Terrapin Station

Sure, so is Herbert Hoover president now? It seems like a tautology isn't sufficient to make ontological claims about what obtains at a particular tim...

A claim like that is sufficient to not take the paper seriously. Maybe the guy should have stopped studying climate change for a few months so that he...

As I said, I'm never trying to be disagreeable. So I won't be shooting for that at all.

I'm not a realist on physical law, but we weren't talking about physical laws anyway. We were talking about rules that people construct, whether inten...

I think it's worth (1) asking why there would be any need to prove this, and (2) analyzing just what it is that we're doing when we're constructing pr...

I'd say that those expressions do not use the term "rule" literally. Not all language is literal. When we're doing philosophy, though, ideally we're t...

On S's view, your account can't be the case, because in his view meaning obtains just the same even when no people exist.

So, "If 'flirt' means 'give someone a sharp blow' or 'sneer at,' then 'flirt' means 'give someone a sharp blow' or 'sneer at'"? Wouldn't that also go ...

That's otherwise known as "arriving at something" and having an infinite regress.

I'm more confused than ever. What would it have to do with logic?

I'm not saying it can't be what the word means in English. I'm querying how that works. It works in some nonphysical way in your view? We write down "...

Wait--what happened to the (a) option--"nothing"?

If we're making empirical claims, how about making empirical observations? In other words, how about if we check the facts?

If you're ready to engage in a conversation, just start already. So let's define how you're using "suffering" and explain which negative/undesired sta...

So first, we're going to assume that it doesn't "magically change" when there are no people around. If it doesn't magically change, and meaning exists...

I don't remember you ever trying to explain just how it would be/become something other than a set of ink marks on paper. It always seemed that you ju...

That's your claim. The question is how it does any of that when we just have a set of ink marks on paper and no people exist. The justification for my...

"Identical" simply means that a single zygote splits during development. It isn't using "identical" in a logical sense, so that we're talking about tw...

Re our meaning dispute, I'm not sure if you're imagining people literally being taken out of the picture. If we have something like a dictionary, say,...

A set of rules, ontologically, requires meaning assignments, and that only happens via people thinking about the utterances, the text, etc. in specifi...

In other news, water is wet. :joke:

How does a convention or something merely understood but not explicit govern conduct? You don't have to follow any convention. There's no punitive act...

I think of "evil" as simply being the strongest form of disapproval someone can give. It's the biggest BOO! "Naughty" I think of as having a more play...

Hence you having a problem rather than me. :razz:

And are any of them really qualified to judge content anyway?

Pretty lame, especially as it's not as if there are too many active threads on the board so that a bunch of stuff is getting buried. The first page co...

Again, I wouldn't say that you can't use "rule" to simply refer to conventions, but that's just not the way I use the term. There's nothing wrong with...

I don't understand how that would amount to a disqualification. Re rules, I explained earlier that I take them to be things for which there is I mean ...

I asked you to explain what it would amount to and you didn't answer.

Yes. I don't believe that the idea of an existent that isn't something (a la a chunk of something) makes any sense. The idea of "disembodied propertie...

In what sense are their rules of chess, though, if there's no penalty (as I described before) for not following the rules? The penalties that matter a...

Matter = "chunks of stuff" basically. I'm an antirealist on mathematics (and all abstracts period).

I don't believe that anyone has any idea what the universe would have been like at the start of time, or even if there was start. Current theories cen...

Yes, it had to be.

As anything independent of matter and relations, I can't make any sense of them (and I don't believe that's my flaw)

Aren't you the one complaining about suffering?

So you'd agree that being a convention isn't sufficient to be a rule?

I don't believe that I'm the problem here. Maybe you should make some adjustments?

"Abstract(ion)" is a term for a specific mental activity we perform--formulating concepts to range over a number of particulars, via generalizing sele...

Interesting. I think it's something we can get correct.

Well, what was the reason for adopting the theory you adopted in the first place?

Oh, I understand, but I want to get us to do some philosophy rather than focusing just on your personality quirks.

You could just as well posit a contradictory theory. Why not believe that one instead?

The point being that it's a dubious empirical claim, Probably due to psychological projection from the author.

Make a wrong choice about something like what bread you're choosing or what album you're putting on? I wouldn't say I could make a wrong choice about ...

That's the claim, isn't it? It's not a support of the claim.

I don't know what sort of determinism that's supposed to be. It seems odd to call making a choice from a pool of many thousands of things things, say ...

I don't know how that would make sense, though. I can't make sense of there being anything that's not matter or some relation of matter.

The problem with this is that you're contradicting yourself. It doesn't say anything about ontology. If you're assuming N and only N, you can't assume...

You're rather not understanding because you want the discussion to go in a manner that you've already prepared for. I'm not arguing with you about "no...