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

sime

Comments

As a sentiment perhaps. But willpower isn't a scientifically admissible cause of human action. Rather, willpower is the force one exerts in the pursui...
June 28, 2019 at 09:45
Yes, as far as truth is concerned, perspectivism is unavoidable. But that isn't to say that I necessarily believe in the possibility of first-person c...
June 28, 2019 at 09:16
The individual might use the social consensus as an estimator for what is true, but ultimately it is environmental feedback, experience and reason tha...
June 27, 2019 at 15:53
You first need to distinguish truth from objectivity; the difference being that the latter is dependent upon linguistic convention.
June 27, 2019 at 09:04
Oughts and expectations are close cousins, due to the inferential semantics of propositions. For example, the meaning of the sentence "this apple is r...
June 26, 2019 at 15:46
If Suicide is tempting, then presumably the solution might be to contemplate the mysterious state of suicide, such that with any luck one 'virtualises...
June 26, 2019 at 12:57
In my opinion, the sleeping beauty problem and the doomsday argument aren't meaningful epistemological problems, and merely serve as reductio ad absur...
June 21, 2019 at 14:49
Yes, I am tempted to think that such notions are non-cognitive expressions of one's epistemic disposition ,-although the more general world "truth" so...
June 21, 2019 at 07:16
I think Quine's web of belief provides a reasonable picture of the broad notion objectivity in terms of epistemic acceptability; the objectivity of a ...
June 20, 2019 at 19:07
Not necessarily; Only that the objective-subjective distinction has no objective justification on pain of infinite regress. I am still nevertheless pr...
June 20, 2019 at 17:39
Objectivity refers to a public balance upon which impressions are weighed. Yet I only possess impressions of a public balance.
June 20, 2019 at 17:04
You first need to define what makes each ball unique. What makes one green ball different from another green ball? Do the green balls each possess ess...
June 20, 2019 at 15:04
"my consciousness is an illusion" can only mean that my stimulus-responses aren't publicly understood. If society concludes that my judgement of an ob...
June 20, 2019 at 14:25
The philosophical problem here, is that there is no definite meaning of 'living at a particular date', and we get very different answers to our questi...
June 20, 2019 at 11:18
Well, for Presentism and neo-Kantianism, the probability of living now is one :) From the standard realist perspective, averaging over all possible fu...
June 20, 2019 at 07:46
I agree that there is much to be gained by considering philosophical disputes to be cultural conflicts, in which the role of the philosopher is that o...
June 17, 2019 at 15:05
The problem is, the truth conditions and semantics of our physical ontology, i.e. our enumeration of 'what things exist', is defined in terms of publi...
June 13, 2019 at 14:25
Suppose somebody sends you a circle in the post. You then proceed to verify that the circle isn't perfect. Does "perfect" here refer to an internal pr...
June 13, 2019 at 08:26
Probability should be considered as part of set theory, rather than classical set theory being considered to be a foundation for probability theory. F...
June 10, 2019 at 13:35
Yes, any programmer's use of an infinite FOR loop. We all know in practice that infinite loops are, in a pragmatic sense, merely finite loops whose te...
June 09, 2019 at 08:45
sorry, I should have said infinity is equivalent to volatile and unbounded. I am saying volatile and unbounded is equivalent to the specification of a...
June 09, 2019 at 08:02
Finitism overlooks the fact that the practical use of 'infinity' is merely to denote an unspecified unbounded number. Consequently, If infinity wasn't...
June 09, 2019 at 07:31
In my opinion, Wittgenstein wanted to use the word "grammar" to refer to the pre-theoretical, intuitive, ineffable and phenomenological aspects of mea...
June 06, 2019 at 15:49
Am i right in suspecting that Speculative realism is continental-philosophy's muddled attempt at analytic philosophy?
June 06, 2019 at 10:23
Turn the question around: Is it right for humans to allow other animals to commit cannibalism? Suppose that we can synthetically mass-produce artifici...
June 01, 2019 at 09:58
The idea of the Turing test involves interaction between two open systems. This implies that the dispute over the significance of the Turing test is i...
June 01, 2019 at 08:23
There are two ways to interpret the Turing test, namely the realist/cartesian interpretation and the anti-realist/non-cartesian interpretation. The pu...
May 31, 2019 at 07:38
That is pretty close to what i thought you were saying. I wasn't questioning your views, just pointing to directions of further discussion.
May 30, 2019 at 18:07
Supposing a speaker, perhaps a schizophrenic, behaved in a certain fashion while talking in a contradictory manner about his actions (much like a poli...
May 30, 2019 at 14:28
In constructive logic, the logical rule for introducing existential quantification replaces a proposition that directly refers to a particular, say "M...
May 29, 2019 at 07:47
Given that Existence was one of Kant's modal categories of understanding, perhaps Kant was arguing for your very position, namely that existence isn't...
May 28, 2019 at 19:57
In that case, it sounds like you are more interested in the policy optimization of Decision processes. Such problems can be implicitly solved via adap...
May 28, 2019 at 14:53
The problem is, set theory fails to explicitly distinguish 'constructed sets' that correspond to an algorithm known to the logician, from 'discovered ...
May 28, 2019 at 11:20
I think you're referring to modal logic, i.e. to possibility. Syntactically, modal logic looks like the inverse of deduction, due to the fact that ded...
May 28, 2019 at 09:34
yes, we appeal to external witnesses, such as the operations of computers, or to the opinions of others, in order to conform whether or not our reason...
May 27, 2019 at 13:00
"Logic doesn't require facts" - Only when our process of deduction isn't in question. Remember, we usually need to verify our proofs via appealing to ...
May 27, 2019 at 09:34
Presumably you mean formal logic (since the question is logical in its very nature). Formal logic is in an identity crisis imo, due it's failure to ex...
May 26, 2019 at 18:37
Yes, as I understand it, verbal knowledge - the sort of knowledge discussed by epistemologists, is trivial and irrelevant to Gettier problems, for ver...
May 22, 2019 at 12:10
In PI Wittgenstein examines "Moore's Paradox", namely the sentence "It is raining, but I believe that it is not raining" and as I recall he concludes,...
May 13, 2019 at 17:19
The problem of course, is that natural language is it's own meta-language; it is therefore incapable of expressing a distinction between the publicly ...
May 08, 2019 at 09:18
By realism I mean the idea that the meaning or truth-makers of a proposition are fully transcendent of the process of it's verification. For instance,...
May 04, 2019 at 11:26
Consider all that happens when teaching a physical law: i) We write a statement which expresses a physical law. ii) We demonstrate the meaning of the ...
May 04, 2019 at 09:45
All you have is an intuition that you call your "future self", an intuition which you currently experience and which is therefore a part of your immed...
May 01, 2019 at 09:41
Compare the following statements A: "Such and such is consciousness" B: "I can relate to such and such". Notice that nobody disagrees with you wheneve...
April 30, 2019 at 12:47
What if a buyer of the bottle believed 100% in the curse, but had a 'non-standard' understanding of "eternity", whereby eternal hell was understood to...
April 28, 2019 at 08:54
The natural concept of depression isn't descriptive of the state of the individual per-se, but of the individual's behavioral relationship to society....
April 26, 2019 at 09:14
It isn't as simple as that, because the debate isn't purely an epistemic dispute over the possibility of theological knowledge. Rather, the debate bet...
April 25, 2019 at 12:23
Californian houses can in fact metamorphose into flowers; by digesting themselves with fire to produce a large quantity of heat that can germinate flo...
April 25, 2019 at 08:34
In the mathematical subject of topology, it is joked that donuts are coffee mugs and cows are footballs; because their shapes can be morphed into one ...
April 24, 2019 at 19:05
As i see it, the notions of linguistic reference, causation and rigid-designation are part of an irreducible triad, in that each of these concepts can...
April 21, 2019 at 08:36