Hand up. At a slight tangent, it is relevant to the use of statistics in public health. Durkheim studied suicide rates and noticed that whilst each su...
So that we can pretend we are one day going to make the stuff they are showing on the TV cookery programmes, of course. That's why we've always had th...
What I'm suggesting in this thread is that we first consider the circumstances in which we ask this question - "When do we ask about a four year old a...
Not quite. Horse shoes come in fours and you can't wear them on your feet. The brake shoes on your car cannot be worn at all. Cinderella's shoe was no...
If someone had stolen his Treatise manuscript and published it as their own he would have suddenly remembered who Hume was and he would not have forgo...
Funny place for a rabid right-winger to be hanging out. Strange example for a 'let me profit from your disadvantage' capitalist to choose. I think you...
@"Isaac" Hmm, yes, there is always that problem with anarchism. It can be self-defeating. Perhaps it always is. I'm sympathetic because I think NOS is...
Nah, I don't think it's Trumpism. It's idealised anarchist socialism and I'm glad it's still alive even if only as a dream. The roots are not in indus...
That was Aristotle's answer to the question 'Why do stones fall downwards rather than upwards?" It's their nature. They are heavy. That's what heavy t...
Guessing has to be a bit wild in this context, as the OP gives us not many clues, but you may be right. I will start with "We are the people who, when...
Some bees are just lazy. This is down to feckless parents and too much socialism meaning they don't have to fend for themselves. https://elifesciences...
Some examples have curious results. You could play misere football so that any goal scored is awarded to the opposing side. I think the game strategie...
I was relying on old friend Charity to supply the contradiction but fwiw here it is again: If we call a dog's tail a 'leg', then a dog has five legs. ...
On slot machines you are guaranteed to lose and the less money you put in the more you will go home with. I have been winning on slot machines for man...
When one AI poet drunkenly criticises another AI poet for the shallowness of its simulations and lack of soul then I will believe that AI can produce ...
You can play a 'misere' (play-to-lose) version of almost any game. It's often played with life itself, where the stakes can be pretty high. https://en...
I seldom see leftist accounts, only rightist accounts which are mainly complaining about leftist accounts. I think the algorithms have concluded that ...
I never get called a fascist. I get called a woke leftist liberal communist degenerate. I used to get called a woolly liberal, which on the whole was ...
Rhetoric, but that is very similar to what happened with 'square root of minus one'. It was as if people said - "We know that negative-one has no squa...
A. Regardless of what (if anything) we call a 'dog' or a 'leg', dogs have four legs. There are brute facts. B. Dogs having four legs depends on what w...
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Judith Butler treated the midwife's announcement "It's a girl!" as performative, making the attribution of s...
I think it's tempting now to say that Searle and Austin were stating the obvious and making a big logical fuss out of simple observations about langua...
There is no presumption in Kant's example about eternity. Kant's example is drawn from everyday experience in which balls and cushions seldom stay in ...
Suppose someone laid the ball on the cushion. And suppose also that the ball is causing the depression in the cushion. I'm supposing both those things...
The ball is the cause. In the same way, the props are causing the wall not to collapse and the magnetic field is causing the compass to point north. R...
@"Agent Smith" We can adopt two theories. (1) Causes must precede effects. (2) Only events can be causes. But these two theories will not stand by sti...
The ball causes the indentation. There are two things: (1) ball and (2) indentation. In the case of self-creation there would be only one thing - some...
D Marsh wrote: 'We Will Rock You "is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band....
As far as I know, that's nobody's claim. The argument I was answering is this: 1. If actions are not determined then they are the result of pure chanc...
An example of 'Y' is 'freely willed action' from a libertarian free will point of view. Freely willed action is neither determined nor the result of p...
@"jgill" Amazing images, thank you! For non-programmers with basic skills (me), there is a way to explore chaos with a simple iterative function on a ...
That is true if 'determined' and 'pure chance' are exclusive and exhaustive categories. But a separate argument would be needed to establish that. For...
I suggest Peter van Inwagen's anti-compatibilist argument that determinism entails no-free-will; but compatibilism entails both determinism and free w...
It's not magic, it takes work and re-iteration from pure maths back and forth between the natural sciences. Calculus, complex numbers and chaos theory...
The weakness in my last post being - "OK, you insist on looking for a cause. Now tell me just what it is that you are insisting on looking for?" Which...
I think that is exactly Hume, provided 'inferred' means logical inference. I don't think so. Belief in the causal nexus is when you think that walking...
I don't see that there is more at least with regard to making the distinction between causal and logical necessity. In the case of physical causation,...
Doesn't that resolve the deep confusion you mentioned? 'Presumed' and 'expect', true. That is, when we get some awkward experimental result we have a ...
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