SophistiCat

So we need to explore what we mean by dependence (and the significance of any such dependence). The Anthropic Principle is one example where the usual...

A world that was isn't the world that is though. Or if it be the same world, then it is the world with humanity in it.

He was not alone in this. There is this type of poster who are only interested in their own topics (if even that).

This sounds reasonable, but close scrutiny erodes the sense of understanding. What sort of independence are we talking about? A world without humanity...

This doesn't tell us why you think agnosticism is better than atheism. If the underlined sentence is your reason, then I disagree. Depending on your e...

Thanks for this. What's the reference for Dummett? My own takeaway so far is in alignment with that Crispin Wright quip: "realism about any topic" is ...

You should probably tell us a bit more of where you are coming from with this query: where have you heard about "constructivism" and "anti-realism" re...

On the contrary, It's only a fallacy if your intention is to explain what is wrong with the argument. The way you phrased it here would be an ad homin...

A line is 1D, a surface is 2D. Think of dimensionality as the number of independent coordinates that you need to locate a point in the domain. For exa...

If you bite, then you must put aside questions about qualifications and assess the argument on its own merit. But you don't have to bite - you could d...

Yes, I think the primary concept of a hole is that of a gap, an absence in the middle of something. As such, we can very well think of holes in 2D or ...

"'Free Britney,' Pro-Putin Babushkas Demand" - that's an Onion-worthy title! It's a catchy tune, and Thompson's performance is masterly, but the lyric...

There are a number of common rhetorical moves, some of which are generally held to be fallacious - hence named fallacies. Nothing is wrong with the ge...

I won't dwell on donuts any more (never liked them anyway, or bagels for that matter), but I am a bit puzzled by this. Why not 2-dimensional holes? A ...

A torus in 3D is not topologically equivalent to a rectangle: you cannot continuously transform one into the other. In your demonstration you had to m...

Here is a historical case where a lab leak was passed off as a natural disaster. It took a regime change for the truth to come out: Soviets Once Denie...

All that you describe here is a typical reaction to anything out of the ordinary in China. Assuming the prevailing natural origin hypothesis, this is ...

Apropos of the title and nothing else, just read this in an interview with a classics scholar Mary Beard: :snicker: (If you want to read the full inte...

But if we adhere to strict "truth=provability" principle, then the sentence is not true even in the metatheory, if it assigns truth to sentences subje...

I wasn't specifically referring to Gödel's theorem, but using that example, a strictly formal reading of the first incompleteness result would be like...

I don't think he claims this to be the logical conclusion of his argument. It is more like, having cleared the ground, he is venturing a plausible hyp...

Russell seems to assume an externalist, causal conception of empirical knowledge, and then projects that assumption onto Locke and then Hume, for whom...

Hume believed that all knowledge can be categorized into "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact." On the latter he took an austere empiricist stanc...

What is mathematical truth is an open question in the philosophy of mathematics that has been much debated over the last 100 years, since Tarsky resur...

I am not a "veteran logician," and my criticism was not directed at your logic - quite the contrary. The logical structure of a typical philosophical ...

I have no interest in formal debates, either as a participant or as an observer, so perhaps I'll be barking up the wrong tree. But anyway, here are my...

Yeah, but I feel that saying "there is only one kind of stuff, namely matter" doesn't really say much. All we have to do to "save materialism" in this...

Sure. Whether fields are real in some sense is a debatable question, but it's not obviously wrong. What I took issue with is comparing fields with sta...

I don't think there's much point in debating this question, since there has never been a unified concept of "materialism." The word has been thrown ar...

Yeah, but it couldn't be just the regular space(time) metric, because that already accounts for distance and gravity - not something you would want to...

ER=EPR is way above my paygrade, but I think I get the gist of what Carroll et al. are trying to do: From this the usual spacial geometry is supposed ...

So for you it's perfectly fine to waste your time on crazy or stupid people, as long as they are above 23. That's just bizarre. I judge people by thei...

Yes, so? I think it should be obvious from the style that I was speaking informally.

How do you glue two points in a set together? You make them equivalent.

I have thought of a different simplification, which I think hits closer to the mark. But first let me quote from Bell's lecture, where he quotes Einst...

I am not really grasping your point here, nor how it relates to your thesis. Hume argued that normative statements cannot be logically deduced from no...

We are not. Fallibilism is built into the very idea and method of science. So if your thesis is that science is just like religion because both are do...

Perhaps you can expand on why you think this way? Then there will be something to discuss.

Witti couldn't have said it better: https://i.postimg.cc/02zngkP3/qjepy-Xy-Jn8.jpg

As has been pointed out, your ideas of what probability should mean are very far from what is usually understood by that term. If you are interested i...

Here is a little script that implements this scenario using a pseudo-random number generator: https://groovyconsole.appspot.com/edit/5205481161228288 ...

Yes. Like I said, history-independence is an assumption in common games of chance, such as dice. But if you start off assuming that the probability of...

This is quite a profound question, but for better or for worse, it is irrelevant to the gambler's fallacy. (Your understanding of probability is way o...

Depends on who you ask. I would expect that philosophers of physics, and generally those who have a handle on the mathematical and physical concepts o...

That is a gross oversimplification. Philosophers argued for (or at least insisted on) the existence of infinities both before and after Aristotle. The...

Now I remember why my earlier attempt to engage you on this topic was a failure. Bye.

You know that philosophy of science is a thing, right?

If you are not with me, then you are not genuinely answering moral questions? One can disagree with the answers that other people give to moral questi...

Don't be ridiculous. Everyone is answering moral questions, no thanks to your theory. No, thanks. I entered one of those discussions once, and it went...

Well, all you've told me so far is "if I am right, then I am right." I still don't have any idea of where your moral philosophy gets its purchase.