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Of course, and the exact same argument has been used against atheists. "I can't believe they don't really feel the presence of God, they're convinced ...
July 06, 2018 at 10:16
Child-rearing. If I could pick a single thing, it would not be respect for their environment, their respect for autonomy or even egalitarianism, all o...
July 06, 2018 at 10:09
I don't think you can separate the two. There seems to me to be only one of two possible scenarios; either sub-concious racism exists or it doesn't. I...
July 06, 2018 at 10:05
As I said, I'm not interested in your story-telling. I have absolutely no doubt at all that you can construct a reasonable story from the evidence tha...
July 06, 2018 at 10:00
I'm not seeing the link you're making here. You seem to jump from saying the frameworks are meaningful (which I can agree with) to saying that the deb...
July 06, 2018 at 08:23
From the SEP; We could go on like this forever, but I'm fairly certain that the meaning of the term consciousness is not agreed on, that's the point. ...
July 06, 2018 at 08:15
I think we've reached the point arrived at in just about every debate of this sort where we've exhausted the actual evidence and our positions rely on...
July 05, 2018 at 09:57
I didn't say Unicorns are meaningless. We're going round in circles here. It is the debate about them that is meaningless. Not the question, not the a...
July 05, 2018 at 08:42
Not very different, no, but that's the point. They think they understand the 'meaning' of the word, but others disagree. Conciousness is a noun, its m...
July 05, 2018 at 08:18
That one is going on my list, thanks. Note (as I suspect you already have) that that quote comes not only from Ramsey talking about what isn't a discu...
July 04, 2018 at 07:21
I'd argue that you don't. Being able to repeat the propositions and deriving any meaning from them are not the same thing. Again, I'd ask what measure...
July 04, 2018 at 07:16
Right, so there's no debate, the one with the most of those things is better. That's fine where there's some fuzzy, vague definition, almost all words...
July 04, 2018 at 07:05
Or you could have actually shown an interest in why we might have such divergent opinions instead of scrabbling for every example you could find of ju...
July 04, 2018 at 06:57
My mistake, I misinterpreted your use of the term 'concentrate'. So, would it not then be true to say that the discourse is only rational to those who...
July 03, 2018 at 15:42
Yes, because we're so concerned about their mental health that in 2015 suicide was the most common cause of death among 5-19 year olds and the NHS in ...
July 03, 2018 at 15:31
This is becoming ridiculous. I'm not about to dedicate half my mornings to giving you a crash course in anthropology when I'm not even convinced you h...
July 03, 2018 at 12:43
No, I maintain the "the colour of the tie" is simply an ambiguous property and therefore can be in multiple states (both green and blue). There is a l...
July 03, 2018 at 10:11
"What's the best way to get from Paris to London?" "Well, you should take the train to Marseille, then along to Cannes and finally knit your way back ...
July 03, 2018 at 09:18
Yes, but only because he was wrong about the meaning of the word colour in this context. Think about it, if he genuinely was asked about the colour of...
July 03, 2018 at 09:02
No, John knows two things about the tie, its colour under the electric shop light and it's colour under natural light, both of which he is right about...
July 03, 2018 at 08:38
It's not what else I'd have him do, it's what he's not doing. He's not in any way implying that John's knowledge about the colour of the tie is wrong ...
July 03, 2018 at 08:33
Yes, but only if we define 'colour' as "that sense most people get on seeing the object under natural light". All Bob is doing is correcting John on h...
July 03, 2018 at 08:24
Is its colour not a property?
July 03, 2018 at 08:12
Really, how? One can know of an object more than one of its properties. When we are asked as a witness to "describe the thief", we do not talk about h...
July 03, 2018 at 08:01
There's no normative knowledge claim here that I can see. Bob is telling John how to describe the tie entirely contextually (in his language use), the...
July 03, 2018 at 07:46
So, I seem to be missing something here. The tie seems green in natural light, it seems blue under electric light, the shopkeeper tells the assistant ...
July 03, 2018 at 07:20
So what is the basis then. What makes a debate about the colour of unicorn's tails meaningless, but a debate about universals meaningful? Again, I'm n...
July 03, 2018 at 07:07
I honestly haven't a clue what this means, with my Christianity example I quite clearly stated that it is meaningful to the Christian because of the s...
July 03, 2018 at 06:59
As I said, I agree with Quine that it is not a simple case of things being either meaningful or not, some are more meaningful than others depending la...
July 03, 2018 at 06:39
No, I'm quite happy to admit that there are words we find easy to define, but I doubt many of them find their definition through the Socratic method. ...
July 03, 2018 at 06:26
To the extent that you can accuse political debates of having the same problem then, yes, I would say they were meaningless, but to save me writing th...
July 02, 2018 at 18:51
Firstly, I don't quite get from the rest of what you've written exactly where we do disagree. Are you saying that you do find the debate meaningful fo...
July 02, 2018 at 18:46
I think you may be missing the point of what I'm trying to say in this thread, so I will try again. My argument is this (note the absence of any appea...
July 02, 2018 at 17:45
I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coher...
July 02, 2018 at 17:28
No, the exact opposite, it's an appeal to the fact that multiple 'authorities' continue to exist despite 2000 years of Socratic dialect. Yes, but they...
July 02, 2018 at 13:07
Yes, I thought I'd answered that one already. The question may be meaningful in an aesthetic sense, the answers might be meaningful to those who adopt...
July 02, 2018 at 11:55
Can you imagine a unicorn? Yes? But unicorns don't exist, so how is it you can imagine one? Maybe everything you image actually exist in some form, bu...
July 02, 2018 at 11:36
Right, so from which ethnography have you obtained your knowledge about the reasons for infanticide? Which ethnography describes sadistic leaders? Whi...
July 02, 2018 at 11:14
No, I'm saying that damning an entire section of humanity on the basis of a few bones is unwarranted. What if the early people involved tended to bury...
July 02, 2018 at 08:03
No, because the entire sample is biased in favour of bones left in places where they were either buried or otherwise preserved from the elements. This...
July 01, 2018 at 09:15
1. You can't possibly know this, or even reasonably infer it. For most of human history (the vast majority) all we have to go on are a few scraps of b...
July 01, 2018 at 06:48
I'm not unsympathetic to the position you outline with the proviso that the story is not one of biblical redemption from original sin. The 'problem' t...
June 30, 2018 at 20:50
I don't mind being simplified, I genuinely thought it a really fascinating insight. One can provide all sorts of clues that hint at sarcasm, but very ...
June 30, 2018 at 20:14
Absolutely brilliant! And here's me thinking I was complex when actually it's the same theory through and through. Quietist philosophy, quietist child...
June 30, 2018 at 17:27
I've not read the book, but I've read some papers based on it so I'm moderately familiar with the propositions in it, but rather than put the discussi...
June 30, 2018 at 16:10
I think there are broad enough similarities within the obvious diversity. I actually meant to specifically reference the environment our children are ...
June 30, 2018 at 16:01
What is that way? I thought that was the proposition we were debating, you're referencing it as if it were a brute fact. I'm asking to you provide an ...
June 30, 2018 at 08:08
Firstly, Chalmers himself admits that "in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter.", but more i...
June 30, 2018 at 07:27
I think that force multipliers undoubtedly play a massive part in the problem, but the palaeoanthropological data, whilst extremely sparse and open to...
June 30, 2018 at 06:40
And again, you're just talking about the question. Of course the question is more complicated than that, of course people want to know what you mean b...
June 30, 2018 at 06:23