Terrapin Station

I think it's explained as well as anything is explained. The resistance to that stems from inconsistent, incomplete and/or unanalyzed views of just wh...

It seems equally weird to me that it wouldn't seem obvious that facts are located wherever the things they're "facts of" are located.

Do you buy the notion of real (non-mental) abstracts?

Facts refer to some set of physical phenomena, so wherever the phenomena in question are located. Locations can be complex, scattered, non-contiguous,...

So they're natural and then change to unnatural? And what do they have to do with agency? I was never under the impression that you were only talking ...

If what's said is the meaning then you'd say that meaning is a property of sound waves for example?

In my view nothing exists without a location, including time. Time is located at every change or motion in the universe. You believe that some things ...

But they have finite time periods in which there's a zero probability of them occuring. If the universe I described were to begin that way and last fo...

Well, "knowing the meaning" refers to the fact that we're making associations for the words, phrases, sentences, etc., with an implication of understa...

No, of course it's not the same. Language doesn't just involve meaning, but it does involve meaning (at least at some stage).

So conventionally, you know English in an individual's estimation if you can coherently (to the person judging) formulate sentences (usually we requir...

Where is the language rule?

The associative act. That's different than the scribbles.

For example, take a universe where we have just one particle that can radioactively decay to two different subsequent particles (and that particle can...

Well, both x and y can be anything, really. You can make the associations between scribbles on paper and other scribbles you'd make on paper, or a sig...

If the definition of "unnatural" is "zero probability in some finite time," what does that have to do with agency of any sort?

The difference is whether our utterances are "matching" some state of affairs or not. If they're simply expressions of dispositions, feelings, etc., i...

Presumably, Plato would say that God isn't a person, per se. So comments about whether there can be an "ideal righteous person" don't apply to him. Go...

That's part of why the answer is to instead reward people based on the extent to which they help other people/provide the things that other people wan...

How would an objective principle (ignoring for a moment how there could be objective principles) be obligatory for a will? I'm going to try to avoid a...

One thing that objectivists always overlook, by the way, is this. Let's say that Joe murdering Bill by shooting him in the head with a gun somehow has...

I didn't pay much attention to Banno saying that (or I missed it altogether). He's conflating different senses of "judgment" there. Just like people s...

What is "imperative objective action"?

Also, if the exact way that we're figuring out any probabiilty statement, with relation to arbitrary finite time periods, isn't important, wouldn't yo...

By the way, probability isn't the same thing as whether something actually happens. Which is one reason why it's important to nail down just how we're...

Which brings us back to the unanswered question of "Why would you be associating 'zero probability in some finite time periods' with god? That couldn'...

I often like to focus on asides, so that's what this is, but it struck me as very odd re this: That you'd see goals and striving as having nothing to ...

If I were king, we'd not have an economy based on money in any manner similar to what we have now. There could still be the equivalent of billionaires...

Right. That's the claim. The challenge is for us to provide any evidence of that claim. We can't provide evidence of that by talking about language pe...

Good, so let's talk about the action itself and whether the action itself is wrong. If we say something about language per se, we're getting off track...

The action itself isn't language, is it?

As someone who loves "art for art's sake," I'm not at all fond of people more or less demanding that the arts (at least if they're to be good, worthwh...

This is essentially no different than discussing religious beliefs with Christians, say, and it's nothing like discussing something with people who ar...

The action itself is, for example, Joe murdering Bill. It's the physical action of Joe taking a gun, say, and shooting Bill in the head. It's been cla...

So the meaning becomes what in your view, a set of sounds, or text marks, or behaviors, or what?

Just as forthcoming as I expected specifying the evidence.

What's any evidence of moral properties occurring extramentally?

Not sure why you're repeating that. I addressed all of that.

First, I'm not a realist on mathematics, and especially not on sets. Relations are simply any way that two things are related to each other. "To the l...

How are you defining objective so that interpretation (and meaning) could be objective?

Even if that were the case how would that not involve interpretation?

Oops. Nope.

And evidence for that (the action itself being right or wrong) would be?

But I had just explained what understanding amounts to. What part of that did you disagree with, or what did you think it didn't cover?

No luck. A lot of people here seem to have the impression that "reading groups" should be somewhere between an apologetics strategy meeting and a chee...

I really need to take a break from this board sometimes. The, uh, let's call it "irrationality" just drives me bonkers after awhile.

Why would you be associating "zero probability in some finite time periods" with god? That couldn't be more arbitrary.

So let's hash it out in the PI thread. Again, I'm not going to bother at all with anything based on a critique of whether anything is an "explantion" ...

You're only using "natural"/"non-natural" to refer to probability right?

I wouldn't say that it's possible to "put something not into a relation with something else." So yeah, it's a kind of relation. That would just depend...