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SophistiCat

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Right, "checking their internal structure on the basis of shared human mental structures" would be one such reductive procedure. "Greatest happiness (...
September 26, 2019 at 12:12
This kind of brings to mind arguments over "objective" morality and the is/ought gap. What often stands for said objectivity is some consistent reduct...
September 26, 2019 at 10:32
"Understand" is too vague a requirement to give an answer. It's vague even in the usual context of human interactions, but if you want to apply it cro...
September 25, 2019 at 14:02
Updated link to the Firefox extension @"Pattern-chaser"
September 24, 2019 at 08:26
Yes, that was what I understood you to mean. It isn't so much paywalls that separate the masses from the latest scientific research, but years of trai...
September 20, 2019 at 06:25
No, you misunderstood whatever snippet that you have read. You need to read the article in order to be able to comment on it.
September 18, 2019 at 05:52
No, this point wasn't missed either in the cited articles or in the discussion in this thread.
September 17, 2019 at 19:46
Fanaticism for truth and justice sounds very fine and romantic. Who could object to that? The naked truth used to be allegorically depicted as a beaut...
September 17, 2019 at 18:24
That's gotta be the Philosophy Forum motto.
September 17, 2019 at 09:07
In that case, the somewhat flippant answer that I gave you in the beginning still fits. There are plenty of things in our ordinary experience that fit...
September 17, 2019 at 06:33
The problem with this discussion is that no one, including, I am sure, the OP @"elucid", quite knows what question is being asked, and what kind of an...
September 16, 2019 at 10:42
You have very naive, black-and-white notions both about academia and about open-access publishing. The best of open-access journals are very much a pa...
September 16, 2019 at 10:08
That's kind of a silly thing to say, on the one hand. A field is "a physical quantity... that has a value for each point in space-time." And temperatu...
September 15, 2019 at 06:17
You are just making my point. You choose to include elementary particles into things that you call "objects." I don't think it's a conventional use of...
September 15, 2019 at 05:55
So am I. Physical objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Things that can occupy the same space at the same time are not called objects...
September 14, 2019 at 20:37
On one now defunct forum that I used to visit they even made a sub-section of their philosophy forum specifically for free will discussions. I wish we...
September 14, 2019 at 20:33
This is just what we mean be the word "object." If some entities - real or imagined - can be at the same place at the same time, such as fields or gho...
September 14, 2019 at 20:14
The basic hypothetico-deductive method works like this: 1. Assume that the system under consideration is described by some theory - in other words, it...
September 14, 2019 at 10:50
It is certainly an interesting question to ask how music came about, and there can be different ways of answering it. The "easy" question is the descr...
September 13, 2019 at 17:23
The fact that our blood is red does not confer fitness advantage to us, so why is it red? The color of blood appears to be "just extra-chance-random" ...
September 13, 2019 at 07:49
Not only that, but the slogan is not a good representation of the theory of natural selection. You are still stuck on the idea of hyper-adaptationism ...
September 12, 2019 at 17:01
You are not trying to explain it in a different way. You are repeating the exact same truism ("a thing is what it is and is not what it is not") over ...
September 12, 2019 at 07:47
Even as an atheist, I am surprised that of all the garbage threads that are started here, @"fresco" chooses to pick on the few religion-themed ones. B...
September 11, 2019 at 13:24
That's a good way to put it, if a bit vague. It makes sense if you are already familiar with various examples of metaphysics and are trying to general...
September 09, 2019 at 07:42
Don't automatically assume that what seems to you like an abstruse post is a sign of "intellectual posturing." A forum is not a school or a public ser...
September 05, 2019 at 17:41
If you are interested in what people in the street (and perhaps also in courts of law and ethics committees) think about "free will", then perhaps, ra...
September 04, 2019 at 21:14
It is, of course, an age-old plaint about people getting stupider, weaker, more corrupt, etc. etc. But if you are being serious and not just idly moan...
September 04, 2019 at 13:50
It's the point where reasoning stops and table-pounding begins.
September 02, 2019 at 16:00
I am more concerned with exploring those views, starting with learning them even in the most basic outlines. But I can see that you are not interested...
September 02, 2019 at 08:15
I just told you, didn't I? Why not read something about this topic if it interests you? You might want to start not with the identity theory specifica...
September 02, 2019 at 07:44
You are misunderstanding the mind-brain identity thesis. It does not say that your mind is literally a physical object that is your brain. Rather, it ...
September 02, 2019 at 06:42
Well, thank you for being so upfront, I guess - this will save me time and effort. By giving a caricature of your position I was hoping (though it was...
September 01, 2019 at 17:40
It's contentious, if you care to survey philosophical literature on free will, rather than just the works of one or two authors. And no, I am not goin...
September 01, 2019 at 15:56
Right, so your receptive/consequential distinction falls approximately along the same line as Hume's matters of fact vs. relations of ideas, which is ...
August 25, 2019 at 12:10
That's a lot of words, but I am kind of struggling to understand what it is that you think is the original thought here. How is your receptive/consequ...
August 25, 2019 at 09:06
That's some assignment! I read Notre-Dame de Paris as a teen, and even at that age his overwrought romanticism turned me off. The shear bulk of Les Mi...
August 18, 2019 at 07:44
"What it means" is where conceptual issues begin and end. What did you think I meant? Specifically with regard to causality, since that was the contex...
August 17, 2019 at 20:38
Certainly. Sorry if I've misunderstood you.
August 17, 2019 at 20:11
Reader here. I read every day, though since I am a slow reader, I don't cover nearly as much ground as some. I don't have a good idea of how much othe...
August 17, 2019 at 16:47
Which is impossible to judge based on the retelling of one of the participants. For all I know, you could be right, but to a rational observer who kno...
August 17, 2019 at 16:05
LOL you guys. Yeah, you could say that Hugo was a republican, though not in the way you think.
August 17, 2019 at 09:18
Have you heard of "blogs"? It's a hot new thing on the Internet - you should check it out!
August 10, 2019 at 13:41
Did you read just this last sentence? I don't deny the value of philosophy, nor even its applicability to science.
August 10, 2019 at 12:53
This situation is changing though. Just as science is no longer the province of gentlemen dilettantes, as it was until about the mid-19th century, phi...
August 10, 2019 at 10:30
This isn't so much Popperian falsificationism as just empiricist principles that were around, more or less, since Bacon's time. Falsificationism is so...
August 10, 2019 at 07:49
What exactly are you proud of? Choosing your parents wisely?
August 09, 2019 at 07:47
You don't need a NYT account to read this article. If somehow, despite your policy, you've exceeded their free articles-per-month limit, you can just ...
August 09, 2019 at 06:44
32 mass shootings this so far this year - that's about once per week.
August 07, 2019 at 20:56
Well, Science Forums has an explicitly stated narrow focus and tight moderation, so the fact that your thread was closed immediately and the earlier t...
August 05, 2019 at 16:21
WTF? Will you just keep spamming these idiotic threads about infinity? One is not enough for you?
July 10, 2019 at 11:51