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Self-reported beliefs bear greatly on issues pertaining to the problems of private language, since in many cases a person's self-reported beliefs are ...
January 17, 2018 at 11:34
Both Quine, Wittgenstein and Lewis Carroll have each denied that any statement is necessarily implied by any other. To paraphrase, any explicit repres...
January 15, 2018 at 12:00
It doesn't make sense to refer to the semantics of expressions as being equivalent unless we can define what we mean by "equivalent semantic use" of e...
January 10, 2018 at 12:57
I'm saying that in ordinary language, physics and in mathematics, to determine something is to make a comparison. So it only makes sense to employ the...
January 09, 2018 at 18:38
But causal necessity is neither empirically meaningful nor true by definition. There is no physical justification for causal necessity, and science ha...
January 09, 2018 at 18:21
Sort of. i am saying that the grammar of determination involves a relation between two designated roles - the determiner and the thing determined. Det...
January 09, 2018 at 09:17
well, what exactly do you mean by "the same"? When we ordinarily say that two things are the same, aren't we merely implying that we can substitute ea...
January 08, 2018 at 14:17
Don't you mean to say that the very assumption that a code is representative of, or is generated by, a particular underlying function is what determin...
January 08, 2018 at 09:52
Yes, provided they understand the use of "unbounded" in a given situation to mean " a closed range of quantities cannot be specified here to satisfy o...
January 08, 2018 at 08:51
It is because what we do and think partly 'determines' what we mean by something 'being determined'. To see this, consider the following string, and i...
January 06, 2018 at 22:59
A psychological problem for non-beliefism: is it psychologically plausible that one can pragmatically adopt unwarranted assumptions for sake of compet...
January 06, 2018 at 18:47
Well, firstly nobody seems to agree on what Hume's arguments establish, but in my opinion: Hume's argument against a logical justification for inducti...
January 06, 2018 at 14:19
The definition you've quoted is more or less the same, as is the psychological conception of belief as a behavioural disposition towards evidence, whi...
January 06, 2018 at 13:34
If beliefs are defined as the assignment of probabilities to outcomes conditioned on one's partial knowledge, and if it is impossible to decide upon a...
January 06, 2018 at 10:51
I think you are confusing the idea of practical belief with religious faith in scenarios pertaining to prediction and control. You've jumped the shark...
January 06, 2018 at 09:27
To my mind, the only problem with not attributing consciousness as a metaphysical substance to 'suitable' forms, is that there no longer seems to be a...
January 05, 2018 at 10:03
isn't trying to change one's own beliefs a bit like trying to tickle oneself? One somehow needs to present evidence to oneself that reinforces the tar...
January 04, 2018 at 19:43
I don't quite follow that argument, because in practice no proposition is applied exactly with infinite precision, hence even the meaning of a 'precis...
January 04, 2018 at 16:53
That is the price you pay for holding substance views of space-time, as if space and time were transcendental tape-measures being aligned to a table-u...
January 04, 2018 at 13:36
The idea that ethical interventions shouldn't interfere with "destiny" undermines the very idea of ethics. And why shouldn't a Jury consider it "desti...
January 04, 2018 at 11:55
Supposing I insisted " Having seen five white swans, it has been determined that all swans are white". Clearly this statement only expresses my behavi...
January 04, 2018 at 08:41
I think confusion arises because the sentence "consciousness is a product of the brain because one get can knocked out" looks on the surface as if it ...
January 02, 2018 at 13:09
The meaning of determinism is akin to an "infinite for-loop" running inside a computer program that executes the same instruction repeatedly until the...
January 02, 2018 at 12:13
Can you explain this transcendental notion of "determination" that is over and above our practical judgements that something is determined? What does ...
January 02, 2018 at 09:36
Those who don't believe in Compatibilism mistake the principle of necessity for an empirical fact. Remember, Hume was a compatibilist - and this wasn'...
January 02, 2018 at 08:33
Your argument seems to boil down to the observation that the experience of contemplating two things together, whether simultaneously or in quick succe...
December 31, 2017 at 16:30
I am saying that they are not dichotomous domains, but inseparable aspects of a single cognition or application of language, for Wittgenstein did not ...
December 28, 2017 at 18:33
The "Truth" of all of Wittgenstein's philosophical works was in terms of their aesthetic or therapeutic value. This is why the Tractatus's self-refuti...
December 28, 2017 at 16:20
But we don't experience consciousness, we experience the world, and all of our ordinary non-philosophical questioning are empirical and are said in re...
December 28, 2017 at 11:02
Yes, in part. As a recently converted pragmatist, I assess the "truth" of a philosophical statement, whether metaphysical, epistemological or ethical,...
December 26, 2017 at 10:29
yes, in the same sense that art and works of fiction are persuasive - or perhaps i should say, "inspiring" or "therapeutic", since the word "persuasio...
December 25, 2017 at 00:24
Compare the quoted passage with Dewey: "We only think when we are confronted with a problem"
December 24, 2017 at 13:53
I think the question of truth-aptness in relation to philosophy dissolves once we understand statements of philosophy as not so much constituting prop...
December 24, 2017 at 13:15
that looks to me like a grammatical proposition that is true by definition and hence amounts to as much as saying "I like what I like". i.e. our langu...
December 21, 2017 at 17:50
your argument is correct, but only if it is assumed that 'physical time' is metaphysically independent of the stream of consciousness. Only under this...
December 21, 2017 at 14:00
I don't think the notions of either determinism or randomness amounts to anything meaningful when describing 'nature in itself', because the 'necessar...
December 20, 2017 at 23:01
I would first suggest untangling the grammar of psychological predicates when used to directly express oneself in the first-person, from the grammar o...
December 20, 2017 at 17:09
I notice the screen is still moving as my eyes are wandering, and when I prevent them from moving my vision plays tricks. Are you implying that I shou...
December 19, 2017 at 08:27
Wouldn't it be better in the long run to replace the "proof of work" performed in the creation of blocks with a social or economically useful task? Th...
December 18, 2017 at 17:39
A Logical Behaviourist would dispute that minds aren't observable. After all, we didn't learn the concept of 'other minds' by being shown the private ...
December 18, 2017 at 16:50
A toddler puts their hand into a fire and get burnt. Their mother says: "Fire is always hot" Which is another way of saying "It is a fact that fire is...
December 16, 2017 at 17:06
Suppose someone insisted that they didn't believe in the existence of facts. What would they be missing? I imagine objections "it is a fact that the E...
December 16, 2017 at 12:05
Is stillness something we can even imagine or perceive? To my mind 'constancy' or 'stillness' is never present in sensation nor in the imagination sin...
December 15, 2017 at 16:38
I would say that reasoning is merely habits of thought, trained partially under external supervision, that have been found to lead to survival advanta...
December 14, 2017 at 14:48
So how can the present be ambiguous if it is not a concept of perspectival experience, while having no definition in physical theory, except as an arb...
December 14, 2017 at 13:59
"Esssence is expressed by grammar." "Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is" I think Wittgenstein's central point here was deflationary in t...
December 13, 2017 at 18:35
is to talk of 'the present' necessarily to speak of a concept? e.g "I call all of what I see around me the 'present' " Isn't our concept of the presen...
December 13, 2017 at 11:50
The word "concept" is ambiguous, as are "relations among ideas" and "matters of fact". Must the content of a concept be thinkable, or are concepts onl...
December 08, 2017 at 11:09
Right, although judging by how many people wrongly equivocate Hume's skeptical conclusion with "correlation doesn't equal causation", we should be car...
December 06, 2017 at 17:33
The use of the word "explanation" sounds misleading, since Hume accepted the skeptical premise that the concept of causal necessity isn't reducible to...
December 06, 2017 at 14:09