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Ironically, not only does Johnson's 'refutation' of Berkeley miss the the point, but his non-representational demonstration of the meaning of "real" b...
February 15, 2019 at 16:16
Yes, i believe you. And i would even argue that it is obligatory when following the logic of idealism for the idealist to accept any realist claims to...
February 15, 2019 at 09:56
In general I understand George Berkeley and his philosophy of subjective idealism as being a precursor to twentieth century Phenomenalism. For I can o...
February 14, 2019 at 17:49
The question isn't relevant to the idealist. For the question conceives of an unperceived object, which isn't what the idealist is taking issue with. ...
February 14, 2019 at 14:37
"Natural Selection" seems analogous to "Lawless Sequence of Numbers" in arithmetic. We never see a completed infinite sequence. So "Lawful" only refer...
February 11, 2019 at 11:35
Artificial selection is derivable from natural selection, while natural selection is derivable from artificial selection, yet their distinction is mer...
February 11, 2019 at 10:37
Consider that the ancient greeks identified numbers with visual geometric constructions obtained using a compass and a straight edge. If our concept o...
February 10, 2019 at 22:07
It depends on what you mean by "determine". The mathematics of quantum uncertainty refers, at least according to its most literal interpretation, to t...
February 08, 2019 at 16:14
I believe that the overall sentiment expressed by Aristotle's view is vindicated by the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which expresses his sentimen...
February 08, 2019 at 14:25
Yes, in own case I cannot understand my desires in terms my personal behavioural history. But if my attribution of motives to others is considered to ...
February 07, 2019 at 19:47
I haven't had the time to read the book link you posted, but it is certainly the case, as the author states, that Wittgenstein was an anti-transcenden...
February 07, 2019 at 11:54
If they are diametrically opposite worldviews, constructivism says they cannot be so in the sense of the presence or absence of construction, because ...
February 06, 2019 at 18:58
Metaphysics is what everyone denies doing, whilst accusing everyone else of doing it. I think metaphysical statements are best understood as being spe...
February 06, 2019 at 14:45
Wittgenstein draws a sharp distinction between understanding how to use a word according to public convention, versus the personal attribution of mean...
February 06, 2019 at 13:11
Consider the sentence "Animals eat in order to survive". How is this different from saying "survival tends to follow eating"? In a given situation, to...
February 06, 2019 at 09:49
Realism is a type of constructivism. For otherwise the statements of realists would not exist. The difference between realists and idealists is in wha...
February 04, 2019 at 09:52
sorry, perhaps i should have been clearer. I'm referring to change within the context of 'phenomenal change' and it's relationship to the A series, as...
February 01, 2019 at 21:49
My original point was that I cannot make sense of the notion of unchanging phenomena, so "phenomena changes" is a tautology that says nothing. One mig...
February 01, 2019 at 17:43
Yes, because if y cannot fail to have x, then x is part of what y means . "Phenomena is always changing" is analogous to "Every rod has a length" So j...
February 01, 2019 at 14:14
Isn't the idea of essential phenomenal change nonsense rather than true of false? To say "phenomena is always changing" is to assume the meaning of "p...
January 31, 2019 at 15:25
There isn't such a thing as 'physical phenomena', for no physical concept can be given a persistent interpretation in terms of experiential phenomena,...
January 31, 2019 at 14:34
(t) transitivity: aRb & bRc => aRc (s) symmetry: aRb <=> bRa (r) reflexivity: aRa (s) & (t) => (r) via substitution of (s) into (t) Therefore: (s) => ...
January 30, 2019 at 16:39
But how do we know what adherents have in mind? Isn't the only way to determine this to establish the environmental conditions under which they make t...
January 30, 2019 at 11:16
Not necessarily. For if transcendent referents are ruled out of semantics, this does not preclude the word "transcendent" being used to refer to thing...
January 30, 2019 at 07:49
It doesn't make sense for the presentist to think of the past as being immutable, for the presentist does not interpret his memories as referring to a...
January 28, 2019 at 23:55
I'm not sure how you get the impression that the later Wittgenstein believed in psychologism. For he rejected the "picture theory" of meaning, arguing...
January 28, 2019 at 11:02
Lets think of a specific example, for example let's imagine a god who created the universe and who exists outside of space and time. Now in one sense ...
January 28, 2019 at 09:43
linguistic reference is only demonstrable within a language-game. Wittgenstein made the therapeutic suggestion to include percepts and actions in the ...
January 27, 2019 at 16:16
Yes memories have content, in the same way that a digital image has pixel values, but it is a vacuous tautology to say that information is intrinsical...
January 19, 2019 at 14:58
I cannot fathom a hard distinction between memories and present experience, for i cannot see much of a distinction between memories and photographs. A...
January 19, 2019 at 11:45
In my opinion, the objective of science is the simulation of behaviour, with the aim of inventing efficient and understandable languages with which to...
January 18, 2019 at 18:26
Aren't tastes and personal preferences also truth-apt? For isn't it possible to doubt our own tastes and preferences? Don't we often say that we want ...
January 18, 2019 at 13:45
Only if epistemology is premised upon a hard object-subject distinction. Or put equivalently, that one's epistemology is based upon the correspondence...
January 18, 2019 at 10:27
Necessary statements are commands or policies, i.e. speech acts, whose origin of force is the intentions of the speaker or institution who asserted th...
January 15, 2019 at 01:24
Anyway, doesn't the semantic under-determination of the word "determinism" render the question meaningless? Consider the following circular definition...
January 14, 2019 at 09:13
I don't think that Quantum mechanics is helpful or useful in this sort of discussion, because of it's many conflicting interpretations that parallel t...
January 14, 2019 at 07:47
In my constructivist opinion, what is impossible cannot even be thought. Impossibility refers to the sentences of a language that have no application ...
January 12, 2019 at 10:26
Recall Wittgenstein's analogy for verbal definitions in terms of occasional sign-posts that are placed to guide walkers along a route. The sign-posts ...
January 10, 2019 at 14:54
Interestingly Lewis Carroll's paradox concerning the meaning of logical deduction in "What the Tortoise said to Achilles" came 50 years earlier than W...
January 10, 2019 at 10:42
Yes, the concept of intelligence is anthropomorphic, for we understand intelligence to be the capacity to solve problems of relevance to ourselves. Th...
January 09, 2019 at 23:37
i am unable to visualise or demonstrate a semantic notion of logical inconsistency. I can demonstrate what might be called psychological inconsistency...
January 09, 2019 at 16:09
It is inferences that are uncertain, whereas a report can only be considered to be false in the sense of violating our conventions for communicating r...
January 09, 2019 at 12:11
I understood Wittgenstein as insinuating that one's private experience of red, i.e. phenomenal red, is neither a necessary nor sufficient estimation o...
January 09, 2019 at 10:04
The obvious yet strange thing about predictions is that they cannot be future-referring in any physical sense since they are only expressed in immedia...
January 08, 2019 at 23:55
To the best of my amateur knowledge, there isn't general agreement as to whether Kant meant to posit anything literal that was a-phenomenal. After all...
January 08, 2019 at 17:48
Is hearing voices qualitatively different from hearing your own thoughts? Or are there intermediate cases, where the voices are semi-controllable and ...
January 07, 2019 at 05:17
You are free to call a hypertask the motion of an arrow by saying "this moving arrow is a hypertask", which says nothing other than "this is a moving ...
January 04, 2019 at 21:09
Zeno's paradox even applies to each of the infinitesimally small elements of a supposed hyper-task. Suppose we use a non-standard calculus that define...
January 04, 2019 at 14:25
Sadly one cannot appeal to mathematics without begging the question. Sure, a normalised infinite geometric series equals 1, which is to say that it is...
January 04, 2019 at 14:00
But aren't depression and anxiety treated as beliefs produced by cognitive distortions in CBT? And what is the definition of a cognitive-distortion? C...
January 04, 2019 at 12:46