Terrapin Station

The only thing one has to realize to know that the idea is bogus is that you are identical to your body. Your mentality is identical to your brain fun...

Doesn't that simply amount to insisting that your interpretation is correct, and contra what the author intended, because . . . well, I guess because ...

Anyone can reach a conclusion based on anything they like, no? I wouldn't be saying what's necessary for all people to reach a conclusion. That would ...

You mean that you're saying that I may have been forwarding an argument even though I didn't think I was forwarding an argument? Or are you saying tha...

Arguments can be circular. It wasn't an argument. Geez, it's like talking to a wall.

How you read something and how I was thinking about something are the same thing?

Again, it was an explanation. I wasn't saying that I was presenting premises and a conclusion where the conclusion logically follows from the premises...

The problem with that for religious belief is that it undermines the conviction/commitment of it. If you only believe because there's a logical argume...

I wasn't trying to be sarcastic. If that's your (sole) criterion for explanations, you'd have to say that in 200 CE, that was the explanation of eclip...

Hence why I put "physical" in quotation marks, by the way. The grounding is that the facts can't be wrong about the facts. But a reporter can be, incl...

Question begging occurs when premises assume the truth of a conclusion. A single phrase after a comma in a sentence can't do all that. At any rate, no...

I know I shouldn't address more than one thing because the other will be overlooked, but I can't bypass this. As a response to my example of a common ...

I just want to address one thing first: I wasn't introducing an analogy. I was explaining a common way that true/false are used that the consensus the...

A similar example is, "It is either true or false that one hour ago, you were thinking of airplanes. I want you to not tell anyone the answer, but thi...

Would you not be able to make sense of "It was true a moment ago that I thought of eating ice cream"? The fact that it was true a moment ago involved ...

Do you not realize that people use "truth" in a way that doesn't at all hinge on (the possibility of) communal agreement?

Ah--maybe I have to take that back. Here's one supposedly common definition of "opinion:" "the beliefs or views of a large number or majority of peopl...

There's no sense of the word "opinion" that I use, or that's in common use, that I would say fits that. You could suggest a definition, though, I gues...

So is this trolling, or are you really dim enough to not even realize that I consider anything morally bad? One thing I might consider morally bad is ...

Interesting to find someone who actually subscribes to a consensus theory of truth . . . interesting because it's rare. Rare because it's pretty clear...

No, because that wasn't an argument. The part after the comma simply explains the part before the comma. Question-begging is an argumentative fallacy....

Again, it depends on what you're saying intersubjectivity amounts to, exactly. I'm the sort of moral relativist who says that there are no moral truth...

I'm fine with it, too, depending on how we define it, but the definition I'm fine with doesn't amount to much, and the definition I'm fine with doesn'...

Are you saying anything different ontologically with "intersubjective" other than the fact that people can interact with each other behaviorally, incl...

I would go with the "you live there" answer personally. You have a legal status that allows you to live there for an extended period of time, and you ...

Hopefully Mueller discovered that it's ridiculous that we're spending so much time on this sort of nonsense rather than figuring out how to directly, ...

It's trust or confidence in something in lieu of other evidence/support for it.

Again, in my opinion the definition is too narrow, because it would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically ch...

Sure. I wouldn't say that nothing stupid is forwarded in the name of science. Scientists don't actually have a monobrain. :razz:

"Science saying something" is scientists saying something. And scientists definitely say that completely implausible, incoherent, etc. things don't ex...

Scientists aren't going to be agnostics about the idea of, say, there being tranvestite ballerinas orbiting some distant star just because there's no ...

It sucks that you keep repeating that when we've shown the problems with it. It makes your posts come across more like a telemarketer . .. or televang...

"To learn the breadth of what 'morality' conventionally refers to, you read the SEP page on it, and then you're done. Just repeat/paraphrase what you ...

I wasn't saying anything merely rhetorical. I was hoping you'd address all of that. The goal is to get your noggin working a bit better. To really do ...

Are you asserting that it's necessary to agree with Gert, by the way? Is this really how you do philosophy as a "creative soul"--you find someone who ...

Gert doesn't even define morality as narrowly as you defined it. I've already pointed that out. Anyway, if he did, it would simply be a case of me not...

But I disagree with you that your definition covers the conventional usages of the term. That was just the point I made. It's exactly why I wrote, "(1...

So the verification is "That's how Bernard Gert defines it"? (And even if you're going by that, you don't seem to be acknowledging the "or accepted by...

Obviously I don't agree that it's true. In what way would you say that it's verifiable? In other words, explain how we'd verify it.

I disagree, starting with the first premise, for the reasons I gave in the post of mine that this tangent is stemming from.

Bodybuilding doesn't imply that you do it competitively or even that you're trying to get unusually large. It also doesn't imply that you do not do ot...

I'm very into fitness, including that I bodybuild. I don't take any steroids.

That's only evidence of some combo of a lot of people liking it and/or the way that things become entrenched and socially transmitted due to certain e...

Correct. Sure, they may have. At least you're getting it now. :grin:

The right or wrong of something like "Murder is bad" or "One should not murder" is a moral right/wrong, and it's identical to the preferences "Murder ...

But I know what I like/what I'd prefer, and I've long known that. I don't need anyone else to help me figure out what I prefer.

I don't believe that there are any normative facts, so I'm not looking for normative answers from anything.

I don't recall you mentioning that, but I could have just overlooked it. So you're saying that in your view, what matters is that some consensus of pe...

Speaking of likelihood in the absence of frequency data . . . (I just brought up the problem with this in another thread)

Testimony is fine as long as it's not just testimony. There needs to be "physical" empirical evidence, including evidence both that the people who ori...