Snakes Alive

Because the way people use speech acts and intend to do things with them is importantly tied to the conventional meanings of the words involved. It's ...

There are any number of things you could be talking about with 'meaning.' I take the literal meaning of an expression just to be the role it plays in ...

To someone who knows that 'Donald' and 'Mr. Trump' are co-referential, and has no need to access this other meaning, saying something like 'Donald is ...

Consider the following example. If I know some Spanish, but am not fluent, and I hear someone say "El gato está durmieno," clearly referring to a cat,...

Certainly part of what is communicated by the statement, in the broadest sense, is that the man has a certain name, or that the two names refer to the...

The mistake would amount to thinking falsely that 'H20' and 'water' refer to the same thing. Admittedly H20 is a terrible example, since it's not a ca...

Here are some environments you can use to test for rigid designation across possible worlds: Attitude contexts, such as belief reports: with non-rigid...

That's exactly the point. 'The 45th president....' etc., is not a rigid designator. It's an empirical question – you run the arguments, and see whethe...

Because the fact that we might not know what words mean already solves this problem, and the Fregean sense, if it is something more than this, adds no...

Yes, but that much is obvious from the fact that words mean things, and what they mean might be opaque to their users. Invoking a dubious notion like ...

I suppose it is possible, but he would have to take the senses not to be the sort of descriptive entities that interact with the compositional semanti...

Part of Kripke's point is that we can indeed be mistaken about necessary truths – that is, some necessary truths are a posteriori. You are trading on ...

What matters is not the glass, but the material inside of it. If you stipulate that the same glass holds hydrogen peroxide instead of water, then you ...

Then what you are supposing is that the glass of water had instead been a glass of hydrogen peroxide. Whether 'water' really means the same as 'h20' i...

No, it is perfectly possible to stipulate that an individual may have had some properties other than what it has (being made of something different, o...

My point is not that you think this, but that you think that Kripke does. In other words, you are confused about what the technical term "rigid design...

If water is H20, it makes no sense to 'stipulate' that a glass of water does not hold H20. Perhaps 'water' doesn't really mean the same as 'H20' – pro...

This is just not true.

This is a misunderstanding of the Kripkean position. According to Kripke, we can speak of the same individual in distinct possible worlds. This is jus...

There is, according to Kripke, no "second Venus" off in another world. To speak of Venus in another possible world is just to speak of Venus, that ver...

You are under the impression that a rigid designator is a term that could not have meant anything other than what it actually means. This is not what ...

Then you should have read this in it, for instance, at the beginning of section 1.2: which would have told you that this purported objection is misgui...

If you're going to rail against someone's claims, it would be best to read that person's work and understand what those claims are first.

Dfpolis: you can stop writing paragraphs and paragraphs of text. Read my previous posts – you're uninformed about this matter. Read up on it. You're w...

This fundamentally misunderstands Kripke. Read Naming and Necessity.

This thread is confused. Possible worlds are pieces of a technical apparatus that allow a model-theoretic interpretation of a language with modal oper...

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html

I say this to emphasize that to get away from these issues, we must genuinely apostatize from philosophy. Wittgenstein, whatever his merits, was still...

Well-said, but I'd put it slightly differently: philosophy isn't the study of such confusions, but the participation in / performance of such confusio...

I share the positivist view that there is something 'wrong' with philosophy, that the questions it asks are somehow confused. Philosophy therefore can...

Philosophy as a discipline in the West originated from sophistry, both literally/historically and spiritually – the point of it is to foster endless a...

No, "speak" in English isn't a conventionalized performative. As points out, you can coerce it into sounding like a performative in some contexts, but...

I've never met anyone who claimed otherwise. Many trans people come to realize that they are trans.

When men or women sit around talking about their shared experiences as men/women, what are they talking about? Incredibly, it must be an experience th...

I did – I don't know what you want.

So being a golfer involves shared experience, but being a woman doesn't?

Why not? You don't think professional golfers can talk about that for hours together over a beer?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you expressing skepticism about the ability to communicate feelings through linguistic reports or actions?

They could tell you, you could notice their reactions to things, etc.

Why not?

The former seems to imply a stage-level or momentary inquiry, the latter an individual-level or habitual inquiry. Hence the error here: Nonetheless, t...

This isn't right. There are simple answers one can give to the question – it sucks, it feels great, it's fun, it has its ups and downs, etc. The princ...

I think that a homosexual is someone who is exclusively sexually attracted to members of their own sex.

You can't possibly believe this?

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words – Milorad Pavic

Yeah, the effectiveness of the conditional switching strategy is a red herring that is irrelevant to the puzzle, so I didn't want to touch it. The thi...

Your reasoning suggests that you ought to switch unconditionally.

What do you think about the empirical outcome of switching? Does it help? That is, if you were actually to play the game (say over a huge number of tr...

It is not ill-defined. The game described is one we can actually go out and play. I am asking about if we actually go out and play the game, what will...

Can you answer the question?