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IMO, Chalmer and Dennett both had a tendency to misconstrue the meaning of "physical" as denoting a metaphysical category distinct from first personal...
October 01, 2025 at 11:08
Isn't understanding the same thing as justification? I'm not sure what the U adds to JTB, given that we assess understanding in terms of justification...
September 25, 2025 at 16:16
I think that axioms are a misleading interpretation of Wittgenstein's hinges. i) Axioms are typically used to represent truth-apt empirical hypotheses...
September 25, 2025 at 11:19
Yes, the keyword here is interaction - more specfiically John's ongoing interactions with his environment that maintains a correlation between his con...
September 24, 2025 at 12:57
Here we must ask if John's understanding of mathematics is relevant to the mathematical truth of his utterance: From the perspective of the mathematic...
September 22, 2025 at 09:57
Under the strongest possible interpretation of truth-conditional semantics (the principle of maximal charity), the meaning of your use of a sentence S...
September 19, 2025 at 13:14
Truth conditional semantics does not escape the dilemma between the postulation of belief intentionality ,causal semantics and trivialism on the one h...
September 19, 2025 at 11:08
And that is the idea I am attacking. Supposedly, Intentionality refers to "The quality of mental states (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) which...
September 19, 2025 at 10:09
Thermometers never commit epistemic errors; they can only mislead those who uncritically rely upon them. Likewise, the same can be said of a 'believer...
September 18, 2025 at 17:24
Don't think of thinking as a solitary activity, as in a circular causal process. Think of thinking as open communication between two or more processes...
September 18, 2025 at 12:23
Science isn't committed to the reality of alethic modalities (necessity, possibility, probability) in the devout epistemological sense you seem to imp...
September 18, 2025 at 10:55
Or rather, it explains why mathematics is simply efficacious - mathematical conventions are arbitrary and independent of facts and hence a priori, and...
September 18, 2025 at 07:03
Here is my position: 1). I cannot know false propositions a priori. 2). I can have known false propositions a posteriori. This is because I cannot dis...
September 14, 2025 at 08:24
But you haven't presented any cases that can be expected to survive an ordinary degree of scientific scrutiny. Randomized trials aren't a requirement,...
September 02, 2025 at 11:35
In modern western societies, a testimony that appeals to clairvoyance falls under misrepresentation of evidence, an inevitable outcome under witness c...
August 26, 2025 at 09:07
I am guessing that if EEGs are flatlining when patients are developing memories associated with NDEs, that this is evidence for sparse neural encoding...
August 25, 2025 at 17:42
Sam, name one reproducible experiment under controlled laboratory conditions that confirms that NDEs entail either clairvoyance or disembodied cogniti...
August 25, 2025 at 11:49
Sure, so the question is whether proponents of physical explanations for "consciousness" and purported anomalous phenomena share that sentiment, in wh...
August 25, 2025 at 08:42
Which is precisely why Physics survives theory change, at least for ontic structural realists - for only the holistic inferential structure of theorie...
August 25, 2025 at 08:12
For the record, I don't consider any such case to be real - a flat EEG reading isn't a sufficient measurement for defining brain death. Only quacks se...
August 23, 2025 at 22:25
Even if NDEs were veridical, that wouldn't be enough to challenge physicalism or mind-brain equivalence. The same goes for past life regression. At mo...
August 23, 2025 at 18:03
Actually that's untrue, because without ontological commitment to universal quantification over absolute infinity, one cannot distinguish the hypothes...
August 18, 2025 at 12:52
Leibniz's Law at the Post Office The postal system relies upon referential transparency, namely of knowing an immutable address that is associated wit...
August 18, 2025 at 09:12
Yes, that is perfectly reasonable as an informal description of gravity when describing a particular case of motion in the concrete rather than in the...
August 17, 2025 at 12:47
Determinism can always survive on a theoretical level, in the sense that in ill-posed problem with more than one possible solution can always be conve...
August 17, 2025 at 10:08
if NDEs were objective, then intelligence agencies around the world would be training spies to induce them for purposes of remote viewing. Alas, the S...
August 17, 2025 at 08:07
Yes, the semantic distinction is a methodological distinction. I think of mathematical language as being analogous to a high level programming languag...
August 15, 2025 at 11:13
In my view, both Berkeley and his detractors are right. His detractors are right in that physical definitions purposely omit the subjective. Therefore...
August 15, 2025 at 09:04
A classical analogy for interaction free measurements, as in the quantum Zeno Elitzur–Vaidman_bomb_tester, can be given in terms of my impulsive niece...
August 13, 2025 at 19:38
By all accounts, Berkeley was an instrumentalist. So Berkeley would have "believed in physics" - but not in realist metaphysical interpretations of ph...
August 12, 2025 at 12:14
I think that Berkeley would have accepted physical explanations, but as being semantically reducible to talk of private sensations, perhaps by arguing...
August 12, 2025 at 09:22
Berkeley presented what we might now call a nominalist or deflationary view with respect to abstracta, both mathematical and physical, that considers ...
August 11, 2025 at 18:52
Notice that propositional attitudes at least internally satisfy Leibniz Law, since if Lois believes that Superman is Clarke Kent, then she believes th...
August 11, 2025 at 08:47
A proposition is meant to describe and thereby predict the world. So then what of the unity of the proposition? Consider the sentence "The cat sat on ...
August 08, 2025 at 09:33
What is meant by a scientific explanation here? If scientific knowledge is conceived to be reducible to a formal system, then a scientific explanation...
August 05, 2025 at 12:31
Somebody first needs to explain why emergence should be considered to refer to a physical or metaphysical property, as opposed to referring to grammat...
August 05, 2025 at 10:07
Logically speaking, first-order quantification refers to quantifying over atomic terms (i.e. constants) that satisfy a first-order proposition, namely...
August 04, 2025 at 13:44
The mechanics of cognitive externalism are generally considered to be physical, as when resorting to a calculator to do arithmetic or when a robot is ...
August 01, 2025 at 07:43
The idea that NDEs behave as a sixth sense is actually in conflict with the idea that NDEs are evidence of Cartesian dualism; for how are the experien...
July 30, 2025 at 11:00
I actually find it tempting to define computability in terms of what humans do , to follow Wittgenstein's remark on the Church-Turing thesis, in which...
July 29, 2025 at 09:17
I think a common traditional mistake of both proponents and critics of the idea of AGI, is the Cartesian presumption that humans are closed systems of...
July 28, 2025 at 07:38
Judgements about other minds should always be made relative to the person who is judging. Then all the philosophical confusion dissipates; if I judge ...
July 05, 2025 at 10:15
The OP raises an overlooked point; if the evolution of a system is invertible, which is presumably the case for a deterministic system, then there is ...
July 04, 2025 at 07:23
My opinion is: Nobody has a transcendental conception of other minds, rather they project their own mentation (or not) onto whatever it is that they a...
June 22, 2025 at 19:20
Consider Wittgenstein's following remark: 124. Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it....
June 17, 2025 at 15:35
A "Quale" should be understood as referring to an indexical rather than to a datum. Neuro-Phenomenologists routinely conflate indexicals with data, le...
June 09, 2025 at 22:37
Two directions need to be distinguished, namely analysis Phenomena --> Physical concepts Which expresses the translation of first-personal observation...
June 07, 2025 at 17:35
"That man over there with champagne in his glass", if interpreted as a rigid designator, doesn't fix an immutable description, but rather fixes an abs...
June 07, 2025 at 10:40
Hinge propositions correspond to non-logical axioms that correspond to presuppositions, rather than to undecidable sentences whose truth values are de...
June 06, 2025 at 11:15
Your interpretation of immanence is naturally fitted by Chu Spaces , which can be used to model bidirectional causality that can either be interpreted...
May 17, 2025 at 07:36