Terrapin Station

According to someone, any arbitrary thing you'd like to believe.

The only answer I can really give is "I'm not sure" because I can't manage to make sense of the B theory of time really. It just seems ridiculously in...

So you'd say that either there's no creation of heaven and earth until humans, as a species, develop consciousness, or that there somehow keeps being ...

In other words, if you're not saying that any random thing that anyone does counts as "authority," then you weren't really addressing the point he mad...

What sort of definition of "authority" is that?

Nothing has a "sole significance." Meaning is something that individuals do --it's an active, dynamic process executed by individuals, and it's done v...

"Confirmation" in the sense of proof a la "Can't possibly be wrong." That's what's not available. In order to count as science, any claim has to at le...

I'd say that everything could be described as a bundle of properties. Re essence, it's simply an individual's criteria to apply an abstraction or conc...

Are you able to identify "everything"?

A worthwhile thing to contemplate when wondering this is how we could know whether our brain requires this or not. How would you know that what you ex...

There's classical music and there's also the Classical period of classical music--the period follows the Baroque period and predates the Romantic peri...

I'm confused, first off, why "consciousness is a soup of natural instincts, emotions, knowledge" suggests anything about religion/spirituality to you....

How strictly are you using "proof"? Because no empirical claim is provable if we're using that term fairly strictly. If you just means "reasons for be...

Why would there be a burden of proof issue with atheists anyway? (I'm an atheist by the way, but obviously a "positive"/"strong"/etc. atheist)

Saying that "nowadays" is typically used to refer to an exact time is very dubious. "Nowadays" is usually fairly vague and broad. For example, in the ...

Again I'm not endorsing it, but the reason that people stress that definition is that they're stressing that atheism isn't a claim, it's simply a lack...

If you don't agree with that then you don't think that the principle/law of noncontradiction is a particular. I don't want to move on to other stuff (...

I've actually read it a couple times, including in school. I don't recall him really addressing what he takes himself to be doing on a meta level. If ...

If the law of noncontradiction is a particular that means there's just one instance of it, at a specific spatio-temporal location. Do you agree with t...

In what sense do you mean the beginning of consciousness? Do you mean once consciousness arose evolutionarily? Or something else?

But we can ask the same thing about definitions. What are we trying to do when we forward them? Are we describing how people use a term? Prescribing a...

Person one: Names in modal logic are just descriptions. Person two: Names in modal logic are not descriptions. What do we look at to adjudicate who is...

If it's true that names are such and such in modal logic, then it's true by virtue of something, right? Not just by one guy's stipulation presumably.

Correcting it per what, though? In other words, what's the truthmaker for it?

Something that I don't think is often addressed in this stuff in this: just what, exactly, does Kripke take himself to be doing? Is he supposed to be ...

Then it wouldn't be correct to say it's something you can't know anything about.

Hmm, it seems to me that the objective world is relative. Descriptions have a psychological component. Something only counts as a description if someo...

The term is "counterfactuals." A huge number of philosophers active in the past century (and this century) have talked about counterfactuals, with tha...

Yeah, I'm not endorsing the distinction, but it's common and I think it makes some sense. I'd also prefer to use the term for positive/active denials.

Logical certainty about the future isn't possible. Psychological certainty is, but psychological certainty doesn't imply anything about what will actu...

The way that negative/weak/implicit/soft atheism works is via atheism being defined as a lack of belief in deities. If you've never thought about it, ...

My answer to that is, "I don't, and I'm not at all convinced that anyone does, but nevertheless, people keep forwarding it." At any rate, I say that e...

Your account suggested something I found amusing--namely, feeling that Hume's comment that we can have no certainty about the external world should be...

"Ought to be" can take a hike as far as I'm concerned. Aside from that, I'd say "all of the above in many important respects." And part of the reason ...

Okay. We can't do anything with that re forwarding a conversation, obviously, so . . .

I am in the process of answering your question (the answer is "No," which I've already explained), but you'll not be able to understand the answer if ...

If the law of noncontradiction is a particular, then there's just one instance of it at a specific spatio-temporal location. (Or in other words, no, y...

If you don't know what I'm referring to then you don't really understand the distinction between particulars and universals or abstracts. A particular...

Would you say that the law of identity is a particular, found on just one occasion, in one spatio-temporal location, etc.?

I don't know how to ask this without it seeming patronizing, unfortunately, but do you understand the distinction between particulars and universals o...

I suppose we just don't understand what each other is saying then. Not sure how to work around that, because you seem annoyed by all of my attempts to...

If someone's conception is that logic is somehow "above" him, then he's not omnipotent. That's okay, people don't have to propose an omnipotent god, b...

It's not a nonsequitur, because then logic is "above" god so to speak.

That doesn't have the same dilemma built into it though. The "rock heavier than he can lift" thing sets up a dichotomy where either answer implies som...

If they're incompatible then we're obviously not dealing with certainty for them.

It's not clear to me what difference it would make if he were to actually create the stone or not. Either it's possible for him to create a stone that...

Not just Anglo countries. European countries in general, and the places where European countries had a significant influence through colonization, etc...

I'm confused why you addressed the above to me.

First, I don't think that there's an axiom or rule that's objective, just a particular relation. I also don't think that logic is objective. The parti...

Certainty: see Rene Descartes' Meditations Logic: Is an extrapolation of how we think about relations; there are different species of logics, with inc...