Terrapin Station

How are we determining "fit," "great," etc.?

The demarcation criteria (or criterion) idea is one basically of defining the method against other things we could be doing. The issue is that attempt...

Thanks. So re this "how could we arrive at the idea that the activities called 'science' follow objective principles and are devoid of subjectivity," ...

Keep in mind that in music, harmony refers to things that are different from each other--different pitches--occurring simultaneously. Especially collo...

First, in the spirit of solving one thing at a time, does this mean that you agree that it wouldn't be possible to come up with objective demarcation ...

If you believe that there are objective purposes and you wanted to support that, you could try to provide some evidence of objective purposes, for exa...

So that's a more specific idea, no?

Weird, "Isn't that a more specific idea than 'the first nuclear weapons for attacking N. Korea . . .'?" seems like a yes or no question to me. Either ...

Which has what to do with the fact that there are no objective purposes?

Isn't that a more specific idea than "the first nuclear weapons for attacking N. Korea . . ."?

There are no objective purposes,

?? In your view, we'd not be able to attack North Korea, say, with nuclear weapons today, but we would be able to in September?

Tell Wallows. He started the thread.

Whether anything is called "offensive" or "defensive" doesn't really matter here. That's simply a relative matter of positioning. But it doesn't matte...

I wasn't commenting on whether an SDI system is currently feasible. Just the logic of it being an advantage given the assumption of present or future ...

What in the world? Where did I say anything that suggested "surprise"? Empty your mind. Read what I wrote above slowly.

Let's solve one thing at a time: We're talking about the supposed objectivity of calling/considering one set of activities "science" and another set o...

This is not difficult: You build and launch a set of satellites equipped with laser weapons that can shoot missiles down so that they're not a danger....

If you think I agreed with that, you didn't understand what I was saying. No one can be more or less right in assessing anything, or assess things "be...

You build the SDI. What's to stop someone else from building their own SDI to take out your SDI system? And so on.

It's not so much of a paradox if we realize that we're creating meaning "in the meaningless."

"its existence in its prior entirety"? What is that saying? I wouldn't know what "its existence in its entirety" would be saying, even, that "its exis...

Not in this zealot's case.

What do you suppose makes you so interesting that people would be tracking you? How would anyone do that? Give a specific example of the info that wou...

You can measure the objective stuff in various ways, but the word aesthetic has value connotations (and other mental connotations) that can't be measu...

https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2016/04/artist-s-shit-1961.jpgLarge.jpg

You can't measure objective (e)valuations at all, because there are none. People obviously have (e)valuative opinions, because we have psychological r...

The whole idea that there can be objective criteria is way off base. Any criteria are going to be subjective. It's simply a matter of whether there's ...

Not sure what the question or comment is there. :wink:

This question comes up periodically, and I thought I answered it again recently, but in a nutshell, it's a combo of (a) initially she wrote fiction an...

The Quine aphorism was forwarded under the umbrella of Russell's theory of descriptions. As such it's tackling philosophy of language issues.

From the nominalist perspective, any universal/type term is a concept. No concepts are necessarily as they are.

I was actually responding to a misread. I thought you said, "You assume that other creatures ARE conscious."

I'm not sure what we're referring to re "some of them are not conscious."

But I just told you the evidence we have. What's the objection to it? (And the evidence had better not amount to it not being certain.)

If "assumptions" can be things we believe on plenty of good evidence, though that seems like an unusual way to use that term.

It seems as if you're trying on terms of art like they're hats that you might incorporate into a Halloween costume.

There's plenty of evidence--behavioral, structural, etc. It just doesn't support a conclusion that's certain (or proved--but that's a truism with empi...

The simplest Barcan formula is just to have the mailman come. Your dog will go crazy. But maybe tackle one small thing at a time until we've solved (o...

What makes something de re is that it's positing a property (or lack of a property) to some (particular) thing(s) in the world, and it's not about the...

? When do you get to the "impossibility of de re counterfactuals" part or why we'd think that Kripke would say that there's any sort of de re counterf...

My point is that that wasn't what the website would have been. The article makes it clear that it would have just been a review site. That's my point ...

Sure. he doesn't like them. Again, the website was simply going to be a review site.

What does that have to do with the article about the website?

My point was just that the article didn't actually say that they were trying to--or thinking about trying to--shut down anything.

People can have a mental model of an ideal for something, and people can influence each others' mental models, so that many people who spend time focu...

It depends on your view of how concepts work. Do you believe that we receive concepts from others?

The thesis would have to be that a significant number of students taking the courses in question wouldn't take them if they knew the sort of informati...

Some examples of adult language: "mortgage" "wrinkles" "tax season"

How would you say that "thrownness" addresses how concepts are started?