You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

SophistiCat

['Member']Joined: September 10, 2016 at 10:46Last active: February 25, 2026 at 23:4213 discussions2362 comments

Discussions (13)

Comments

The default for me was "Auto", which tracks system preferences. I think that's the friendliest option.
February 21, 2026 at 18:12
Just a couple of brief notes: This is going to confuse a lot of folk, because what Anderson describes as "reductionism" is more commonly known as supe...
February 16, 2026 at 00:59
What were you expecting? (Just curious)
February 11, 2026 at 12:21
Andersen does not talk about strong emergence, or indeed any emergence - these terms gained traction later.
February 11, 2026 at 12:19
OK, so you really have no idea of what you are talking about. For anyone who is actually interested in the subject, here is Mark Bedeau's influential ...
February 11, 2026 at 01:08
Speaking of, you should probably do that yourself. Emergence is a slippery term, but no one would call this any kind of emergence: Read Bedau, who coi...
February 10, 2026 at 02:51
That's not at all helpful as an analogy. So, some stuff can make up water and other stuff can't. What's the lesson here? Look, I kind of get the intui...
February 10, 2026 at 02:40
Coordinate geometry does in fact represent a line as a combination of points. Of course, it is not just a combination of points, it is points plus str...
February 08, 2026 at 21:11
???
February 07, 2026 at 00:04
You don't understand how language works. Numbers don't have colors, but to say that numbers are colorless would not make any sense. Come on, Hallucino...
February 05, 2026 at 23:59
In: Infinity  — view comment
Yeah, because the student doesn't understand basic math. If resistance is infinite then you can't tell what voltage is being applied - unless, of cour...
February 04, 2026 at 19:17
In: Infinity  — view comment
You are making this sound more esoteric than it is. This is freshman calculus that has been studied by generations upon generations of students. In ou...
February 02, 2026 at 16:32
I think you are still confused about reference frames. Time dilation is an observer effect. If you are traveling at a constant speed of 0.99c relative...
February 01, 2026 at 13:47
This only invites confusion, I am afraid. At any given time, we are moving at a speed close to c in some reference frame. And, at that same time, we a...
January 31, 2026 at 16:55
Evidence in this context is not just any reasons. 2+2=4 is true within its "language game," and no evidence can change that - only changing the rules ...
January 31, 2026 at 16:19
These are not all equivalent. The statement that I bolded above is correct: "If it is unfalsifiable, it cannot have evidential warrant for its belief....
January 31, 2026 at 00:31
In: Infinity  — view comment
It doesn't even work for finite sets. Think what it would mean if you could only compare the sizes of sets and their subsets. You couldn't say, for ex...
January 13, 2026 at 11:42
In: Infinity  — view comment
Strange as it may sound, Peano arithmetic does not require you to accept natural numbers as a "completed" set. You can have your successor function, y...
January 12, 2026 at 21:43
In: Infinity  — view comment
Explicitly specifying a function is acceptable as a constructive proof. Constructivism shares some concerns with finitism, but it is not as bonkers st...
January 12, 2026 at 21:15
In: Infinity  — view comment
This is not even an extension or enrichment of finite counting: all counting is based on bijection. In the finite case, whether you use your fingers, ...
January 11, 2026 at 13:45
Criminal gangs and armed groups already control large swathes of Venezuela, and they actually seem to do a better job of it than the central governmen...
January 05, 2026 at 21:51
It looks like "adults in the room" are betting on VP Rodriguez being more pliant and reasonable than her (former) boss. So, to them, "running the coun...
January 05, 2026 at 21:43
Glad you liked it. I thought that Chirimuuta's account handles the problem of divergent perceptions well - dependence on viewing conditions, interspec...
January 05, 2026 at 14:17
Sorry, I probably won't wade into this discussion, but I just so happened to have been listening to a New Books in Philosophy podcast on a related top...
January 04, 2026 at 22:32
The question of the OP invites a kind of view from nowhere, unconditioned by any framing or assumptions. Is there anything necessary tout court? My co...
December 29, 2025 at 16:17
I did not love Jane Eyre, but I liked it well enough. I suppose that when it comes to this sort of literature, you need to calibrate your expectations...
December 28, 2025 at 00:53
The Great Gatsby I first read this book a long time ago, when I was just coming to grips with the English language. I had only a vague recollection of...
December 20, 2025 at 18:28
Hume was an austere kind of empiricist (not unlike Logical Positivists in the 20th century, who valorized him). He accepted that we could, albeit fall...
December 15, 2025 at 12:03
Yeah, I agree, bitmasks are a holdover from the early days of computing. Nowadays, you probably won't see them much outside of C. But C is so deeply i...
December 10, 2025 at 01:21
That's not thinking about math. Nobody does calculus when throwing a spear, any more than the spear itself does calculus when it flies through the air...
December 10, 2025 at 00:21
Yes, Kripke suggested "possible states (or histories) of the world" or "possible situations." The latter may seem most vague, but that's for the bette...
December 08, 2025 at 19:30
@"Ludwig V" Kripke himself regretted his choice of "worlds" terminology for that very reason: he acknowledged that it invited a conflation of metaphys...
December 08, 2025 at 12:15
Just finished Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels (My Brilliant Friend, etc.) Fantastic.
December 08, 2025 at 01:36
If this is supposed to be an argument for p -> ?p (if p then possibly p), then it does not work. Notice that (p or ~p) is a tautology: it is true rega...
December 02, 2025 at 01:06
Well, I did select a rather awkward quotation for my example - this is Kant, after all, so of course, of all the ways he could have expressed his thou...
December 01, 2025 at 00:49
Well, the actual world is either possible or impossible (necessarily not actual) - this is the equivalent of the law of excluded middle in standard mo...
November 30, 2025 at 21:39
We already have motorsport, don't we? The incidence of fatal crashes actually used to be much higher than it is now, after safety improvements were im...
November 18, 2025 at 11:35
I wasn't talking about black and white characters, either. "Morally gray" characters are nothing new, nor is the critics' hand-wringing over the "mora...
November 17, 2025 at 19:30
Well, the issue is not new. Homer's heros are no angels, by anyone's measure. Even the otherwise rather prissy Aeneas did a bad thing with Dido, and d...
November 17, 2025 at 12:00
These exact words may not be used all that commonly in ordinary language, but I think that cognate concepts of freedom and responsibility pervade all ...
November 11, 2025 at 01:41
I don't really understand why you think that. Let me be clear in turn that I think that this is a tenable position (that free will may not be a valid ...
November 11, 2025 at 01:34
In time for COP30, New York Times published some nice charts that show 10 big things that have happened on the climate front in the last decade: 10 Ye...
November 10, 2025 at 14:52
I am not even certain that we should be talking about revision here. That Harris's concept of free will is out of touch with its common meaning is obv...
November 10, 2025 at 01:59
I rather think you should begin by asking the bolded question. You may even find that the question of determinism vs indeterminism isn't as relevant t...
November 10, 2025 at 01:49
Is this why you think that the concept of free will is incoherent? Why?
November 09, 2025 at 18:02
The OP is not worth commenting on, but I just want to note that to this day, the existence and the nature, as it were, of the laws of nature are debat...
October 29, 2025 at 16:51
To clarify, my question was not rhetorical. Where I was going with this is that causal analysis is a choice that we make, and so is the form that it t...
October 28, 2025 at 00:19
Before asking this question, or @"J"'s original question (Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?), I think we should ask ourselves: Do we need to analyz...
October 27, 2025 at 11:25
Ned Rorem's violin concerto is a recent discovery for me. It is featured on this recording with Gidon Kremer and Leonard Bernstein, together with Phil...
October 27, 2025 at 00:45
How about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJf5r1ZjwTY
October 27, 2025 at 00:15