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SophistiCat

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Evolution by natural selection is a good example of a teleological explanation that is indeterministic at every scale. It is teleological because evol...
July 04, 2025 at 19:55
Again, a bizarre non sequitur. Even accepting your caricature, what does this have to do with establishing a goal or purpose for the universe?
July 04, 2025 at 19:41
How does it help if these connections are only in our head and have nothing to do with the environment in which we live? How could we even exist in an...
July 04, 2025 at 00:24
That's not what teleology is. This is a non sequitur, even to your own caricature of teleology.
July 04, 2025 at 00:09
What said. Also, consider that the paradigmatic cases of teleological explanations are those where human (or animal) agency is involved, and these are...
July 03, 2025 at 21:08
Just to make it clear where we stand, we have rules about self-promotion and SPAM: Now, you didn't include a link, but that doesn't change the fact th...
June 30, 2025 at 19:56
You know, there was not so long ago another cr..., er, thinker on this forum who challenged all comers to refute his theories. He made his (also self-...
June 29, 2025 at 20:49
Perhaps you didn't mean it that way, but the way this quote reads is that "a world in which we are: unable to have peace, unable to eradicate poverty ...
June 26, 2025 at 15:04
I have never had discussions over PM. I don't feel obliged to respond to, or even read crap posts from crap posters, so, filtering is not much of an i...
June 24, 2025 at 21:14
Generative AIs are trained on huge volumes of text from print and electronic media, and designed to generate similar texts. Since their training mater...
June 22, 2025 at 23:57
If this is going somewhere, please dispense with Socratic questions and get to the point. On the other hand, if you have no clue, as you seem to imply...
June 22, 2025 at 22:56
There are many things without which you cannot perform logic - breathable atmosphere, for example. What's the point of this and the rest of your quest...
June 21, 2025 at 23:55
Your precis on causality is well taken, but I don't think it is very relevant to the present discussion. Causation was not thought to be a law of logi...
June 21, 2025 at 13:38
I was only disputing the idea that logic is about the world, which is to say, that there is some kind of inherent correspondence between logical state...
June 20, 2025 at 21:53
I use "about" in its intended sense - the semantics of logical sentences.
June 19, 2025 at 23:46
P.S. Meh, I should read all responses before adding mine. But I'll add one thing: What question the OP is asking? It is never entirely clear. Is it ab...
June 19, 2025 at 23:36
Well, what would any of us be talking about absent intelligibility? If there is an object of discussion, it is perforce intelligible. As for what acco...
June 08, 2025 at 12:15
Yes, I get your point. Although the intuitiveness of Newtonian physics shouldn't be overestimated either. It only seems commonsense because the basics...
June 08, 2025 at 12:03
So, do you think that this implication has never occurred to any materialists, or that there have never been any materialists to begin with? Because I...
June 08, 2025 at 00:34
Right, and even that term is fraught and uncertain, as the article that you referenced shows. I have a hunch, though I cannot back it up with a litera...
June 08, 2025 at 00:17
Does anyone? Would any materialists nowadays own up to such a characterization?
June 07, 2025 at 21:19
So, it's just about physics being different? I don't think it makes sense to identify philosophical materialism with physics at a particular place and...
June 07, 2025 at 21:17
"Ionian materialists"? I thought you were addressing present-day materialism? For my part, I wouldn't venture to speculate about the psychological mot...
June 07, 2025 at 21:12
What do you think is olds-school materialism, and what is post-QM materialism? Again, examples of exponents of these views would help.
June 07, 2025 at 19:18
Are you saying that materialists deny this? Can you point to anyone, at any time in history, who held this position?
June 07, 2025 at 19:15
Can you expand on what you mean by materialism, beyond these caricatures: If materialism is, as you assert, a popular and intuitively attractive view,...
June 07, 2025 at 14:41
To be fair, it is often difficult to understand what you are saying. Perhaps a language issue. For example, I am not sure that I understand what you a...
June 02, 2025 at 18:40
That would indeed be a performative contradiction, without additional qualifications of what "anti-violence" entails in this context.
May 24, 2025 at 19:06
The performative contradiction is in performing a democratic act by someone who perforce rejects democracy.
May 24, 2025 at 18:58
Not so fast... Read on...
May 16, 2025 at 01:58
There is a sense in which the motion of a body depends on other bodies in both senses: If there was only one body in the world, then the very idea of ...
May 07, 2025 at 20:31
You seem to be equivocating between "dependence" as being a function of something else and being grounded in something else. And your conclusion doesn...
May 06, 2025 at 21:35
The orthodox thinking in Western philosophy used to maintain that what we now call inertial motion (such as that of a billiard ball rolling on a flat ...
May 06, 2025 at 15:49
Conceptually, change only depends on time. And time depends on change - it's a mutual dependence. What neither concept requires is a magic man pulling...
May 06, 2025 at 12:35
Our intuitions are not universal and unchanging. They are influenced by experience, exposure to ideas (from science, but also from history, philosophy...
May 06, 2025 at 12:19
Well, that's a far broader question than the original topic. You won't make much headway on the question of magic if, in order to answer it, you first...
March 31, 2025 at 11:26
Your idea of an explanation as nothing more than giving a name for what you want to explain is not even deflationary - it is patently silly. To wit: T...
March 31, 2025 at 00:45
From what you have written, I cannot tell what distinction you make between a phenomenological and a fundamental theory. The contraposition of "descri...
March 28, 2025 at 02:09
In: Bannings  — view comment
You could leave the rest of the sentence as a wildcard, since what you wrote up to that point is a truism (or at least that is what it is meant to be)...
March 23, 2025 at 17:02
Libertarian free will requires agency, causal control, and most importantly, "genuine" alternative possibilities. The devil, as always, is in exactly ...
March 12, 2025 at 00:06
I am going to take back what I said. While not everyone frames libertarianism as a species of incompatibilism, some do, and that includes some promine...
March 11, 2025 at 01:01
Well, it's not. Libertarianism and incompatibilism often go together, but they are neither identical nor subcategories of one another.
March 10, 2025 at 20:41
This is a well-known objection to libertarian free will. It even has a name in the literature - the Luck Objection. Naturally, libertarians are well a...
March 10, 2025 at 16:21
Oh, I am not being pessimistic, just saying that the situation there is a lot more complicated and uncertain than the domino metaphor would suggest. E...
January 13, 2025 at 23:01
This is going in circles, and I am not keen on repeating myself.
January 13, 2025 at 00:22
Your argument is not a truism, but its crucial premise stands without support. I don't know why it is so controversial to insist that in order to make...
January 12, 2025 at 21:02
It's all too tempting to reach for a recent precedent, but Georgia is nothing like Syria. Without an understanding of its specifics, it is useless to ...
January 12, 2025 at 20:51
I thought there was some major development in Georgia in the past few days that I hadn't heard about. But no, the ruling party is still in control and...
January 12, 2025 at 16:42
I was addressing the argument - not the thesis about what is sine qua non for intelligence, but that it is out of reach for AI by its "very nature." N...
January 12, 2025 at 16:36
No one said they were, so I am not sure whose fallacy you are attacking. I was just pointing out the emptiness of critique that, when stripped of its ...
January 12, 2025 at 01:17