Dawnstorm

This is a post from Posty McPostface, right? So are you, Posty McPostface, claiming that Posty McPostface is the alter ego of Posty McPostface? If the...

Hm, this is actually surprisingly difficult to answer for me. On the surface of it, I have an easy "no, not like that". "My age" has a stable meaning,...

I thought Goodman proposed a predicate that involves a scheduled meaning-change of a word, rather than word that describes a change in an object. Am I...

I'm an Atheist who grew up and still lives amidst Catholics, and what you say is certainly what they preach. But it's also, generally, what they do. N...

Well, there's a reason I said "I much prefer..." rather than a more convinced "...is better." But "this" vs. "that" doesn't make much difference for t...

No. As far as I can tell, you treat singular they gramatically as plural with one exception: "themself" instead of "themselves". As it happens, that's...

I'm hopelessly confused. I read your ,] as: "Given that one envelope has the value 10, either or ". And that describes the sample space of both envelo...

But you have to remember if you go one envelope has X and the other 2X, then you're defining as the envelope that contains X as the one with the small...

This is how I see the problem: Objectively, you're in one game, where one envelope contains X and the other contains 2X. As soon as you pick an envelo...

So how's this: A, B = two envelopes; X = the smaller of two values, 2X = the greater of two values; Y = the known value of one envelope P (A=X and B= ...

Okay, we have envelopes that contain a certain value. This thread has used X for the values in the envelope and for the sample space of an envelope. T...

No, I have created a sample space with one impossible and one necessary outcome. It's an either/or situation, and that's appropriate because expectati...

Sorry about the correction. My head is swimming.

I'm not quite done yet thinking, but 20 is definitely not possible value of X. It's like this: For Y = 10: 5 is a possible expected value for X (alter...

I think I got it. We've got two variables, a numerical value X and a binary variable that tells us which letter we picked, the one containing X (small...

Well, with full knowledge of the situation there's a 100 % chance that one envelope contains $ 10,-- and the other $ 20,-- and there's no need to invo...

Hm, thinking about it a bit more, I think we're making a basic mistake, here. X/X2 is the relationship of the variables, not the sample space. I'll go...

I haven't read past this page and only skimmed the the next two, so if I'm repeating what someone else said, or if that's irrelevant by now, please ig...

I'm not sure if, or how much I disagree with you here. A simplification: if we have (taking my rough definitions as a base) antonym pairs of: simple-m...

Isn't that the difference between intelligence (~ the ability to "work with complexity") and wisdom (~ the ability to make things "work out fine for y...

Heh. I don't know much about sports and very little about baseball, so I was staring at your post and didn't really understand it, until the edit. So ...

Well, true. But focussing on the sentence's truth condition may itself be missing the point. I don't know your son (or even if you have one), so I'm n...

I don't think it's quite that simple. Take your sentence (3): "Hesperus" is another name for Phosphorus. First, look at the word "another" and it's re...

I always wondered what the point of the blue pill was. Isn't it just erasing memories? What about a person who took no pill at all? Wouldn't such a pe...

I think that formulation is incorrect, because if this truth condition yields "true" for more than one value, the chance to be correct <i>overall</i> ...

Sorry for making you wait. I'm too slow a writer, reader and thinker - and this thread outpaces me. Also sorry that my answer's likely going to be uns...

I'll start from here, because it's easiest for me. Whether or not a physical object can be the object of belief cannot be determined by saying that "I...

Thank you for the welcome. I'm mostly hanging back and reading: I'm a slow writer, and by the time I have something to say threads usually have moved ...

"Semantic field" is a term used in structural linguistics and anthropology, and it's simply the range of meaning associated with a word or a set of cl...

That depends on how we organise the semantic field, though. In an experimental set-up, for example, I could see "A belief is a relation between an ind...

I find this thread extremely interesting, but since I'm no experienced philosopher, I also find it hard to follow, since I don't always understand the...

No, I agree. Instinct is just an impulse to execute a specific behaviour. I think belief is more complex than that. It's just when I go back to the ed...

Clarification question: Are "Belief X causes action A," and "Instinct causes action A," two mutually exclusive propositions? I'm asking because differ...

Well, there is a problem here. "X is hungry" restricts X to objects that can have the attribute hungry. This includes both humans and dogs. This isn't...

Maybe I should stay out of this thread, because I've never read Descartes myself, but here's a reply based on what I've read about this: Thinking isn'...

Under these definitions: do I have to understand the proposition "God exists," to be an agnostic? Or differently put, is not understanding the proposi...

Given this formulation, how would you distinguish a belief from a working hypothesis? For example, I'm an atheist. I intuitively reject the propositio...

True, you can rephrase this in many ways. What I'm addressing is the connection between syntax and self-reference that TheMadFool is trying to establi...

You can rephrase the liar sentence: "The sentence I am uttering right now is false." "What I'm in the process of saying right now is false." What matt...

"This sentence is false," is only self-referential on the sentence level. "This" on its own refers to nothing at all; it's a determiner in the noun-ph...