jkg20

I'm certainly not saying that everything Berkeley said is true, but in order to attack his position, you need to attack his position, not a misreprese...

Don't forget that in Berkeley's metaphysicsesse est percipi does not apply to perceiving beings. For Berkeley, as perceiving beings, we do not require...

Thanks for the response, a couple of follow ups: "In my view, instrumentalism threatens to collapse into an uninteresting solipsism." How does instrum...

One can take modern physics seriously in at least two distinct ways: instrumentally or realistically. Taking it realistically has been argued to lead ...

Hello David. Do you have an argument for why, as far as you can tell, the external world is inferred and not perceived? Is it some version of the argu...

Aryamoy Mitra is right. The analogy is supposed to elucidate the idea of a measured spatial difference between two things being, on the one hand, the ...

:up: Thanks for that clarification.

The standard answer to this is, I believe, that at small scale distances, e.g. between the atoms that make up bodies, gravitational effects like expan...

1 Doesn't really break the "no object faster than the speed of light" principle: as per my post above, the speed that galaxies appear to be receding a...

Nothing, or more strictly no object, can accelerate beyond the speed of light, including galaxies, and that is according to both special and general r...

The equations of special relativity entail that nothing can accelerate up to or beyond the speed of light, taken as the constant c, since the logical ...

Suppose one were to admit that existence is a predicate. You still need to argue that existence or non existence are perfections, after all, maybe the...

?jkg20 The paradox is in the image - not in the actual number of grains of sand. The only images that might be considered paradoxical are of the Resch...

1. Either nonexistence is a mark of greatness OR Existence is a mark of greatness Start at the beginning. Why would anyone accept this premise? It's n...

How many grains of sand does it take to make a pile? How many images of grains of sand does it take to make an image of a pile of sand? The first ques...

I just want to stick an oar in here for Descartes. Regardless of what anyone might have to say about his motivations and personal hygiene, he has and ...

OK, well thanks to you I've been able to look into an aspect of philosophy I've not really considered in relation to this particular issue in metaphys...

OK, so at the risk of putting words into your mouth, one kind of triadicism is the view that all reality arises from pure, unstructured indeterminaten...

So triadicism in general is the idea that the relations between two things gives rise to a third, and that those three things do not have a reality in...

No real project, just an interest in feasible alternatives to monisms and dualisms in the philosophy of mind.

Skim read the references, but I don't think it is quite what I'm after as to some extent the articles seem to be "preaching to the converted" insofar ...

:ok: Thanks.

What would be a key text, or some key texts, for this approach please?

There is a distinction to be made between two claims. The first claim is that Hegel knowingly and rigidly attempted to apply a thesis/antithesis/synth...

Well, that seems a little too strident. English speaking idealist interpreters of Hegel such as McTaggart and Stace, different kinds of idealist admit...

Interesting that you quote Hegel. At least under some interpretations of Hegel, although he did not accept God as a being, and he had a conception of ...

A premise of my argument is that information content is propositional. This means, amongst perhaps other things, that if someone were to ask: "what is...

A true anecdote with most names eschewed to protect those innocent and still alive. Two respected but socially idiosyncratic Cambridge philosophers, w...

I thought I had been clear about this point, and here is a quotation from an earlier post of mine, emphasis added: "One can circumvent objections by c...

I did not make any such objection. I pointed out simply that the original aim was to provide an argument that circumvented Churchland's objections abo...

Mary was unable to learn it before, because what she learns is not discursively learnable, and since everything that is physically encodeable is discu...

But I am not simply rejecting it, I have presented an argument against it. Assuming the argument is deductively valid, which on the surface it is, the...

Information content can of course be the content of knowledge, but since realism about information content is being assumed, it need not be the conten...

Certainly there is not. However, the only acceptable premise to add to an argument that is presented as a complete argument is a premise that is hidde...

Let me deal with this first, I'll speak to the more significant issues you raise in your previous reply to me, concerning the notion of information co...

Actually, "could be stated" would be better as a synonym for "expressible". Sorry to split hairs, but there are nuances of difference between "can" an...

At the risk of falling into a trap: no objections. :wink:

That is not the distinction I made. Please reread the post.

You make it sound as though what preceded this sentence was an argument against premise one of my argument, but it was not. All you do is point out a ...

You are mistaken. My argument that you are referring to contained the conditional premise that if one accepts that Mary gains knowledge, then there is...

Or to put things a little differently, and perhaps more clearly, the Crane/Churchland line seems to force the skeptic to a position in which they will...

OK, so this argument puts off the question of accepting whether or not Mary learns anything. I guess against this argument, the skeptic would have to ...

Is there a distinction between doubting the proposition that a sentence expresses, and doubting what proposition that sentence expresses? It seems to ...

That there is a distinction between, on the one hand, being in a physical state P, and, on the other, knowing all the facts associated with being in a...

Sorry, I am not clear on exactly what issue it is that you want me to address. The paragraph preceding the one from which the above quotation is extra...

This seems a little beside the point. The sentence "Ants are not elephants" might have expressed a different proposition to the proposition that it ac...

But the arguments, Jackson's and mine, are based on the idea that Mary's knowledge is complete, at least complete insofar as to make any examples of e...

But how, knowing what "no ant is an elephant" means, is it possible to doubt it? Sure I may not know the meaning of "ant" and/or I may not know the me...

Interesting. So your claim is that if a proposition can be known, then it can be doubted. What about a proposition such as "No ant is an elephant"? Is...

It depends. It seems to me the materialist monist would have to reject the premise of my argument that Mary does gain epistemologically when she confr...