Confirmation is what happens when your confidence in a proposition or a theory increases in response to evidence. To deny that our confidence in the p...
Do people say "time nowadays"? I googled the phrase, and although there are many hits, the sentence context is usually something like "...waste of tim...
Crackpottery is not a diagnosis - well, not necessarily - it is loopy pseudoscience in this case. Whether the guy really is off his rocker or whether ...
I didn't say all of Popper's ideas about science were banal - some of them were just wrong (kidding!) No, I was referring to ideas like "people trying...
Well, one thing Nietzsche is not is clear and consistent, which is why just about every scholar of Nietzsche thinks that he is misunderstood by someon...
This is a banality. The ideas that are popularly credited to Popper have been around since Bacon. What is right about Popper's prescriptions isn't new...
Yes, even the law of non-contradiction can be intelligibly doubted: see Dialetheism The a priori status of logic has been under attack for quite some ...
Either you understand what is written, or you don't. If you don't, then nothing more can be said. If you do, then you know what "odd" and "even" mean....
I don't know. It seems to me that only a defeasible statement can be meaningfully tested. How do you test a tautology (or a contradiction)? There seem...
Yeah, the title is odd: it's supposed to sound provocative, but how is what it ostensibly asserts even controversial? The author's thesis is stronger ...
The "study" is actually a book: Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Here is the author's ...
You are not wrong. Indeed, in natural speech, when we say "some A's are B," more often than not we mean that some are and some aren't. If we want to c...
Here is a better (IMHO) refutation of Aristotle through thought experiment. Consider a dumbbell: https://i.postimg.cc/tRYfYX6d/dumbbells.png Let's tak...
Aristotle, even as Galileo presents him in his dialogue, talks about "natural motion," which apparently is a free fall through some medium, such as ai...
First, it is not entirely clear whether "Americans curse" means "Some Americans curse" or "All Americans curse." (Applying real-world knowledge, it se...
Right back at you. As I said right before the paragraph that you quoted, Aristotle (as per Galileo) does not treat of bound systems - his law concerns...
So, turning back to the OP for a change :) This refers to Galileo's famous argument against the then prevailing Aristotle's theory of falling bodies, ...
Thought experiments can be more than that. Some thought experiments explicitly assume counterfactual conditions, unphysical idealizations, etc. The in...
You would have to use a formal language to avoid ambiguities (e.g. ? vs. =), but for relatively simple reasoning this isn't necessary. You just need t...
Is this literally the doctrine with which Norton, Brown, et al. are concerned? Have you actually looked at any of the literature? Do you think it reas...
Your mistake is that you interpret "are" as identity (=), whereas from the context it should be clear that "are" here indicates membership of a class ...
At best, pain signals us about some adverse environmental circumstances or a bodily disorder, so that we attend to this situation and deal with it. Bu...
I think you got this idea because you don't have a good feel for the timescales involved (that's OK, most of us don't). Life has been on Earth for abo...
This post would benefit from some background reading suggestions for those who do not know what you are talking about. John Norton, Why thought experi...
So suppose, as you say, that in our evolutionary past pain (qua mental state) served a causal function. Does that mean then that the neurophysiologica...
Here is Levada-Center, a reputable Russian research center:Religion and superstition survey conducted in Russia over a number of years. Self-identifie...
Well, the argument doesn't explicitly assume any metaphysical stance on the nature of reason; it seeks to challenge determinists (in this context: tho...
Right, that would be the identity thesis: the abstract, or the mental just is the physical, or somehow supervene on the physical (and then it's just t...
You are reprising A.J. Ayer's argument in The Concept of a Person (1963): Note however that this argument only shows that causal determination does no...
This sounds somewhat like Popper's argument that says that physicalist (let's call it that to avoid confusion) ontology is too impoverished. But a phy...
I can't see how you are getting this from the quoted snippet. I think you are just reading into it your own thoughts (which I don't claim to understan...
You seem to be responding to one word in the title of the thread and nothing else besides. That's not determinism being self-refuting, i.e. denying or...
Well, the pop-sci story that I've seen is that at the beginning of the Carboniferous period the climate was warm and humid, but during the later part ...
This is not an unusual use of the term determinism - at least it was not at that time. Nowadays determinism is most often taken to mean Laplacean caus...
What people would do if their behavior was accurately predicted is - that's right, they would behave exactly as predicted. Because that's just what yo...
Why can't we? Because we don't want to make him feel bad about losing an argument? When making decisions, we do consider various hypotheticals, but if...
Arguments to the effect that determinism (and/or materialism/naturalism/physicalism) is self-defeating* abound. In The Self and Its Brain Popper cites...
No, I stick with analytics; continentals make my cat-brain hurt :razz: Although the clarity of analytic philosophers can be deceptive (when it is not ...
As far as Eccles's contribution to the debate, the passage that Churchland quotes is the extent of that particular argument - not very illuminating, t...
Substitute anything else for "consciousness" in the above sentence and you'll realize how absurd it is. When motion itself isn't entirely understood, ...
I am not sure why you wrote that string of remarks in response to my post. I didn't opine on whether machines were "truly sentient." All I said was th...
We are the masters of our language, not the the other way around; we create meanings. If we apply the word 'intelligent' to something other than a hum...
What exactly do you mean by "determinism" here? Are you using a strict physicalist definition, or some loose metaphorical one, as in "business as usua...
Your proof, as far as I can see, consists in redefining what it means to "act freely." To paraphrase Russell, this method of redefining words has many...
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