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

Andrew M

Comments

I'm not sure I understand you. Suppose Alice sees a bird fly by and land on a branch. She perceived the bird flying and then perceived it landing. The...
July 13, 2020 at 08:15
The isomorphism (i.e., equal form) is between the state of affairs and the statement, as abstracted from their concrete instances. For example, it is ...
July 13, 2020 at 08:12
I know. That conviction is wrong. :-) Science is simply a natural extension of everyday experience. If a subject/object framing leads to tension and p...
July 12, 2020 at 07:28
My point was not that we wouldn't share commonalities with other beings. My point is that how the world is perceived and understood depends not just o...
July 12, 2020 at 07:16
The realist argument is that we perceive and understand the world as human beings. There is no view from nowhere.
July 11, 2020 at 11:15
In addition to the natural world, Platonism posits a separate and prior world of the Forms. So, yes, the natural world is then a shadow or reflection ...
July 10, 2020 at 22:42
The first. There needs to be something that we are talking about beyond the talk itself. At least, there does if we want our talk to be useful or mean...
July 09, 2020 at 02:06
Yes, I agree that that is what we both say. :chin: OK, perhaps our disconnect is that I'm just making natural language claims. I'm not making claims a...
July 08, 2020 at 06:59
Yes. And if the argument is sound, then the person has knowledge. Obviously there is no guarantee of that since the conclusion or a premise could be f...
July 08, 2020 at 05:29
:up: Good comments! The conditional approach seems reasonable to me.
July 06, 2020 at 07:59
Good to start with a point of agreement! :-) Perhaps you could unpack what the phrases "from outside" and "as meta" are contributing in your above exp...
July 05, 2020 at 23:09
The answer doesn't depend on those questions. On conventional use, there was no language prior to the emergence of life. Conventions, like road rules,...
July 05, 2020 at 12:28
Wasn't the world prior to the emergence of life a world without language? Not "in the terms of the language". For example, scientific language changed...
July 04, 2020 at 07:23
I meant it as shorthand for "independent of our linguistic propensities to apply the same term to them" as in the original Oxford Reference quote. And...
July 03, 2020 at 05:54
Note that the average person knows nothing about JTB. And most of us, especially when not doing philosophy, normally use language conventionally. So G...
July 01, 2020 at 11:39
OK, you specifically mentioned Goodman. From Oxford Reference: Now it seems to me that if two things are not similar independent of language, then app...
July 01, 2020 at 03:22
Gettier didn't need a theory (beyond the JTB theory he was challenging), he just needed to be aware of people's ordinary use of the terms "know", "kno...
July 01, 2020 at 03:10
The Alice-Bob story is an everyday scenario where Bob forms his belief that it is raining for a legitimate reason (i.e., he justifiably forms his beli...
June 29, 2020 at 22:41
Just what you might expect in ordinary, everyday life. If Alice looks out the window and says it is raining outside then Bob, in the next room, has ju...
June 29, 2020 at 07:51
Yes. The Platonist embellishes similarities as (capital-N, entity) Names, the Nominalist reduces similarities to (small-n, paper draft ) names. Neithe...
June 29, 2020 at 07:22
The luck element is that some person other than Jones happened to fulfill the justification criteria. Smith's belief was true despite the false premis...
June 29, 2020 at 05:12
I was going for metaphor. :-) For the jest, see here... The broader point is that it is easy to be mislead by language and there are plenty of example...
June 27, 2020 at 06:26
Fair enough. It seems to me that belief can still be justified on balance of considerations.
June 26, 2020 at 14:07
That would be this: Whereas Gettier's intention was to setup the case such that Smith's belief was justified and true, but not knowledge. If Smith's b...
June 26, 2020 at 13:55
Yes, but I'm not sure that's essential for justification. You might justifiably believe it will rain tomorrow based on the weather report. Turns out i...
June 26, 2020 at 13:24
No, what Gettier has shown here is that Smith can have a justified true belief, yet fail to have knowledge (since Smith's belief was true by luck). So...
June 26, 2020 at 12:57
No easy answer. But it seems to me justifiable just as believing the sun will rise tomorrow (or in a thousand years) is justifiable even though it has...
June 26, 2020 at 12:13
I think as a general rule, the Law of Excluded Middle applies. But there can be exceptions, e.g., fuzzy logic, or loaded questions like "Have you stop...
June 26, 2020 at 11:46
Lazerowitz's reclassification hypothesis at the end of that paper seems apt for this thread. Which is the philosophical proposal that an abstract word...
June 26, 2020 at 06:27
Given its predictiveness and simplicity (and perhaps also its explanatory power), I think it would have to be a strong contender. That the field is un...
June 26, 2020 at 00:16
I find it difficult to envisage what an "unknown immaterial field" could be. If the GUT requires it, then isn't it then coupled to the world by virtue...
June 25, 2020 at 12:08
Yes, and you can probably extract everyone's view of universals right there. Contra Nominalism, reference frames aren't just in the mind or in languag...
June 25, 2020 at 00:53
As you know, reference frames are a formalism that abstract over the systems they stand for. Physicists use that formalism to say that when you do thi...
June 24, 2020 at 23:51
:up:
June 19, 2020 at 13:37
It's a relational interpretation (which the paper uses, see for example reference in the earlier quote referring to Rovelli's RQM). Right, the electro...
June 19, 2020 at 12:54
OK, but the puzzle is to account for what happens when the two apparatus slits go past the electron in the electron's rest frame. If the apparatus rem...
June 19, 2020 at 02:44
Nice find. Also here's a brief media summary of that paper, aptly titled How does a quantum particle see the world? Unfortunately the paper doesn't di...
June 16, 2020 at 12:54
That's right. Gilbert is not a Nominalist in that story.
June 12, 2020 at 23:23
You requested some stories about universals... The stories all begin with Gilbert visiting Oxford and remarking that he had seen the colleges and the ...
June 12, 2020 at 22:34
They shouldn't. Since the predictor is infallible, there can only be two possible outcomes: player chooses box B only; box B contains $1,000,000 playe...
June 10, 2020 at 08:41
You're re-quoting what I had just criticized as verbiage and muddled thinking. Doesn't that bolded statement seem strange to you? It should. It's unna...
June 08, 2020 at 08:15
It takes a human being to understand that a wheel is circular. OK. It implies that the world is intelligible, which Aristotle held. It doesn't imply a...
June 07, 2020 at 08:16
Yes, Plato conceived of Forms in a separate and prior realm. Whereas Aristotle conceived of form in the world itself (per hylomorphism), neither prior...
June 06, 2020 at 05:53
Each person would see that they pass through either the left slit or the right slit. As long as you couldn't obtain which-way information from the peo...
June 04, 2020 at 14:13
I think demonstrating the potential for circular objects is sufficient to ground mathematical circles. And since mathematical circles can be considere...
June 04, 2020 at 11:59
To take the law of non-contradiction as an example, Aristotle regards it as a fundamental principle of being ("It is not possible for the same thing a...
June 03, 2020 at 10:21
Aristotelian realism. The world has a mathematical structure (form) that we can investigate. The essay that @"Wayfarer" highlighted in the Aristotle t...
June 02, 2020 at 13:18
Based on recent studies on herd immunity, about 7% of people in the Stockholm region have antibodies to Coronavirus. So Sweden's cases and deaths may ...
June 02, 2020 at 12:51
Solberg says at the end of the article, "I think it was the right to do at the time," she said. "Based on the information we had, we took a precaution...
June 01, 2020 at 03:40
As you may know, Aristotle was an immanent realist, not a Platonic realist. He regarded mathematical objects as an aspect of the world that could be i...
June 01, 2020 at 01:08