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

sime

Comments

To my way of thinking, the meaning of a question is trivial by way of causation; a question refers to whatever answer the questioner finds acceptable....
April 19, 2019 at 13:35
When writing pi as 3.14159... the dots "..." do not abbreviate the numeric result of an algorithm, rather the dots express that pi is a sequence gener...
April 18, 2019 at 10:44
Isn't the Hippocratic oath and the entire practice of medicine a political practice? Accusations that the practice of clinical psychology is political...
April 18, 2019 at 09:00
Consider the game Cluedo. Who killed Dr Black? - The "fact" as to the identity of the murderer refers, by convention, to a single name within the enve...
April 15, 2019 at 08:36
If we accept that individuals are not self-causing agents, and therefore if we understand the concept of guilt pragmatically, in other words we define...
April 14, 2019 at 11:35
How is disagreement possible if we really are talking about the same thing? By "the same thing" I include any intuition or phenomena that the observer...
April 13, 2019 at 23:16
Right. But does this necessitate the concepts of truth and falsity? Don't all statements refer to objective facts, even the so-called "false" or "subj...
April 13, 2019 at 17:13
If all stimuli impacting upon the individual accounted for, both external to and within the individual, then I am at a loss to know whatever else "tha...
April 13, 2019 at 10:27
It isn't clear a priori what the object of a belief could be, other than the immanent and immediate stimuli that provoked the expression of the belief...
April 13, 2019 at 09:37
"There-is-no-objective-truth" is self-inconsistent if understood to be a universal proposition. The same is true of any negative universal proposition...
April 11, 2019 at 19:48
The "spirit" of any word isn't it's definition.
April 11, 2019 at 14:17
Suppression of doubt is critical for a good performance, especially when hecklers are in the audience. And the sense of any proposition is in relation...
April 10, 2019 at 11:32
An image is ideal if it is the image of one's striving. For example, this imagined polygon doesn't satisfy my striving for symmetry and smoothness. So...
April 04, 2019 at 10:44
I can certainly imagine a "perfect circle", an "infinite extension", an "ideal body" and so on. But "perfect", "ideal" and "infinite" aren't passive a...
April 04, 2019 at 10:12
To me, your thoughts exist in a different sense to mine. Certainly the word "solipsism" does not possess a shareable public sense (hence the lack of s...
April 01, 2019 at 12:09
Well, can't you fathom the vibe of the extrovert's mindset when he says "the world exists without me"? Is there really more to it than that? (The issu...
April 01, 2019 at 10:37
I am under the impression that those who discount presentism do so, because they interpret presentism as a variant of realism about time and causality...
March 31, 2019 at 09:02
Presentism is certainly a dramatically different viewpoint upon the meaning of the past. But in a sufficiently simple universe, presentist understandi...
March 30, 2019 at 12:15
If the present is considered to be the origin of one's spatio-temporal coordinate space, then there is no reason to consider past eternity to be any m...
March 29, 2019 at 19:37
What distinguishes the practice of psychiatry from the above, is that the the reason for the practice of psychiatry isn't politically neutral, either ...
March 29, 2019 at 12:00
In case anyone hasn't read Quine's Word and Object, I'd recommend reading it simultaneously with PI, especially for the clarity of Quine's behaviouris...
March 28, 2019 at 15:31
It sounds like you are describing the problem of clustering; for any collection of elements that are pairwise related by some measure of similarity, h...
March 28, 2019 at 09:40
What does imagining "forever" consist of? For example, I imagine walking for some time along a row of trees that has no end in sight. Then I say to my...
March 27, 2019 at 18:39
But is it even possible to define a difference between actual vs potential infinity? Supposing you were confronted by a skeptic who doubted the semant...
March 27, 2019 at 15:04
have you considered interpreting infinity to mean an under-determined finite number? For in practice, (as in the software engineering application of i...
March 27, 2019 at 12:32
But how is it possible to take these factors into account? What does this analysis consist of? Could an analysis of a patient's cognition, behavior an...
March 27, 2019 at 09:06
If the question as to whether or not one's personal identity has changed over time is answered according to experience, then doesn't this demonstrate ...
March 25, 2019 at 13:51
Even frequentist probability doesn't require a qualitative distinction between assumptions and knowledge, for assumptions can be represented as "pseud...
March 23, 2019 at 10:23
The are two distinct ways of understanding timelessness and immortality. One is to identify timelessness as infinitely extended duration, which many p...
March 21, 2019 at 12:43
Firstly, in my opinion, Bayesian probability should be interpreted as being reducible to frequentist statistics. For ultimately the empirical distribu...
March 21, 2019 at 10:37
From a meaning-as-use perspective, the difference between a past-referring image - such as a photograph of a deceased historical figure, versus a pres...
March 20, 2019 at 17:04
Not necessarily. Consider the anti-realist's interpretation of time: Definition: "Now" is a tenseless designator that refers only to actually occurrin...
March 20, 2019 at 15:23
P?Q doesn't permit Q?¬P in a consistent logic. That case is different to the set-theoretic case, where Fx ? Gx permits Fx ? Gx and is therefore a weak...
March 01, 2019 at 16:28
Correct, hence your conclusion permits a possibility denied by your premise.
March 01, 2019 at 15:56
Your stated conclusion (?x)(?y)(((Fx?Gx)?(Fy?Gy))?(x?y)?¬(?z)((z?x?z?y)?(Fz?Gz))) does not say that X or Y cannot simultaneously be F and G. Therefore...
March 01, 2019 at 15:33
The conclusion "exactly two beings are F-or-G" does not follow from "exactly one being is F and exactly one being is G and nothing is F-and-G" Because...
March 01, 2019 at 15:22
From a presentist perspective, one's notion of an 'after life' or lack of, refers to one's present state. This is also true from a behaviourist's pers...
February 28, 2019 at 16:06
Ordinary thinking considers death to be a state of the individual very much like sleeping or being happy. This leads to the commonly accepted but inco...
February 28, 2019 at 11:21
The mathematical field of Homology (and by extension Cosmology) runs into a similar problem, namely the problem of how to define a hole in a surface p...
February 27, 2019 at 15:57
Observing young children can be enlightening in this respect. My nieces appear to agree with one another for the sake of establishing fairness and equ...
February 27, 2019 at 11:15
As you've demonstrated, to determine is a verb relating two objects; namely a process called a determinator and an object determined through the actio...
February 27, 2019 at 09:48
Curiously, he only directly refers to "private language" in three passages: 259. Are the rules of the private language impressions of rules?— The bala...
February 20, 2019 at 18:15
As an ex-phd student I saw scant evidence to suggest that neo-liberal universities, whose main object was to retain fee paying students, were truth mo...
February 20, 2019 at 15:59
If we neglect the concept of time as a medium and instead directly define a position in time in terms of the phenomena associated with it, then what a...
February 19, 2019 at 12:44
Don't we ultimately define the correctness of a proof by it's agreement with consensual opinion or with the output of an implemented computer program?...
February 19, 2019 at 09:55
what is the difference between faking something versus changing something? Does the past necessarily have to be viewed as being fakeable but not chang...
February 18, 2019 at 17:09
so presumably you mean, how can one rely upon one's own memory when classifying false memories? Firstly it has to be asked: What does it mean for a me...
February 18, 2019 at 16:40
You seem to suppose that an inability to define a distinction implies a rejection of the said distinction. Is that implication valid? When a child sta...
February 18, 2019 at 12:23
The contention here seems to be that ordinarily people understand reason as being prescriptive, such that a reasoned argument tells us what we ought t...
February 16, 2019 at 12:21
Soundness of reason is merely a reference to linguistic convention, and has no significance beyond convention. Take any example of unreasonable behavi...
February 15, 2019 at 20:14