As a non-schizophrenic I have some difficulty understanding delusions, but as an occasional depressive i am familiar with reality contradicting my neg...
Thought experiments are nothing but a form of empirical simulation. For any thought experiment can be substituted for a publicly demonstrable virtual ...
Drawing upon Wittgenstein, one might say that the meaning of a thought experiment is how it is used. Hence thoughts 'in themselves' do not express imp...
Suppose that somebody was tee-total most of their life, yet had not worked for years due to treatment resistant depression and addiction. For such a p...
The underlying dispute seems to be whether the determinist can consistently assert an objective distinction between reasons and causes. Such a distinc...
The following temporal duration, A, has an exact length of 3. Proof: A: "one..........two...........three" Now does it make sense to dispute this, by ...
By his very belief in universal determinism, the determinist, if he is consistent, cannot interpret his opponent's sentence " I possess free will" to ...
"this denial either presupposes free will for the deliberately chosen response in making that denial, which is a contradiction, or else it is merely t...
To my mind, determinism does not express the factual content of a proposition, rather it expresses our intended use of a proposition. We don't discove...
I will certainly attest to have had many lucid dreams, but yet, I am unable to describe what makes my previous lucid dreams different from my memories...
Supposing a Christian, Bob, associates some ineffable inner experience with the Holy Spirit, is perfectly happy, and never complains of experiencing c...
I understand Wittgenstein's "Beetle in the Box" discussion as referring to the same aesthetic quality of depth to our language. In that discussion he ...
I think the underlying problem is that our concept of 'other minds' straddles the subjective-objective distinction and cannot be categorised as either...
A realist who interprets the concept of Necessity as being a mind-independent principle of nature that is charted by causality, will have to either de...
To my mind, the concept of self-control is partially distinct from the concept of motivation. Motivation is a relationship of attraction between a per...
I don't believe Wittgenstein would have supported this, as that appears to imply that skeptical doubts are largely symptomatic of bad English. I belie...
By rejecting the fictitiously imagined "birds-eye" perspective of reality, where one pretends to oneself that one is transcendentally observing realit...
Even assertions of metaphysics and ethics must be reducible to empirical propositions about how the world really is. For to assume otherwise is to ass...
Yep, none of our concepts are linguistically representable, because our intended use of rules cannot be finitely represented in terms of rules and sig...
Presumably Wittgenstein would not want to imply that every or even any skeptic's epistemological malady is curable by merely insisting to them that th...
A third party can certainly make sense of your death and say that you are "permanently no longer around to tell the tale", since your corpse can be em...
But here lurks a problem, for our notion of sleep is empirical, even for so called "maximally unconscious sleep." For example, the meaning of a "fully...
But this both assumes that life is a singular concept and that ' afterlife' is a meaningful concept such that it can asserted or negated to mutual exc...
if the meaning of the word "metaphysics" really is "an abstraction with no basis in reality", then how is it possible that you uttered this sentence? ...
Yes. I am merely following that logic even further. If the thoughts of a person are reducible to their memories and their current environmental stimul...
Denying the possibility of an after-life is as equally nonsensical as affirming it. Think about what could possibly be meant by an "after-life". Aren'...
Verificationism and presentism go hand in hand. For according to the verificationist, to speak of the past or the future is to refer to their criteria...
All i mean to say is that if subjective idealists are understood to be verificationists in the strongest possible sense, then it makes no sense for th...
The possibility of 'not experiencing' doesn't make any sense to the subjective idealist. For the subjective idealist semantically reduces the meaning ...
We have of course no reason to assume that our discrete representations are literally representative of a discrete reality undergoing state transition...
Subjective idealists rightly insist that our definitions of physical objects must in some way semantically reduce to our observations and interrogativ...
I'm saying that if there are no objective criteria, i.e. physical criteria, for ascribing to agents propositional-attitudes pertaining to prediction-m...
Whether or not Hume was an atomist is irrelevant, as Goodman's new riddle of induction illustrates. If today one person sees an object as green, and a...
Because if induction is a vacuous notion then to insist upon warrant is to insist upon nothing. I'm with popper, but feel he didn't quite go far enoug...
If a man's beliefs are identified with his non-verbal behaviour, then it is no longer clear to me when he isn't making an induction. Which suggests th...
I used to think that way, but that is to dogmatically assume that mathematics must serve practically intelligible purposes, as opposed to purely ficti...
The fact that infinite cardinals do not represent our intuitions of the relative sizes of countably infinite sets shouldn't feel problematic. After al...
Unless a definition rules something out it isn't useful. There are a huge number of both partially-overlapping and distinct uses for the word "entity"...
It is better to follow Wittgenstein's example and argue that logic reduces to the practical use of ordinary language with additional constraints to de...
But how can descriptivism be irreducible to the causal theory of reference if causal determinism is true? I don't see what non-causal semantic options...
Unless a determinist asserts retro-causality (which would seem to nullify his position), I don't see how it is possible to both accept what the determ...
Let the following proposition S represent a theory of causal determination: S: "For every event A, the state of A is determinable by a particular func...
I didn't think the idea of free will consisted of having a point, but rather consisted in there being no external fact-of-the-matter that precisely de...
To attribute a belief to an agent is to explain the agent's actions in terms of folk-psychological ego-centric reasoning from the perspective of agent...
Does Excalibur exist? In terms of a role within literature, yes - hence the reason the question is meaningful and can be answered in spite of the abse...
If the meaning of a name is the particular it refers to, then the name won't possess meaning until after the particular has been created, and the name...
The premise of the OP is what ought to be in question, namely that there is a particular utility function U(a) that represents the value of the set of...
The problem is, the Schrodinger Equation is empirically verified using ensembles of particles across independent and identical trials. So for the veri...
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