Metaphysician Undercover

I described the conditions which would qualify as an error. I have not intent to judge any particular individual unless you bring the person here to t...

I explained in the last post. The problem is when the incapacities (blind-spots, to use the term introduced by Wayfarer) of the science are not recogn...

Let's see, this looks simple. Smoking kills, dying is not wanted, therefore do not smoke. It's very similar to: eating poison kills, and dying is not ...

I'd say that's exactly why it's a problem, because they don't see it as a problem. If a person notices one's own deficiencies and incapability's, the ...

If I didn't already know how to use the quote button, I would not know what it means to "select" a text, and I'd be lost already. Can you explain how ...

I would be interested to investigate what constitutes a fallacy. Fallacy is defined as reasoning which is invalid, and Wikipedia for example, gives a ...

It might result in a complete break down of law and order if pigs are allowed to enforce the laws.

Of course it seems like that to you, because you think that describing is an essential aspect of using mathematics. One cannot use mathematics without...

Sure, counting can be describing, and mathematics can be used to describe things. But counting, and mathematical predictions are not necessarily descr...

That seems like a good analogy.

Very obviously not, for the reasons I gave. Simply put, to count something is not to describe it. And no description is required for a count because t...

Using mathematics to make a prediction does not imply that the process has been described. That's why Thales could predict the solar eclipse without k...

Is banning someone as difficult as firing someone? I guess not, when the person is Bartricks.

That's the problem with monism. It has no proper ontological principles to separate what's within the mind from what's independent of the mind. So we ...

By the principles of classic rock I would say there are many worlds for sure. Let time T be the time of John Lennon's "Imagine". Clearly there were ma...

Don't you think it's the word "heat" which is the most metaphorical here? Afterall, you say heat is not in a body, nor is it actually transferred betw...

If I understand you correctly, you say that heat is not in a body, it is the transferal of energy between bodies. However, thermal radiation, which is...

Yikes! Sad but true.

I think you and I have approached this issue before, but we were incapable of progressing very far. So I'm going to state some principles here in very...

Even this is problematic because current principles of physics allow that the second body, the receiving body, is not necessary. Radiation of heat fro...

Couldn't he have just wrapped a shitload of plastic or waxed paper around a threaded rod or something like that, and screwed it? Pipe dope, the plumbe...

I believe that the principal difference between Kant and Plato on this matter is that Plato believed that the human mind could have direct unmediated ...

I think you still have a huge gap to bridge. Physics employs "tensors", you suggest a biological "attractor". Don't you need to show how attractors ef...

I know, and I'm not worried, I just thought I'd mention how your specific use of words affected me. See, I'm calling you a user too, by saying that yo...

There's a big difference between saying that introspection is potentially a valid form of evidence, and having actually accepted any incidences of int...

That's a strange way to refer to a person. It carries some bad connotations in my mind which are very difficult to separate from the term.

No, the alternative is to understand that the actual world is categorically different from the possible worlds. The former being the material world we...

What was that guy's name who took over PF just to transform it into a cesspool? And whatever happened to that site, is it completely gone now?

Banno, consistency is a relation between the axioms or premises employed. It does not rely on the law of identity. But consistency is commonly related...

What is contradiction is saying that it is the "very same" person in the distinct possible worlds. Yes, it's consistent because they violate the law o...

But it's false, you did not put your slippers on. When you say "I might have put my slippers on" you are lying because you know that you did not. Ther...

But the issue is not whether it is the "standard" response, the point is that it is not consistent with the law of identity, not whether or not it is ...

It appears this thread is becoming a second shoutbox. Nice work Alan1000!

This brings to my mind the "snub-nose" property, which Plato was fond of as a descriptive term. Aristotle used it as an example of an accidental rathe...

i don't know man, it looks more like a pig's snout than a gorilla's nose to me. It's flat.

This works with the inside/outside relation, if we take process ontology, and make all of reality activity. Then we have no real boundaries between in...

What's your avatar? Are you some type of pig (nothing derogatory intended)?

In practise, confidence is required because time flies, and there is no chance to question things. In theory it's better to question everything. So, l...

I think you misinterpret the law of identity. It says something about things, not something about the way we talk. It says that a thing is the same as...

We can do this simply with the law of identity. It implies that each object is unique, whereas essential properties are what things of the same type h...

Art is complex, as is the judgement of beauty, and your example makes it appear simple. To begin with, you need to distinguish between what the artist...

An x-ray does not allow you to see the inside of a person. It allows you to see the outside of specific internal parts. The fact that the x-ray goes r...

No, that's the problem, breaking an object in two allows us to see the outsides of two objects, not the inside of one. Every time we take something ap...

To put that more correctly, Meta's posts, as usual, serve to show that the subject is confused.

It's a problem because we can never truly see the inside of an object. So sense observations of an object are always observations of the outside of th...

I approach the "first-person nature of experience" from the perspective of the difference between "inner and outer". If we allow the fundamental empir...

The problem though, is that if heat is defined as the motion of molecules, this doesn't account for all the forms of heat in the external reality, bec...

Well, it's all reducible to energy. And since the conservation of energy is universal, it would be the same in all possible worlds which are equipped ...

This is the law of identity in a nutshell, as composed in Aristotle's Metaphysics. A thing is necessarily the thing that it is, because if it were not...

I always thought there was about 3.3 feet in a metre, but I guess that's not necessarily the case. Dr. Google tells me " A poetic foot is a basic repe...