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Andrew M

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OK. Another way to put it is that 'observe' and 'know' are achievement verbs (Gilbert Ryle's term). You can't observe what isn't there or know what is...
December 09, 2019 at 04:34
You can only observe that it is raining if it is raining (if that's what you're referring to). If I know that it's raining because I observed rain, th...
December 08, 2019 at 10:55
Yes. So a robot could be built that had wings and feathers. In that sense it would be like a bird. But it would not be a bird even if we couldn't easi...
December 07, 2019 at 21:46
A handy feature I just found if you want to see the source of an equation in another post. Right-click on the math and select "Math Settings | Math Re...
December 07, 2019 at 05:47
I think so. Yes and renaming ¬f to g makes that visually clear: \begin{align}(s\wedge g(\ulcorner s \urcorner)) \vee (\neg s\wedge \neg g(\ulcorner s ...
December 07, 2019 at 05:26
Thanks for your reply, just one question below for the moment: What is an example of that, on your view?
December 05, 2019 at 23:32
Glad we agree! Yes, they are distinguishable. But we seem to have different ideas about what your duck definition can include. The common definition f...
December 05, 2019 at 23:14
Still thinking about it, but a couple more things. When you consider A, I think you can omit the s1 discussion and just note that A is an instance of ...
December 05, 2019 at 23:00
I think the negation of the lemma needs to contain a disjunction as follows (since for the negation every tuple must be either (true,false) or (false,...
December 04, 2019 at 14:41
OK. OK. So we can investigate why Reason adopts a knowledge attitude towards some beliefs and not others, such as the 'no fluke' condition above. Thus...
December 04, 2019 at 07:40
So Reason has no reasons, as it were. She is inscrutable. It seems that you regard human reason as a kind of intuition or feeling that derives (howeve...
December 04, 2019 at 04:33
How would we distinguish between those beliefs Reason approves of and those she does not? Or to put it another way, why does Reason approve of the bel...
December 03, 2019 at 22:37
The issue is that we're trying to empirically find out what knowledge is (or, linguistically, how people use the term), not legislate it. A human acto...
December 03, 2019 at 20:05
The ancient Greeks called her Athena. These days she's the natural patron of universities and apparently it's well worth seeking her favor.
December 03, 2019 at 04:23
I dispute 1 and 2. Per premise 1, I can point to people making assertions. But you can't point to reason making assertions since it is an abstract ter...
December 02, 2019 at 22:41
That's an unusual usage. As defined here, "mind" ordinarily refers to a faculty or ability of a person, not that it is a person. Anyway since they're ...
December 02, 2019 at 13:18
Mind isn't a person. Mind is an abstraction that refers to a person's ability to think and reason. Only a person can assert things. You seem to be tre...
December 02, 2019 at 05:08
Isn't that like saying that the solution to world peace is what Reason asserts it is? Also capitalized Reason is poetic, but what does it refer to? Ou...
December 02, 2019 at 03:26
You would just provide appropriate context if need be. For example, include an asterisk next to the correction and at the bottom of the post note the ...
November 30, 2019 at 03:03
Some people won't bother reading that far if they encounter glaring mistakes. Correcting such mistakes just makes it easier for your readers. I know. ...
November 30, 2019 at 02:08
It could be useful to your readers if you edited your original OP with the corrected figure. And also provided a link to a relevant scientific study o...
November 30, 2019 at 01:34
Maybe people think there is no relation between is and ought? That may be a philosophical problem...
November 30, 2019 at 01:07
A possible analogy: The rules of chess specify that players can only move a bishop along the diagonal. Moving the bishop vertically would be invalid. ...
November 29, 2019 at 10:10
That is a consequence of how you've defined the system. It seems to me that what you're pointing out is just that a predetermined initial state is inc...
November 28, 2019 at 08:30
On trivialism, the statement of mine that you are disagreeing with is trivially true. So your disagreement assumes non-trivialism (i.e., you think my ...
November 28, 2019 at 03:45
As I see it, if the world seemed inconsistent then that would point to a problem of representation, not that the world was inconsistent. That's the ap...
November 17, 2019 at 03:34
If there is a contradiction, it is only in how the system is being represented. In this scenario, person B has complete information about the system w...
November 16, 2019 at 21:48
It depends on the realist - what they think about concrete or physical things doesn't necessarily apply to abstract objects (or universals). For examp...
November 15, 2019 at 05:18
No, we would just look for ways to model the world that avoided inconsistency. Which is just what occurs in quantum mechanics where the state of a par...
November 14, 2019 at 00:05
Right, the argument shows that one can't know that realism is true (via contradiction). Interestingly, we can see what is going on here via the earlie...
November 13, 2019 at 16:07
Agreed. The relevant issues to my mind would be about what logical consequences follow from it (e.g., is it coherent or does it lead to inconsistency ...
November 13, 2019 at 06:06
I'm going to translate your argument in terms of something concrete. Consider an apple on Bob's kitchen table, which I'll abbreviate as 'the apple'. P...
November 13, 2019 at 01:45
If you lived in a world where nothing followed necessarily from anything else, then MP wouldn't apply. Perhaps, for example, a quantum vacuum where pa...
November 12, 2019 at 07:55
Yes, RQM is a high-level abstraction that preserves nice features like locality, theory completeness (i.e., no hidden variables or ad hoc changes) and...
November 12, 2019 at 04:20
"Believe" is too strong. However MWI and Rovelli's RQM are my preferred interpretations.
November 11, 2019 at 04:58
No. Everett developed his interpretation prior to Lewis' and Kripke's work. And the earlier Copenhagen Interpretation rejected counterfactual definite...
November 11, 2019 at 03:35
None, it seems to me, since they're describing very different things. "Possible worlds" is a tool for modeling abstract hypotheticals or counterfactua...
November 11, 2019 at 03:08
Yes. So I think there's a lot of baggage that comes along with accepting the Gödel sentence in one's logic system. I suggest that the sentence is not ...
November 08, 2019 at 02:24
Thanks for your detailed reply - definitely helpful for working through this. However that Wikipedia link doesn't provide an external reference and a ...
November 07, 2019 at 13:35
Going back to this again. Consider a non-standard model where ~G is true. Since ~G says that G is provable then, if ~G is true, G is provable. Now ~G ...
November 04, 2019 at 10:57
But we're discussing non-standard models where ~G is true. Since ~G says that G is provable then, if ~G is true, G is provable. However since G isn't ...
November 02, 2019 at 04:28
Yes, I get that provability means true (or false) in all models. What I don't get is why the negation of G shouldn't be interpreted as saying that G i...
October 31, 2019 at 02:52
Is that the same as saying, "If, in a nonstandard model, G is false, then G is provable there"?
October 31, 2019 at 01:24
Working through the logic, G is: This sentence is not provable So ~G is: The sentence "This sentence is not provable" is not true Now ~G (as with G) i...
October 30, 2019 at 16:16
OK. So, per the earlier Wikipedia quote, what does it mean that the Godel sentence (G) is false in some (non-standard) model of Peano arithmetic? Sinc...
October 28, 2019 at 11:09
Thanks for the explanations. OK. Does that just mean that non-standard models of Peano arithmetic are inconsistent? Or is there more to it than that? ...
October 28, 2019 at 06:56
OK. What I'm suggesting is that an arithmetic sentence could be defined as only being true (or false) if it is, in principle, provable from axioms (or...
October 27, 2019 at 05:08
Returning to this... Yes, in effect the diagonal lemma can generate the Liar sentence, as follows: This sentence is not true Which, in turn, leads to ...
October 23, 2019 at 14:22
A belated thanks for your reply! I've spent some time working through the proof of the diagonal lemma and do have a few questions. However I thought I...
October 18, 2019 at 19:04
If no true but unprovable X has been found to satisfy "X ? isNotProvable(%X)", then why should we consider it to be a satisifiable definition? Also, w...
October 11, 2019 at 21:56