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SophistiCat

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There is a kind of materialistic presupposition here (for lack of a better word) that draws a hard boundary between impersonal physical facts like ski...
September 11, 2020 at 06:40
You make it sound like there is a dichotomy between the naturalistic fallacy on the one hand and moral skepticism (denying the reality of moral facts)...
September 10, 2020 at 13:55
Well, that's the point of summaries, in a way: to enable readers to jump to the conclusion of whether to commit to reading a largish text or to pass. ...
September 09, 2020 at 06:15
Technically, they have, according to the very criterion of proof that you give in the first sentence - that is to say, the epistemic standards of proo...
September 08, 2020 at 07:30
I don't think that's an issue above and beyond the old realist/non-realist divide. Non-realists simply mean something different than realists when the...
September 07, 2020 at 14:16
I fail to see the difference. We are expressing a commitment to the existence of something from the variable's domain. So in what sense are we not mak...
September 07, 2020 at 06:14
The way ? would typically be used would be to say things like "?x (x?R, f(x) = 0)", that is to say, "equation f(x) = 0 has a real solution." The way y...
September 06, 2020 at 20:33
This reading is inconsistent with how ? is actually used in mathematical texts, at least the ones I am familiar with (which would be math textbooks mo...
September 06, 2020 at 15:35
Hexagrams are arrangements of six Yin/Yang lines, making for 26 = 64 possible hexagrams . DNA codons are arrangements of three bases, and there are fo...
September 06, 2020 at 15:00
Meh, that idea is at least a hundred years old, and has been the subject of a body of evolutionary, anthropological and cognitive research (some in su...
September 04, 2020 at 21:13
Interesting, thanks!
August 30, 2020 at 07:04
I don't know how these numbers were calculated. It would be impossible to do a comparison with other countries based on money income, because Soviet c...
August 29, 2020 at 17:16
What interested me about this was not the paper, nor the fact that a retired comp. sci. prof would start writing such papers, but the journal that pub...
August 29, 2020 at 16:55
I was going to respond, but as I was thinking about what I was going to say, I remembered that I already made similar points in this thread, which you...
August 26, 2020 at 09:17
So the problem that you identify is that scientific and engineering communication requires a common language. But whatever lingua franca happens to be...
August 26, 2020 at 08:04
This group and this artist are amazing! Roomful of Teeth perform Caroline Shaw's 'Partita for 8 Voices' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVMtnaB28E Ro...
August 24, 2020 at 17:08
Geoffrey Scarre's writes in "Utilitarianism" (Routledge, 1996) that "most forms of utilitarianism are welfarist, concerned that lives should flourish ...
August 24, 2020 at 12:03
It is, of course, utilitarian in a general sense - not quite in the way Bentham and other classical utilitarians framed it, but then few modern propon...
August 23, 2020 at 19:01
It is a variant of utilitarianism, with some pop-science thrown in. The general approach was formulated by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, and sin...
August 23, 2020 at 10:11
I am not "you-all." I don't care for Biden. But I am not of an opinion that if I can't get what I want right fucking now, then let the world burn and ...
August 21, 2020 at 06:34
A degenerate ratfuck is one who doesn't care if 1,000 children get bombed.
August 19, 2020 at 13:25
In: Bannings  — view comment
Really?
August 19, 2020 at 06:26
What reality? For all I know, those "intellectuals" are strawmen, a figment of your imagination. You ranted a bunch, but didn't identify the target of...
August 19, 2020 at 06:15
Such general wisdom as "there are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people" I can easily do without.
August 18, 2020 at 20:33
Who are them? "Intellectuals" is a vague concept. If you don't indentify the target of your invective, it loses whatever bite you think it has.
August 18, 2020 at 20:25
Well, exactly, there is nothing wrong with the syntax of the sentence, it is only its semantic content that seems to be a problem. But in order to com...
August 18, 2020 at 18:42
It isn't often that practically every OP that someone posts is either jaw-droppingly stupid or nauseatingly disgusting or both.
August 18, 2020 at 07:16
I don't think so. On the surface, the meaning is clear: First, the sentence asserts that something (presumably a proposition) is false. That's not a p...
August 18, 2020 at 07:04
Why not? You are just restating your position, but you are not giving reasons for it. What the liar sentence claims is the truth value of a sentence, ...
August 17, 2020 at 08:55
Komm, süßer Tod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB1Weo6V1-U
August 14, 2020 at 06:48
Try these terms on Google Scholar search (or whatever citation index that is available to you). Here are works just from the last 1.5 years: https://s...
August 14, 2020 at 06:37
Don't get hung up on this; there's more than one way to present data, depending on what you want to highlight. Posters are a distinct category, becaus...
August 14, 2020 at 06:17
Would It help to put it this way? 2/3 registered users have never posted Of those who have posted, 2/3 have under 10 posts Or if you like pies (who do...
August 13, 2020 at 06:58
Correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was that much of our brain's processing power is dedicated to mundane subconscious tasks like visual proce...
August 11, 2020 at 20:28
Well, this assumes that the determination of a "natural kind" is to be made by means of a reduction to the neurological framework and then checking wh...
August 11, 2020 at 18:39
Corrected one figure: 95% of posters have < 626 posts (was 130). Added stat drive-bys. Note that "posters" are a subset of "users," and posters with <...
August 11, 2020 at 12:04
August 10, 2020 at 07:40
And then there are the bigots...
August 09, 2020 at 22:35
Sure, both the disposition of being in love and the associated behaviors and social context are blurry. But so are all things psychological and social...
August 09, 2020 at 20:46
Your discussion with @"Dawnstorm" is along the same lines as the one we've been having (my position being largely in line with Dawnstorm's), but I am ...
August 09, 2020 at 16:53
Yes, they are. We don't just put together a random collection of things and give it a name; we group things for a reason. This isn't an exact science,...
August 06, 2020 at 07:32
With this I was just trying to restate my position without appearing to contradict myself, i.e. without appearing to refer to some state of affairs th...
August 05, 2020 at 17:36
Like I said, I meant only ordinary, colloquial senses of right/wrong, true/false. Formal analyses of truth, I feel, rarely touch on matters of human i...
August 05, 2020 at 17:10
OK. First, rules of communication and social rules, like rules for purchasing goods, are not necessarily moral. Knowingly transgressing such rules can...
August 05, 2020 at 14:11
Continuing from above, it seems to me that often what motivates moral realism/objectivism is almost like a language confusion. When we affirm somethin...
August 04, 2020 at 08:44
I don't agree with Isaac that what is moral is But I probably shouldn't hijack the thread to debate the point. I don't have a problem with the rest th...
August 04, 2020 at 08:07
Communication is all about mutual understanding. Being able to reduce an informal concept in some chosen scientific framework is not a requirement for...
August 02, 2020 at 18:50
Pace yourself, man. So much stupid at such a high rate is not good for you or for the forum.
August 01, 2020 at 07:53
Meh, this is basically epiphenomenalism.
August 01, 2020 at 07:50
Then why single out biology? Why not geology, for example? - we know that building in a seismically active zone has certain adverse and lethal effects...
August 01, 2020 at 07:19