Posty operates under the misapprehension of the "Many Worlds" interpretation of QM as some some sort of anything-goes modal realism. Lewisian modal re...
Yes, the "ultimate terminus" is the Achilles hill of the unrestricted PSR, and philosophers have tied themselves into knots wrangling with concepts li...
No, I agree, most typically the PSR implies the existence of a cause, whether known or not. My point when talking about our common-sense reasoning is ...
Traditional proponents of the PSR, such as Spinoza and Leibnitz, as well as modern proponents like Della Rocca(1), Pruss(2) and Feser(3), do not accep...
I obviously wasn't talking about this "causeless ground of being." Whatever that is, I don't think it is required to conceive of brute facts and chanc...
I don't think it takes any special ability. We naturally think in terms of chance and contingency. In our ordinary thinking we hold some things as giv...
We certainly seem to have reason-seeking instincts, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that we cannot help it. Chance, brute facts - these remain conc...
If we just say "reason" and leave it at that, then either we are making PSR an epistemological principle, or we are making some rather extravagant cla...
Oh, I am not faulting you for not laying out an entire epistemology right here and now. My point is that historically* the PSR has meant something str...
First, we shouldn't be talking about "the" PSR without further qualifications. The SEP entry that Posty linked has a good intro chapter that classifie...
So, deescalation means tampering down belligerent rhetoric for a while? That's a pretty low bar you are setting, but then chances are, based on past e...
How so? First, as has been discussed here, the scope of the PSR may be limited to events or entities and not include "things" such as rules, principle...
Why Trump? This whole Korean "rapprochement," for whatever it is worth, has been Kim's show from the beginning to the end. Trump just let it happen. ....
Oh, my educational background is nothing spectacular. As far as physics, I only have a BA and some graduate courses from many years ago. So don't take...
The thing is, you need much larger scales in order to detect redshifting due to expanding space. On the scale of a galaxy gravitational attraction ove...
How would they figure that out? Expanding space is validated by precisely the sort of astronomical observations that would not be available in that hy...
As @"LD Saunders" notes, the quote has nothing to say about math. It is about empirical knowledge, which is in all cases circumscribed by available ev...
It's interesting to note though just how philosophical Einstein's thinking was throughout his work on relativity and quantum physics It wasn't just "l...
Well, I am still not seeing much of that in what you have posted. Unless you think that "Hey, here is a naive layman question about some complex scien...
I am not sure what it is that you want to talk about. Is it scientific puzzles and paradoxes in general? The three examples that you gave really don't...
That's a fair point. I guess I am just not very serious about ontology: I am more interested to know what the world is like than what "stuff" it is ma...
Well, I am not too concerned with how this sounds, but what question is being begged here? That to me suggests a structural relationship between theor...
Science tends lead people to one of these views: 1. Reductionism: There is one true ontology (usually assumed to be something like that of the Standar...
I clicked on your thread, and spent maybe 10 minutes on the first page of Google results (most of which are this guy's sites or sites affiliated with ...
I think your criterion is too strict - it would apply to any dynamical systems. We don't necessarily need to test supervenience in such direct, litera...
No, it does not. Well, the reductionism part may or may not be true, depending on how reductionism is defined. The loosest definition simply equates r...
I stopped reading right here. If this is what you took away from the preceding discussion, then you are not in a position to participate in the discus...
And to add to what @"noAxioms" said, you seem to be confusing eternalism, which the theory of Relativity does not assert, with relativity of simultane...
Anything that can be described in the abstract, without essentially incorporating references to specific instances, would be substrate-independent. An...
As @"Pierre-Normand" noted, you need not appeal to such exotic examples as the placebo effect. One moment I was sitting on a chair, the next moment I ...
You can also say that the cause of the pigeon's behavior was its prior training (contrasting it with untrained pigeons). Or the fact that it was awake...
Yes. And to address the causal exclusion/overdetermination argument head-on, causation is contextual; there isn't some objective matter of fact about ...
Well, your one attempt so far in this conversation has been to replace the question with a different one (which, I contend, science cannot answer eith...
Your stated position is that science can answer any question that can and should be answered, and that conversely, a question that cannot be answered ...
Thanks for this discussion. I wasn't really impressed by the title paper, which trades in anecdotes that won't be very informative to non-experts, but...
I can answer whether it is right for me to kill my mother; I consider both the question and the answer to be meaningful; and science has nothing to do...
They probably figure that whatever consequences they are going to suffer this time have already been payed forward. Their reputation outside Russia co...
Good post. Yes, taking what is commonly understood to be a Humean regularity view of the world*, "laws of nature" do not exist as some independently g...
That's a word that sounds right, but a naive parsing suggests a meaning that is the opposite of what it actually means. Woe - be gone! But, according ...
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