jkg20

Thank you. That has considerably cleared things up for me, and I feel a little more comfortable that I know what you are getting at. So if we amalgama...

If you could lay out your logic for us, we will be able to test it. I cannot speak for Banno, but I think I have sufficient knowlege of pure mathemati...

Addendum to the above: I should perhaps be precise in what I mean by a "deductively valid argument", since I am demanding precision from you. I mean a...

I'm really not trying intentionally to change the subject, I am just trying to get to an understanding of what you mean. The route might be meandering...

Sider is a new name to me, must look her or him up. Williamson and Lewis, particularly the latter, were influential even when I was mixed up in the bu...

I've been out of the academic philosophy cycle for nearly two decades now, but Wittgenstein's influence was still very strong some fifty years after t...

That might be the case for the kind of idealism that Berkeley advocated, although even that is not certain: I would need to see a detailed argument to...

I think some socalled Wittgensteinians can be dismissed out of hand, but I think the Philosophical Investigations is well worth reading.

Not to my knowledge. But I'm not sure that absence of evidence in this case can be taken to provide evidence of absence.

I agree with you that "lets look at how we use these words" should not be the be all and end all of philosophical analysis. Where I think we might dis...

Well, consensus amongst dissenting parties doesn't guarantee anything and some of the most well known philsophers are renowned for changing their mind...

The philosophy of mind and for that matter psychology is riddled with technical terms and terms used in special technical senses, "qualia", "visual ex...

Well, I would start by asking both Chalmers and Dennett what they mean by "qualia", after all, clever as they undoubtedly are, they are not immune to ...

Well, your position is not too far away from Wittgenstein's then. He was pretty clear that once you make the questions you are asking clear, either th...

Not all philosophers engage in the kind of language analysis that Wittgenstein engaged in. Some I know to be overtly hostile to that kind of approach....

OK, then, with 1 and 2 nailed down, let me try to get clearer on 3. Is this a fair summary of your position: 1: For the person feeling a pain, the pai...

Let me just make sure I understand your position. You believe that pain involves three things: 1. Pain behaviour, including talk, which is entirely pu...

Point taken, descriptions of pains often resort to metaphor. But how about descriptions of afterimages? It doesn't seem to be a metaphorical or non li...

I'm not convinced about this, although perhaps it doesn't matter to the point you are making. I remember having sciatic pain described to me, before I...

I suppose that would depend on what you mean by the phrase "resolving a philosophical issue". I certainly know from experience that some people will s...

Not sure what I wrote to prompt it, but compliments are always welcome :wink:

Whether you are a realist or an idealist, certainly it, i.e. word usage, matters a lick for our capacity to find out, understand and express what is t...

This seems really odd. It sounds like you are suggesting there could be words and phrases in a language that cannot be understood by anyone. Perhaps I...

There lies the rub. To be honest, I am not certain that this interpretation of W is correct, nor that the ideas I am trying to force on him do so eith...

I might have misunderstood you then. I was under the impression that your view was that pain behaviour is the intermediary in cases of both genuine an...

Sorry, to be clear, how I would like to interpret W is that "the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant" is true for him precisely and only i...

Well, I guess I have to construe it as the first premise in a modus tollens argument, the second premise being that the object is not irrelevant.

To be cautious as W exegesis, I think you would need to add the qualifier "just" between the "not" and "the subjective experience". Some people read W...

I still do not see the impossibility you are talking about, although it might be there somewhere. Let's change the example. A fake Picasso and a genui...

This is compatible with the idea that we can nevertheless in some circumstances recognise genuine pain behaviour for what it is, i.e. the manifestatio...

That we can recognise pain behaviour when we see it is not the issue, of course we can. That Wittgenstein acknowledged this is not an insight of his. ...

Pronouncements, no matter who makes them, are not arguments.

Well if it were only language Wittgenstein was concerned with, then fine, nothing more need be said. However, I have met so called Wittgensteinians th...

I can think of many greater differences than the difference between mock and sincere pain behavoiur, the difference between pain behaviour and smoking...

I'm not sure about "unidentifiable" here, why isn't a case of deception just a successful attempt to deceive? After all, if each instance of deception...

This is precisely what Wittgenstein has to deny, and it is indeed difficult, but I think he does deny it. Accepting the antecedent of the inference yo...

Exactly, we are agreed: Wittgenstien Yes, showing, for me, that the language game itself is incoherent : the meaning of "beetle" cannot be entirely de...

I think we might be largely agreed on how to interpret Wittgenstein, and we are certainly in line that the groundwork laid out for the example to make...

I always presumed that Wittgenstein's example of the beetle and the box was just to show that it is a necessary condition for "pain" to have a meaning...

What is the argument here? I'm not saying there isn't one, I'd just like to see its premises laid out.

I'm wondering if there may be a contradiction buried in the simulation proposal, on the other hand it may be that I am not grasping what is at stake. ...

That Hume made a distinction does not mean he was entitled to. That was Kant's point really. Leading on from @"Wayfarer"'s remark, what are Hume's fam...

Kant got there before you, but made the same point. Take Hume's starting point that everything is, fundamentally, sensations and ideas, and then mathe...

If you have no idea, then how do you know that it has become something unconscious, rather than just something that is entirely there for everyone to ...

I've not read Rand, but if this quotation is a representative example of the kind of thing she takes as given: then she is no philosopher. A philosoph...

You are riding rough shod over numerous subtle distinctions and probably also misusing the word "ascertain". To ascertain means, in the most general s...

Certainly people who are sceptical about IQ tests will not want to say that a slug is as intelligent as a cat. Neither would they want to say that a c...

Sorry, but you are fudging the issue. The claim being made (by a number of people, not just you) is that recognizing intelligent behaviour always invo...

Not a particularly good analogy - driving tests are also a measure of your ability to manipulate a car - if you can do that in the context of a test y...

Your argument appears to be: 1: Self-deception only makes sense if it makes sense for one person A to act deceitfully towards a person B, where A and ...