Terrapin Station

It's important to not see the debate as being between (1) materialism or physicalism and (2) an ontology that posits nonphysical things. One can be bo...

First, it seems like you're still thinking about "true" (and "false") as something other than a judgment we make, as individuals, about propositions a...

All that anyone can tell you is propositions that match facts in their judgment. And that's what I did. We can and certainly do have different judgmen...

Anthologies are a good place to start. Something like: Epistemology: An Anthology - edited by Sosa and Kim or A Companion to Epistemology - edited by ...

Then why ask me in the first place? Just stick with inquiries directed at folks whose judgment you're interested in.

That goes without saying. Of course, the reason it's true is that in my judgment, the proposition matches facts.

What you gain is that you say something that's true rather than something one would simply like to be true. ;-)

Also, "Nothing can come from nothing" isn't anything like a conditional in logic. Conditionals aren't about causality. "Nothing can come from nothing"...

Oh, it's not that difficult to deny that.

The only problem is trying to parse it as a bit of formal logic. Philosophy frequently gets itself into a lot of trouble by at least pretending to be ...

Or in other words, nothing mental can be non-mental, which is hardly a problem. And re prescriptions, there are no true, factual, etc. prescriptions (...

So if "subjective" refers to things occurring only in minds, "objective" is the complement--things occurring outside of or independent of minds. That ...

The last word is "Zzyzx," which is the name of a road in the Mojave Desert.

The premise seems vacuous to me. It would have to be plausible to someone that caring isn't an emotion or doesn't necessarily involve emotions. But wh...

I hate when people routinely write long replies--I try to keep mine short, so I apologize for the length of this one, but I think it's important to cl...

No moral stance is going to be a "logically correct conclusion."

In that I think that (a) "All of these potential people that we're not creating might be really upset that we didn't create them, so we'd better try t...

That's only if you believe that life is suffering and if you believe that it is morally preferable to avoid suffering (and of course that's only to th...

Which is why it would make just as much sense to say that. ;-)

Re the legislative sense, what's supposed to be wrong with this? "the system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating ...

I'm just repeating myself over and over basically here. Again, that P is logically possible is only the case to some S at some specific time, because ...

<sigh> it's not also a logical possibility at the time in question. At the time in question, it's only a metaphysical possibility. This is because log...

He was correct that the statements wouldn't have been either logically possible or impossible 100 million years ago. (They also wouldn't be true or fa...

Re this by the way, then: It would be that it's not logically possible to the reviewer, per the system of logic that they're employing. Which would ha...

Right, logical anything, including possibility and impossibility, is always to someone, and not only that, but it's also going to be only relevant to ...

Again, I do not agree with this. Do you understand that I do not agree with it? And re your example, that my view is something unusual isn't of any co...

But do you understand that I don't agree with this? I'm an antirealist on logic. I don't believe that logic is something objective. Logic is ONLY a la...

It's not that you don't know the identity--it's just someone that we're doing things to. It's not anyone prior to conception. There's nothing there to...

I'm not talking about our perspective. I'm talking about during the first star formation. It was a metaphysical possibility that life would evolve. It...

Great. So an example of there being a metaphysical possibility that's not a logical possibility is that during the first star formation, it was a meta...

Because I'm asking you a question re during the first star formation. You had no problem answering that during the first star formation, there was no ...

Right. So during those events, was it logically possible for life to evolve?

So during those events--the first star formation, say, was there logic?

Again, "point" was in quotation marks for a reason. "Some specified time frame" is the same thing (per what I had in mind). Right, so do you think it'...

In my view time is objective. Logic is not.

Why would that be meaningful but it's not meaningful to say that things occurred 15 (or 18 or whatever age you accept) billion years ago? (At this poi...

Would you say that there was a yesterday, and that it was before today, but after last week?

Right, so you'd also say that you can't answer meaningfully whether there was a time/a "point" in time (in quotation marks for a reason) that you had ...

Right, so do you think that there was a time when the big bang occurred?

I didn't write "or say at the moment of the big bang"?

ONLY one. Again, however that makes sense to you to formalize it. I'm not of the opinion that formalizations have no semantic ambiguities.

Only one is possible to them, however you want to formalize it. (I'm not of the opinion that there are no semantic ambiguities just because we've form...

Didn't I say "at the moment of the big bang" a couple times?

So you don't know if there was a "point" in time billions of years ago? Do you know if there was a point in time yesterday?

Do you think it makes sense that there was a time billions of years ago, just after the big bang, say?

I'm asking you a yes or no question about time t=10 billion years ago, or say at the moment of the big bang. At that time (so a la (2)), not now where...

Say it's 10 billion years ago or so. Is it logically possible at that point in time for intelligent beings to evolve or not evolve?

It's not just imagined. Persons didn't exist at one point in the past. There was no logic. No logical possibilities. But there were metaphysical possi...

You seem to be asking if we can talk, at the point where the universe no longer exists, about the universe--that is, as if we could be at the point wh...

There is no objectivity in something like "life is suffering." There is no objectivity in ethics or valuations.