Terrapin Station

Possibly. For one, say that someone is talking about stoves/ovens and what they do. You wouldn't assume that they're for some reason saying that stove...

These sorts of comments annoy me to no end, because it suggests a ridiculous misreading of anything I've ever said or would say. I can only imagine th...

One couldn't believe in intelligent design where there's some indeterminism and free will?

Yeah, it's not necessarily easy to do, especially if someone has to work at the same time--if they have to support family for example, and as I said, ...

Well, or if you want to know what people like (their preferences), or what their opinions about something are, etc., sure.

A grain isn't nothing, by the way. It's just not a heap. Adding things to get something else isn't that unusual. We do it with things like houses, mus...

the time will seem like nothing then. I added "you'll be glad you did it" rather than being 40 and 50 and thinking about maybe trying to go to school ...

:razz:

Definitely it's better to go, and it's better to get a graduate degree if you can. Do it as soon as you can and get it over with. Just try to avoid go...

Right, so then God could presumably make anything He desired logically possible.

What realm are we changing it to, though?

The point I'm making is that the relationship of a proposition to, say, a state of affairs (if one is using correspondence theory) can only obtain via...

Aside from a quibble about the word "needs" there (which I'll avoid for now as that would be a major tangent), the claim above isn't actually the case...

It's not the whole of it in the sense of what we're thinking about, what influences our thinking, etc. That's obvious enough, right? It's not like I'm...

How do you get to "about" without thought being present?

I'm fine with that (even though there could be exceptions), but how does it help some truth-value not be a matter of judgment?

I wouldn't say it's an "issue with truth." It's simply an analysis of it. It's not a matter of simply redefining meaning. It doesn't matter what we ca...

Yes, obviously, if meaning is a subset of thinking, then we have no meaning if we do not have that subset of thinking.

They do, because outside of thinking about it, those are just marks on paper or a screen that mean nothing, refer to nothing, etc.

Right. So the first problem is that there's no meaning aside from someone actively thinking in a meaning-oriented manner.

We've been doing that in other threads, but okay, first, do you use the definition that propositions are the meanings of statements?

That's just the usual Kantian nonsense that's so prevalent among regulars on the board. I'm not at all a Kantian. I think Kant was wrong . . . and he ...

Right, but I ask, "How is that supposed to work, exactly?" And my conclusion is that it can't. The notion of it rests on a number of confusions, misco...

I'm not a realist on laws existing as something independent of the "behavior" of particulars. And I'm basically a constructivist on mathematics and lo...

The distinction is one I pointed out in an earlier post: "Keep in mind that nominalists are NOT saying that two separate things can't be 'similar in a...

It would be because you're not a nominalist, and you maybe buy real abstracts/abstract objects, you'd probably be a platonist re ontology of mathemati...

Concepts like "chair" are abstractions we perform where we mentally generalize some features and ignore others. If something matches the conception th...

There's no connection between nominalism and whether objects can be composites. Under nominalism, it's just that the parts and the object are particul...

It's not that "you're not allowed to conceive of it." Your abstraction isn't literally the case objectively, and your abstraction/conception itself is...

They're similar. It's not that "they're not actually red." It's that "actual red" isn't just a single thing. You're basically assuming platonism a la ...

As I said above "The photon wouldn't be numerically distinct (including numerically distinct temporal instances)" Not at the same time is numerical di...

So at the same exact time, the same photons would bounce off of numerically distinct surfaces--so that the surfaces would have to be spatially separat...

The photon wouldn't be numerically distinct (including numerically distinct temporal instances) but we'd somehow be able to point the the photon bounc...

I'm asking you about the light. You used that as a determiner.

So the same light reflects off of two numerically distinct tomatoes?

Typically nominalism does not allow identical properties in numerically distinct things. To be an identical property, we're saying that it's just one ...

You're using "begging the question" in that weird, non-formal way. It's not begging the question re the logical fallacy. As I said, because for one, "...

Keep in mind that nominalists are NOT saying that two separate things can't be "similar in all (non-relational) respects." They're saying that two sep...

Sure. Although how anyone could do that is a mystery. A nominalist isn't going to take any numerically distinct things as identical to each other, a f...

That's not something I'd worry about. It doesn't make much of a difference in a case like that if we figure he's conscious or not.

So, what would make one a nominalist, at least in the more common sense of the term, is that one doesn't believe that any numerically distinct things ...

Yes. Again, I said this in the earlier post. The full quote was: "'Adding 2' is not identical in both instances, obviously. And it's not identical in ...

Hence why I said, "'Adding 2' is not identical in both instances, obviously." That would work maybe if the functionalist is positing multiple instance...

So when someone says something like this, I ask--is this correct? What's the argument or evidence for it? And the answer to that is?

Re this, by the way: "Putnam, Fodor, and Block and Fodor argued that if functionalism about the mind is true, physicalism is false.The line of argumen...

Anyway, re the "harder problem," it's not something we need to account for--it's just something that we're unsure of--whether and when something that'...

The Euthyphro problem in a nutshell here is that either God could do things that are "logically impossible" if He were to choose to do so, or logic is...

No, I didn't "mean" anything like that.

I shouldn't just comment on this a bit at a time, I suppose, but that's what I'm doing as I go through the Block paper first: "The Hard Problem is one...

The hard problem of the hard problem of consciousness is that there's no good analysis of what explanations are, including (i) what makes something co...