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SophistiCat

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After watching Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates this melancholy little piece is stuck in my head! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR1pSEBiQ-g
May 31, 2020 at 15:57
Compatibilism and related approaches (e.g. some strains of libertarianism) deal with these questions as axiological issues that are largely decoupled ...
May 31, 2020 at 12:06
It's not as simple as that. Experimental philosophers and social psychologists have done quite a bit of research over the last couple of decades to tr...
May 29, 2020 at 08:32
That's a nice piece.
May 27, 2020 at 11:19
That's not Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that's an obvious fact. Your example is too ambiguous. You need to decide whether you want to talk about legal prac...
May 27, 2020 at 10:00
@"aletheist" will be along shortly, I am sure, invoking the ghost of Charles Sanders Peirce and insisting that Euclid's line is not a collection of po...
May 26, 2020 at 17:31
There was a blackbird who used to sing right outside my window some time ago (I spotted him a few times). That was very cool. Birds are quieter now, b...
May 26, 2020 at 16:26
Well, "the number line" in its usual sense is just a visual metaphor for the real numbers (it will do for the rationals as well, though see above abou...
May 25, 2020 at 07:24
The inept and corrupt populists do what they typically do in such situations: pander to their base.
May 24, 2020 at 20:46
It's funny how ubiquitous the delta function still is in physical and engineering mathematics, and yet it is completely non-kosher from the point of v...
May 24, 2020 at 20:42
The situation with surreals vs. reals is a little different than that with reals vs. rationals. Though it may seem as if rationals completely fill the...
May 24, 2020 at 18:53
It breaks down in the sense that in a dynamic, curved and possibly infinite spacetime there is no uniquely correct way of calculating and keeping trac...
May 24, 2020 at 14:01
No, it doesn't, and yes, we do. This is a typical situation where informal or sloppy language can result in an apparent paradox. IOW is right.
May 24, 2020 at 13:20
Lancet just published a large observational study of chloroquine-based treatmenets of COVID patients. It found that all treatments that are widely use...
May 24, 2020 at 10:28
The Spanish Flu most likely was never eradicated, in the sense of going completely extinct - more likely, it mutated into less dangerous forms and may...
May 24, 2020 at 09:12
Those symbols are just Unicode characters that you can copy/paste from anywhere (e.g. the first Google hit for "set symbols"). But this site also supp...
May 22, 2020 at 09:42
Oh so that's what surgical masks are for? To make those notoriously smoke-filled, asbestos-lined hospitals more safe for medical personnel? Who would'...
May 22, 2020 at 08:36
On the flip side, "covidiot" shaming is also a thing now.
May 21, 2020 at 14:00
I'll go with the quotational approach - that's the opposite of disquotational, as in the disquotational theory of truth. The answer to this question i...
May 21, 2020 at 09:32
There is no such scientific consensus. The evidence is mixed, but the consensus, if anything, is that masks are somewhat effective, some more than oth...
May 21, 2020 at 06:43
Why are they all singletons?
May 21, 2020 at 06:29
I don't see what logic could imply that {{a}, {b}, {c},...} is the same as {a, b, c, ...} You keep making the same mistake over and over again: No! Th...
May 20, 2020 at 20:53
What would be the point of writing down what is indubitable, except as a jumping off point (like Descartes' cogito)?
May 20, 2020 at 17:44
That's an interesting discussion there. Most of us here are non-mathematicians, and among mathematicians only a small fraction are working in or at le...
May 20, 2020 at 17:14
Just discovered this early piece by György Ligeti, a beautiful cello sonata: https://youtu.be/-qRn8UyHogA Bartok's influence, of course, but also very...
May 20, 2020 at 11:04
You need to understand the difference between being a member of and being a subset of. Set X = {A, B, C} = { {a, w}, {a, x}, {a, y} } a is a member of...
May 19, 2020 at 20:36
Who ever said that Russel's Paradox "undermines mathematics"? It undermines what is now known as "naive set theory" (an early attempt at an axiomatic ...
May 19, 2020 at 20:28
That's a good one.
May 19, 2020 at 18:39
The normal Trump strategy is to double down on the bullshit when he is called out on it. And he is perfectly capable of believing his own bullshit aft...
May 19, 2020 at 16:49
I am not sure why you think this fits into consequentialism. You don't offer much of an argument, but your last sentence hints at a traditional deonto...
May 18, 2020 at 17:41
Why? If you like the 1000wordphilosophy project, why not just put a link in Resources section? What would be the point of attempting to reproduce the ...
May 18, 2020 at 08:33
This banana is the only banana in the world that is this and not any other. What's so hard about this? Yes, I know that you want to work the self-sele...
May 18, 2020 at 07:51
The asymmetry arises as soon as the banana becomes this banana. Consciousness has nothing to do with it.
May 18, 2020 at 07:10
Rather, you are asking: why this banana is this banana. This means that this banana is somehow special, compared to the others, because it has the pro...
May 17, 2020 at 18:40
This broke my heart... again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPhkZW_jwc0
May 17, 2020 at 18:35
I disagree, I think there is a difference in usage between "the same" and "alike." In any case, technical or not, this is more than a stripped-down la...
May 17, 2020 at 17:16
Then you are in trouble, because in a symmetric structure, such as the one with the two spheres, you still can't individuate an isolated part, even us...
May 17, 2020 at 16:57
You might instead want to say "they are alike in every way," making it clear that you mean "internal", or "qualitative" properties. Ah, but unless you...
May 13, 2020 at 12:17
No, I meant numerically distinct, as in the example of two spheres. If you are allowed to predicate anything by way of specifying a property, up to an...
May 13, 2020 at 07:29
Why not read what Mackie had to say and find out?
May 09, 2020 at 07:54
It all hinges on what is understood by 'property'. The only sense that makes PII true is the most inclusive (and deflationary): a property of a thing ...
May 09, 2020 at 07:45
That may be so, but I don't see the relevance of bringing up the fact that some philosophers did not write well as an objection to an admonition for p...
May 08, 2020 at 21:08
"Many famous philosophers were miserable communicators" is not an argument against good writing tips (unless you want to argue that they were great be...
May 07, 2020 at 17:34
Ancient cosmogonies were not overly constrained by empirical observations, the way (we like to think) our modern cosmology is; ancient people gave a l...
May 06, 2020 at 12:34
I am not sure what you are asking. What do the designations mean? You can read the links and follow the references inside, but I think you already kno...
May 06, 2020 at 07:29
The terms of art for this topic are Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism, the latter being a stronger form of the former. These theses are...
May 05, 2020 at 21:11
I don't think that our esthetic preferences, habits of thought or limits of imagination should dictate what we believe about the world. On the other h...
May 05, 2020 at 08:18
The reason for saying that there is no center of the universe is the observation/assumption of symmetry, or homogeneity of cosmos. If, on a large scal...
May 04, 2020 at 20:42
Yes, though it doesn't pay to run too far with that idea (as was the fashion at one time). Still, there's a lot of fun, unexpected things that we have...
May 04, 2020 at 19:03
In: Bannings  — view comment
Nah, you are exaggerating. He was perhaps self-centered, but not uncommonly so. (You should see what a really self-obsessed flake looks like. There's ...
May 04, 2020 at 18:15