Dawnstorm

Yes, I'm perfectly willing to disregard this "mistake". First, and foremost, I'm willing to disregard this "mistake" because etymology isn't destiny. ...

I haven't used the "theist->agnostic->atheist" partition in years (I'd guess around 15 years, but I don't remember exactly), and I'm a creature of hab...

Language definitely isn't a machine. But if I use the definition of atheism that says "no belief in God," than having no believe in God is sufficient ...

I agree, but that's not the problem. If the term's going to be descriptive, it will have to apply to people according to the term's definitive traits....

1. It's obligatory that you not murder. 2. (a) If you violate 1., it is obligatory that you choose a manner of execution that is gentle. 2. (b) If you...

That's being "entitled to someone else's suffering", then, no? A cure for cancer is good only in the sense that it removes a particular source of suff...

Sorry for being unclear. That's what happens when I edit my post too much. Normaly I just close the window, but this time I somehow posted it. I'm not...

. Doesn't anti-natalism focus on the responsibility of a parent to a child? An unborn child is obviously not capable of consensus, so you're responsib...

On the one hand, you say that practical limitations can be safely ignored, and on the other hand you wish to appeal to actual experimentation. You hav...

My latest post seems to have come out more technical than I meant it to. I went through a lot of drafts, discarded a lot, and ended up with this. But ...

A variable has an event space, and that event space has a distribution. How you pick a value for the variable determines whether the variable is indep...

Not so much facing suicide, as facing the suicidal thoughts and the emotions that come with them - that anxiety, for example. What that means for you ...

Should you avoid suicidal thoughts in the first place? Wouldn't it be better to face them? What if someone uses suicidal thoughts for some sort of cat...

. I don't know whether I agree or disagree. I'm not sure what - in terms of the real world - it would mean for "probability to be real". Probability i...

I'm trying to figure out what you think a "probabilistic system" should look like. "The initial state of the system" is different for A and B. For A, ...

And if A threw a hundred sixes in a row it wouldn't be behaving like a probablilistic system?

Thanks. I never really know how well I make my points, so having feedback helps. The problem with my post was that it... wasn't sensitive to the flow ...

. Re-reading the thread, I feel I replied to something nobody said. Well, that's embarrassing.

"Some incidental college classes" would have been my first choice, even though it didn't occur to me that "university" and "college" could be synonyms...

Hm, I don't post much, but I might have voted, as voting as a low-effort activity. But I couldn't because what formal education I have doesn't easily ...

I've got a university degree in sociology (but am not doing anything with it and am out of touch with the mode of thinking, too), so I have litte trou...

This is intricately tied in with "being able to pass". The less you look like the gender you feel like, the more often you will have to justify your f...

I don't think recognising the person in a picture is necessary for me to know that this is a picture of N (for example, N is the author of a book, I d...

I've always thought there's a great deal of overlap between thought experiments in philisophy and short stories. Every take on the trolley problem, fo...

In the exchange Herg provided (What's the weather doing?/It's raining.) it can. People may consider it awkward, but "it is raining," as an analogue to...

I could say the same thing about your example. Maybe B didn't hear what A was saying, and is just commenting about the weather, the connection being a...

A: What's the bumble bee doing? B: It's raining. So "it" refers to the bumble bee. The conversation makes no sense, but the syntactic connection is so...

We're talking past each other.

If you have enough information to parse an expression without actual context, it's not indexical, though.

But if "It" in "It's raining," were indexical, then you couldn't be arguing that "it" refers to the weather or anything, because you couldn't tell wha...

What way? I don't understand.

I know that. But you don't need any context to parse "It is raining," correctly: "it" doesn't behave like the usual indexical "it" in this sentence.

Yes, in those cases I say it's referentially empty and only fills a syntactic function. (Also in 2., 4., and 6., for what it's worth).

I agree with this. But meaning in praxis, i.e. when you use "it" in "it is raining," is not quite the same as the meaning you assign in analysis. The ...

Yes. Yes. That's the tricky part. It is not a given that "it" is referential in the first place. One possible answer to "What does "it" refer to," is ...

Actually, that's an interesting case. "Fuck" in "Fuck you," looks like a lot a verb in the imperative, where people usually posit an understood subjec...

You're both skipping ahead of what I'm actually saying. The piece about "category error" was part of bigger and more complex point I was trying to mak...

I used the scenario in response to a question why the holder of a name isn't the token of a type (or so I understood the question). It wasn't meant to...

But a lexical entity "John Smith" being different from a proper name "John Smith" or not is highly relevant for the type/token distinction. (I've had ...

When two or more people have the same name, there's ambiguity. You're right about that. But the hint, here, is in how language treats words syntacticl...

Consider the following exchange: A: Am I speaking with John Smith? B: Yes. How can I help you? A: Please sign this receipt for... B: Oh no, you want m...

No, you haven't. Your posting under an alias, which is different. All post written by the user "Posty McPostface" are attributed to that user. No othe...

You may never have enough information to form an accurate picture of a person. Luckily, that's not a requirement to connect a person to a name. But if...

Rather than "it has no other meaning," I should have probably said, "it has no other type of meaning," or something like that? It's not that easy to t...

Okay, let's say I lie so convincingly that you end up thinking my hobby is polishing tomatoes. Since that's a rather unusual hobby you remember it. So...

"Thingly" is merely an adjective that means "of or related to things". I'm not sure philosophers use the term; I don't read a lot. Yes. And that's the...

Well, I come from linguistics, not philosophy, here. In linguistics, there are (at least) two major ideas of meaning: The first is the semantic triang...

Well, when you use a word you have a meaning in mind, and when I hear the word I have a meaning in mind, too. Those meanings don't have to be the same...

I don't really have anything against that, except framing it like this I agree with StreetlightX: all names are empty. It's sort of like the move from...

But your usage of personal pronouns doesn't differentiate. Neither does mine. I've been Dawnstorm online forever, with only two exceptions, once prece...