Terrapin Station

Right. So I already gave one answer to this--that they are (family) resemblances, and already anticipated that you can very well go "well, what are (f...

This paragraph makes no sense to me. It seems like you're reading "brute fact" as some sort of epistemic move that's only allowed by certain epistemic...

There's a problem with this argument. "All objects are particulars." I agree with that. "Each and every object exists as the particular object which i...

I don't at all buy a (real) distinction between essential and accidental properties. So if rigid designation has something to do with that, that would...

Your subject line asks what self-esteem is, but that doesn't seem to be what you're really wondering. After all, what it is isn't much of a mystery. I...

Shouldn't it be obvious, given that there are religions that do not posit strong determinism, and that instead put a big emphasis on free will, that s...

Okay, but "an amorphous dessert" isn't actually implied by nominalism. I don't really understand this comment because what you're saying is plausible ...

I don't think that's much of a challenge though, unless one simply doesn't understand what similarities are, and one wants to pretend to not be able t...

I don't at all agree, and it wouldn't at all be agreed upon in the consensus of physicists, or scientists in general, that what it means to regard som...

For one, you can see them simply as a brute fact about how particulars "behave." That might seem like a cop-out, but as it is, if we were to posit phy...

I was just going by your comment: "This suggests that you agree that there could be things that exist, which haven't yet been conceived of (but Could ...

Here you are showing that you didn't actually comprehend the phrase "Something logically contradictory being instantiated materially," but nevertheles...

I don't see how anyone could disagree with that. After all, all sorts of films, music, etc. will be made--and just next couple years, say, that no one...

We agree on that at least. ;-)

It's in no way saying anything like that. Be serious if you want to understand this stuff rather than responding like you're in a political forum and ...

Right. And how are you seeing any mathematics as amounting to any sort of ontological commitment whatsoever?

"Something logically contradictory being instantiated materially" that should be, as anyone who understands what logical contradictions are finds them...

The problem with this approach is that there is no default "foundational" stance that everyone accepts for us to start at. The answer to a lot of ques...

It's not your prerogative, it's a fact that's independent of you. You're asking for definitions that work under any ontological interpretation, but th...

Idealism is wrong. So that's your first problem. If you're not making the typical infantile conflation with respect to your perceptions and what your ...

Yeah, per how individuals think about them. To say that they mean something outside of that is simply nonsense. To say that you can use words wrong is...

Our philosophy of language should reflect what the world is really like, what's really going on with language usage, etc. Mine does this.

Yes it is. I said (per behavioral cues)--that's your complex behavioral pattern, but the behavior is what it is simply as a matter of those individual...

Convention is a matter of a lot of individuals having the "same thing" (per behavioral cues) in mind. So that's ONLY what people are thinking about. A...

The problem with making it about reference is that what makes a reference is simply how an individual is thinking about it.

What might work for me, although I don't know if this would be agreeable to folks who think that rigid designators make sense, would be to simply say ...

But any term could or could not be a rigid designator per that--it just depends on how I think about it. If I think about the term so that it picks ou...

Because as soon as we start to introduce more scenarios, re propositions someone is considering, we introduce a temporal element during which referenc...

Okay, but what I was asking was how many different propositions can the same individual consider at a time?

There can be a difference, sure, if I'm imagining the person who I call "Barack Obama" now, as the president, not being president instead, versus imag...

Any number? So the same individual could consider 1,000 different propositions about John at the same time?

Similar to the above question, how many situations can you have for the same individual at the same time? Conventions refer to contingent commonaltiie...

Well, how many things in how many other worlds can the same person talk about at the same time though?

But that makes no sense. If we're talking about real alternate worlds, we have no idea what our counterpart might be actually using a term to refer to...

One thing we should probably clear up is the possible world ontology we're using. Are we talking about possible worlds in a "realist" sense--that is i...

What is the argument for that? How in the world would we know that someone wouldn't change how they use a word in a different possible world or a diff...

Oy, this is remaining muddled. So what the heck is "rigid" about any of this? We're talking about reference/meanings. Well, they can change over time ...

Meaning can change over time, and can vary per person. How would that not be relevant to what a word means? That IS what/how words mean something.

Meaning is always to someone.

Here's what I'm getting at: For any term, including "Hesperus" for example: "a" actually means m only at time T1 to person S (and of course, it can al...

Well, so it's just rigid at a particular time, to particular persons? That would make sense, at least, although I wish someone would have explained th...

That sentence literally made me laugh out loud. I'd nominate you for this (if you had published the above), although they don't seem to still be runni...

(I'm bypassing issues with "meaning" versus "definition" by the way) But what a word means is simply what people use it to mean at any given time. Tha...

if you'd asked me most of those questions beforehand I would have said that I had no idea without looking it up. I also don't base anything re my poli...

I agree with your take on it more or less. Conventional rigid designator talk always struck me as hopelessly muddled. I don't understand The Great Wha...

You're asking me where one's brain is? Or where in the brain? If where in the brain, one study suggested that it starts in the hippocampus, though oth...

Unfortunately, you have absolutely no explanation for that aside from "he just knows." Again, I'm not saying that this process is necessarily explicit...

I don't know why you'd think that, though, because it happens all the time. For example, someone might see this: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lTp9F99lZtg...

You read it as if I'm saying that they're explicitly saying "What are my necessary and sufficient criteria"??? Why in the world would you read it that...

I don't want to talk about 50 different things in each reply, so I'm just going to cover one thing at a tinme. You weren't reading me to say that peop...