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SophistiCat

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Perhaps (contradicting what I've just said - I am large) "scientism" is perceived as a certain philosophical obliviousness. It is when someone prejudg...
March 13, 2018 at 07:46
I mean that the term by itself expresses more of a speaker's attitude than a motivated stance, which is what you've been demanding. If you are after r...
March 13, 2018 at 07:39
Yes, exactly. @"Pseudonym", you are overthinking this. There is no such philosophical school of thought as Scientism. It is just a pejorative label; i...
March 12, 2018 at 20:34
Your outlook seems to be stuck sometime 20 years ago. I remember, it felt like a hopeful time then. The fall of the Communist empire, the end of Apart...
March 12, 2018 at 10:07
A curious thing about China is that the historic events they tend to most dwell on are not of great victories and achievements but quite the opposite:...
March 12, 2018 at 08:39
That Einstein quip about the Moon should not be taken too literally (or at all literally). Its context is a scientific debate about quantum physics, w...
March 11, 2018 at 09:33
Reading your glosses of Cartwright's attacks on the laws of nature (as well as one of her shorter papers), I have to wonder who is she arguing with? A...
March 10, 2018 at 17:50
Yes, I think that's the right idea. However we structure our beliefs, ultimately the whole thing hangs free, so to speak: inevitably, some beliefs wil...
March 06, 2018 at 21:32
Funny how you say that morality does not have to be grounded (any more than anything else), then immediately go on to posit a ground for morality. It ...
March 06, 2018 at 21:07
You are taking theory to mean more--or-less what it means in science, where theories are indeed descriptive and are (supposedly) grounded in publicly ...
March 06, 2018 at 09:13
For context: How to Buy a Gun in 15 Countries
March 06, 2018 at 07:52
I am not America or The West. I did not bomb Hiroshima or invade Iraq. I can - and should - have my own opinion about world events regardless of what ...
March 05, 2018 at 08:47
Ah well, if America is doing something wrong, then Russia can do no wrong. (Or something like that. The "logic" of tu quoque is hard to grasp.) LOL. I...
March 04, 2018 at 20:13
Russia ranks 71 for per capita GDP, and half of it comes from selling its natural resources.
March 04, 2018 at 09:43
I see that putinverstehers are out in force :roll: Right, because it is Russia's birthright to dominate and subjugate and occasionally dismember its s...
March 04, 2018 at 09:36
Putin's and Kim's rhetoric are getting more and more alike. Both autocrats preside over impoverished nations and demand respect by threatening to dest...
March 04, 2018 at 08:35
Interesting discussion, I haven't read all of it yet, but here's one little comment: There is no such thing as the perspective of a photon. The perspe...
February 27, 2018 at 10:07
It is about what ought to be done (or avoided). I doubt that "ought" can be adequately reduced to something that is more basic. But that is not what m...
February 23, 2018 at 21:07
I am not saying that helping ourselves to induction is a problem - quite the opposite. Or if it is a problem, any "cure" that has been proposed so far...
February 13, 2018 at 08:06
I am not sure why you bring up determinism at this point. Are you saying that inductive/deductive split is equivalent to indeterminism/determinism? Th...
February 13, 2018 at 08:00
The conclusion that inductive reasoning is a product of our evolutionary development comes at the far end of a long process of inductive inference. So...
February 12, 2018 at 22:36
You cannot replace induction with deduction salva veritate, since induction is plausible reasoning and deduction is certain reasoning. If you assume "...
February 12, 2018 at 22:17
Its utter pointlessness? I mean, if you've already helped yourself to induction, what's the point of circling back to "justify" it via one of its purp...
February 12, 2018 at 21:43
No, I am pretty sure that's not what I was saying. I am not even sure what that means. Right, circular reasoning again. Induction -> Science -> Fancif...
February 12, 2018 at 20:53
It's not so much vague as artificially restricted. If there is only one system, one language, one ontology, then there is nothing to be emergent. And ...
February 12, 2018 at 07:17
If by "no alternative" you mean a sort of psychological compulsion then that is just what I was saying. Aaand... we are back to circular reasoning. Th...
February 12, 2018 at 06:38
Oh sure, inferences of past events are as vulnerable to skepticism as inferences of future events, and at some point, when you come to question your c...
February 11, 2018 at 21:07
This is one of those papers where the results are probably more interesting and surprising to the researchers in the field than to laymen - which is p...
February 11, 2018 at 20:34
The research in question has nothing to do with consciousness. "Life after death" is a journalistic flourish. This is the article in Open Biology: Tra...
February 11, 2018 at 11:59
I understand what you are saying. I am granting, for the sake of an argument, one half of your "invariances of nature," so to speak: those that lie in...
February 11, 2018 at 08:00
I don't know of any logic where this would be the case. Induction is, generally speaking, plausible reasoning. So normally you would conclude that any...
February 10, 2018 at 15:52
The theory of evolution, like any theory, is based on what we already know. Induction is a way of inferring what we don't know, whether it occurs in t...
February 10, 2018 at 09:54
I am myself in a (leisurely) process of reading up on such issues, although at the moment I am more focused on causation. SEP provides an overview of ...
February 10, 2018 at 08:31
But it is not self-undermining. It is entirely compatible with the situation where the world ceases to be orderly some time in the future (Goodman's g...
February 09, 2018 at 07:55
You are talking about metaphysical systems, surely? Because scientific systems (with the possible exception of some highly theoretical fields) are the...
February 09, 2018 at 07:51
Well, the very fact that science gets along quite well with little or no metaphysics - and in particular, without ever needing to resolve the question...
February 08, 2018 at 09:25
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that induction is justified by its universal acceptance and seeming indispensability - apparently, on th...
February 08, 2018 at 09:20
Of course. There are both deterministic and indeterministic models in science. As for metaphysical determinism, science as such does not take any posi...
February 07, 2018 at 21:30
I don't understand your point. Science does what it does - it provides explanations of a certain sort. What it does not do is provide warrant for ever...
February 07, 2018 at 21:12
Not that this is particularly relevant to either free will or the actual topic of this thread, but charleton is talking out of his ass: science does n...
February 06, 2018 at 21:37
You are asking the wrong question. Almost none of our beliefs are justified (in our mind) by science. So if you only accept reductive explanations as ...
February 06, 2018 at 21:30
You are equating justification with a reductive explanation. Sometimes that is the case, but not always, and clearly not in the case of "passions." I ...
February 05, 2018 at 08:41
This must be the Donald Trump school of philosophy.
February 04, 2018 at 15:55
I want to step back a little and ask this question: How could we generalize the notion of design when all we know is human design? We could, of course...
February 03, 2018 at 17:05
My reference to some other ID-ers and creationists was just such an attempt to identify a more favorable sampling, where the number of instances is no...
February 03, 2018 at 16:18
I hesitate to say that this is unfair to @"Sam26"'s argument, because it doesn't look like he has thought through any of it. Still, this is probably n...
February 03, 2018 at 11:36
As @"Pseudonym" says, this is not an inductive argument - this is no argument at all. You really don't see how unhelpful this circular explanation is?...
January 31, 2018 at 21:44
Meanwhile, a senior official in Trump administration effectively sabotaged the release of the much-anticipated list of corrupt Russian oligarchs and o...
January 31, 2018 at 20:57
Of course induction is normative - I don't understand why you keep saying this as if this is something controversial. And your last remark makes me wo...
January 30, 2018 at 20:53
I am not sure why you posted this lengthy excerpt in response to my off-hand remark. In it Popper criticizes Hume's psychological account of induction...
January 30, 2018 at 20:47