jkop

There are many kinds of symbols, you know, verbal (words) and non-verbal (pictures, gestures). They refer to things in various ways, but their primary...

No, words are symbols, which is more than the marks, sounds, gestures etc. of which they're made.

This year I've been listening a lot to the young great guitarist Pedro Martins Here's a video of his version of a famous tune by Ravel https://youtu.b...

Pictorial or gestural languages are better than verbal languages for some of the signs we encounter in public places such as traffic. Some languages s...

I get that the author's activities and pauses can evoke a kind of freedom for us to imagine unwritten meanings. But what do you mean when you say that...

We are pattern seeking creatures, and normally strive to make the most charitable interpretations of what there is to interpret, also when there is no...

You might want to add the possibility that ideas and fictions are descriptions. Descriptions are actual material objects. Some descriptions denote oth...

The causality and the division of labor that I refer to are used in arguments for semantic externalism. In the case of Fosse's speech one might want t...

I agree, and would like to add that the nature of our languages is such that it connects its users with what the words or its uses refer to. Language ...

To the extent that one can experience social life by writing about it. A writer constructs, discovers, reconstructs and in some sense participates wit...

I'd say writing is a social activity that one can practice privately. In this sense it can benefit the introverted or socially isolated. It can also b...

For the same or similar reason many people are drawing, painting, dancing, exercising, playing music, socializing etc. Some need professional help. I ...

Is there reason to believe that philosophy has become irrelevant? Philosophy is similar to art regarding relevance and how it changes through history....

What characterizes the mindset associated with honesty? A kind of disinterested pleasure that arises when one acts according to the known facts, regar...

Pretending to be stupid is a variety of stupidity that is sometimes passed for intelligence. Also when one is truly stupid one can pretend to be an in...

Goodman started project Zero https://pz.harvard.edu/who-we-are/about

I'd say our interest in pre-existing features arises from our curiosity regardless of whether it is felicitous or serves other interests. However, we ...

I suppose we can know that there was a big bang, and that its possibility requires something rather than nothing (or an instable kind of "nothing" a l...

Some monkeys happened to have the enzymes required for breaking down the alcohol in rotten fruit. So they had more fruit to eat than others who could ...

You might want to look up compatibilism. It is basically determinism with the insight that there are many causal chains, and those that enable us to i...

No, because dreams are neither sufficient evidence nor arguments for the truth of 'idealism'. We could, of course, discuss the nature of dreams, wheth...

Listening to the Portsmouth Sinfonia is not so easy ;-) https://youtu.be/LsFFvthfEZg?t=1298

A proof is the sufficient evidence or argument for the truth of a proposition. Dreams are neither.

The reasoning should be valid and sound, i.e. 'logical' type reasoning is not enough, the premises must also be true.

:-} Sweden is one of the largest arms manufacturers and exporters in the world per capita. We also like to condemn the military acts of others and mar...

I'm not sure whether beauty is made. It seems fairly clear, however, that beauty is found under various or varying conditions. Sometimes regularly, su...

Probably one of the first punk bands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asYwFnm6X7I

As in war... "All warfare is based on deception." Sun Tzu (544 - 496 BC). "In war, truth is the first casualty." Aeschylus (525 - 456 BC).

There is little to be happy about when the happiness is engineered. There is more to happiness than what constitutes the emotion.

Well, to be clear, my post was actually not regarding Hume but andrewk's idea that Hume's identification of the limits of reason thereby opened the do...

Limits are not necessarily borders to something else, but simply limits beyond which there is nothing more to expect.

Nosense. In disputed cases it might be dubious or meaningless to call them scientific or pseudoscientific before it has been settled. . Pseudoscientif...

How is science challenged by the selective idea that it would be a term for marketing? Has anyone other than ideologues taken it seriously? (e.g. reli...

Science is the name of possible knowledge, and when the knowledge is very selective or very general it tends to be useless or misleading, whereas rele...

I think the first premise is false, ignorance is not a source but a lack of something, and you don't get something from nothing. The bliss in ignoranc...

Are true ideas ideologies? Do we have visual experiences of ideologies or objects? I'd say some ideas are not based on other ideas but brute facts. Fo...

Boghossian takes on philosophically far more interesting relativists than the postmodernists. Nelson Goodman, for instance. Frankfurt invertigates the...

You might like Paul, that book is very well written. He also wrote an article about the original Sokal hoax in the 1990s which is available online her...

If you're interested in a detailed examination of relativist claims and examples of refutations, then I'd recommend Paul Boghossian's book: Fear of Kn...

One might add: "In philosophy you must not talk before you think about the nature of talking, or knowing, or doing, or thinking."

Science is the latin name for knowledge. What makes a belief possible as knowledge is whether it is justified (as in testable) and true. There can be ...

As if there would exist many kinds of possible knowledge... :-}

I think so. An event that you dream of has the disjoint syntax of memories or stories told in our language, it appears in parts or fragments, and unli...

Currently here in Sweden the chairman of Mensa (the society for people with high IQ) calls the members "damn idiots" after a party that went out of bo...

I'd say intelligence is a condition for any design (aleatoric design even).

8-)

How is it obvious? What's an example of evidence for the idea that consciousness is a composition?

Statements are compositions of words, and beliefs about the world are models of the world, but consciousness...? I don't think consciousness is a comp...

It occurs to me that the expressions 'being aware of' and 'being conscious of' are clearly synonymous, whereas the noun 'awareness' and assumed distin...

In cases where the lives of two humans differ a lot in capacities, interests, and ways to interact with the world they have little to talk about. At s...