Yeah, lots of things break down if you pull on one strand, such as speed of light or gravitational constant. Suddenly stable isotopes become unstable,...
Spectral measurements indicate that amino acids and sugars indeed form in interstellar dust. They are all over the place, literally. I am by no means ...
Sure, but these would not be distinctions in kind - only distinctions in degree. There are no two things by which we can recognize knowledge - justifi...
I thought that my position was clear. JTB is not an operational definition of knowledge. While justified is operational, true is aspirational. When de...
Oh but it does. What else could possibly warrant a claim of knowledge? (Other than the kind of knowledge that doesn't fit the JTB mold anyway, such as...
That's a problem with the JTB definition of knowledge. You could ask the same question about anything we say we know. The answer, of course, is alread...
Why do you think Venter's work is relevant to the OOL research? In the classic Miller-Urey and similar experiments, researchers were trying to produce...
I'll repost this link to a BBC article that gives a popular overview of the history and the current state of the origin of life research: The secret o...
It's interesting to note how the newly-fashionable anti-Islamism's efforts to villainize Muslims by tendentiously scrutinizing their holy texts parall...
Were Mussolini's theories as quoted here all that far from the reality fascism? Ironically, that's almost spot-on Soviet-style socialism as it really ...
You provide examples where theoretical entities are associated with some more-or-less concrete, sensible objects*. And that's how it should be: any th...
Where this all grounds out is observables, of course - whatever we can observe and measure. Everything else is a theory, a formalism to tie together t...
Whatever, Wosret. It seems that you just aren't interested, which is fine, but you should just acknowledge that, instead of making tendentious stateme...
According to classic behaviorist theory, conditioned behavior needs reinforcement, otherwise it is gradually extinguished. Skinner's experiment demons...
It demonstrates a basic psychological mechanism that at least partly accounts for the persistence of superstitions (despite it being fairly easy to di...
There is a broader historical sense of superstition as all types of non-rational, magical-like beliefs - often including religious beliefs that we do ...
Let me help you out here. There is either a platypus, a piece of lint, or nothing in your pocket. It's equal odds (of course), but there's now only a ...
If you are thinking about something along the lines of jumping from world to world, like in Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife and various other books ...
Strictly speaking, you don't need mathematics as we have it in order to do philosophy. However, in its essence, mathematics is a systematic and discip...
(Ignoring apo's derail to address the OP quote) This looks like a cheap trick, and it is. Here is an even simpler example: 1. The proposition "having ...
all right, there is something to the limited capacity that each of us has for moral concerns; however, I think that more importantly, moral imperative...
Behavioral theories of mind are supposed to explain behavior. Panpsychism is supposed to explain something else - "the hard problem of consciousness,"...
No, no, no. I wasn't looking for "the right way to reason things out." My question was not about life, the universe, and everything. I asked a specifi...
You were doing well until the last paragraph. Not only does it not follow from the reasoning that preceded it, it goes directly against it! If you con...
If I recall correctly, Carl Sagan contributed to some research on meteoritic dust accretion. He is mostly remembered for being a great science popular...
Probabilities are single-case, or nothing But even if you do not agree with that view, you are still committing a fallacy in attributing a causal sign...
That is a thoughtless and irrelevant retort. The question that started this line of discussion was whether black holes were "invented" in order to acc...
We "invented" them only in the same sense that we "invent" solutions to equations. Black holes are what we can expect to see, given GR. And what we do...
...pretty much everything. The thing is that your argument is so simple structurally that it is either trivial or the real meat of the argument needs ...
I was at first confused by your talk about the brain, until I realized that you meant something like rational deliberation, as opposed to intuition/su...
Would anyone actually take a crack at explaining what "objective meaning" or "objective morals" are? It's not a trivial question. Interestingly, one o...
It does change whether what we are seeing is a black hole, because a "black hole" is not a theory-free observation, it is a theoretical entity that ha...
Yeah, this is almost beautiful, isn't it? I've heard quite a few anti-AGW "arguments", but I suppose it takes a philosophy fan to take it to such a su...
I think that the unwillingness to recognize and act upon the issues raised by climate change and natural resource exhaustion is more commonly caused b...
Your last sentence is a non sequitur. The question of human contribution has no relation to whether the whole issue is nicknamed "global warming" or "...
I read your quote as far as saying that "Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are abl...
These seem to be metaphysical questions, not questions of logic or language. There's nothing logically inconsistent or ambiguous about supertasks (and...
I am not sure Michael is even clear about what kind of argument he is trying to make. Syntactically, it is a purely logical argument, and it stems fro...
If you are thinking of discrete quantum states of electrons in an atom, that is not an obvious example of discrete motion (except in a generalized sen...
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