Andrew M

Forms only manifest in particulars and are how we perceive those particulars. That's a difference that determines whether you see particulars as imper...

Thanks - I think I've got Kant's epistemology sorted out now! ;-) I think naive realism and representationalism are two sides of the same metaphysical...

I agree that induction is not useful here. However hypothetico-deduction can be. For example, on the hypothesis that the clown is you, one prediction ...

Didn't we already go over that ? ;-) I think our opinion has been overruled...

Thanks for your responsive comments. So on your view, would it be more accurate to say that the mind subsequently determines what first appears in the...

OK, so as I understand it the object goes through various internal processing stages after which the person judges that he's talking about the Earth. ...

You can't really equate the domains since naturalists and dualists conceptualize the world differently. For a naturalist, the natural world encompasse...

Thanks for your useful comments. Yes, nonetheless the phenomenal domain is not the world of naturalism since the former is dependent on the perceiver ...

I'd be keen to get to the bottom of this. From the SEP entry on Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 'Objects in space and time are said to be "appearances...

The problem is that you're giving two contrary answers to the same question. :-) You seem to be saying that space and time existed in a scientific sen...

You were quoting physicists as supporting your argument. So the Earth appears to be 4.5 billion years old but isn't really? The human point-of-view is...

In a physics context, an observer is "a frame of reference from which a set of objects or events are being measured", not a reference to mind. It's us...

Davies is referring to the world, not mind, when he says, "... how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth."...

There is lack of consensus whenever testable hypotheses are absent. One of the consequences of that absence is language on holiday which is what duali...

We can be in pain or see green objects - that's just everyday, conventional experience. However there are no radically private qualitative states, or ...

"Green" in its ordinary public sense is not a qualitative state, it's a property of certain objects that human beings can point to (trees, grass, etc....

It's not panpsychism. We're only talking about sentient creatures here. The problem is that in the Cartesian scheme, we're non-sentient creatures plus...

I would agree. It's the ghostly "first person ontology" that needs to be rejected. And that doesn't then imply a "third-person ontology", which would ...

There was a faith-healer from Deal, Who said, ‘Although pain isn’t real, If I sit on a pin And it punctures my skin, I dislike what I fancy I feel.’

There aren't straightforward word-for-word translations - those words have different uses in various philosophies and tend to have a cascade effect on...

And that realization or perspective is a human one (i.e., it's based on the kinds of creatures we are), not a God's-eye perspective. Our experience is...

The false picture is, for example, that only one's perception of the stop sign is red (or some variant such as sense data or phenomena), and not that ...

Color, sound, etc. are not illusions (i.e., stop signs are red). What is an illusion is the false picture of color, sound, etc., either as radically p...

With Dennett and Frankish, I'm skeptical of the hard problem, p-zombies, qualia, and radical privacy of experience. A necessary part of dissolving the...

Philosophy as a blood sport. However there are plenty of considered realists around. In QM foundations, for example, the interpretations are almost ex...

I think the call for the pitchforks might have more to do with a certain kind of temperament than whether one subscribes to realism or not. The more n...

If Alice thinks that she and the people she encounters are real (actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed (OED)), t...

Yes that's exactly how we arrive at them. Per the OED definitions, a fact is "a thing that is known or proved to be true" and an event is "a thing tha...

The apparatus can record the time of measurement along with the measurement. Decoherence happens extremely rapidly and pervasively so you'll be part o...

That's the dualism that I pointed out earlier. Bitbol moves from the unproblematic example of an eye's blindspot to positing a world of appearances: T...

No, science implicitly depends on the human perspective. A referee in a football match, for example, can be impartial and unbiased but nonetheless has...

Experience, which is "the practical contact with and observation of facts or events (OED)", is implicit in any scientific model. And that "practical c...

Of course science is a human enterprise conducted from a human perspective. As I see it, the article itself presents a dualist framing. It repeatedly ...

This seems to be the crux of it. By blindspot, they really mean that we can't see the road that we're driving on. Plato's Cave redux. That's a philoso...

That's true for classical nonlinear systems. But quantum systems are linear and aren't so sensitive to initial conditions. From the SEP: I think Mach-...

We notice that some arguments are truth-preserving, and we call those arguments logical. What further explanation of their nature or origin would be n...

As an example, there are infinitely many possible syllogisms, 256 distinct forms, 24 of which are considered valid in traditional logic, and 15 in mod...

I would recommend Gilbert Ryle's influential book The Concept of Mind. But note that it's not so much an argument for naturalism as a sustained argume...

I attribute unchanging laws to the universe itself, one example being the law of non-contradiction. In its ontological sense, it's a form that is exhi...

OK. So as I see it, metaphysics is 'the study of the study of nature'. My observation here is that investigation begins with qualitative interactions ...

OK, thanks! However given what you go on to say, it seems you rule out a physical explanation for physical laws but not a philosophical (or theologica...

I think our philosophical premises are showing. :-) So if we can't discover the nature of the order by investigation of the natural world, then how ca...

If the universe is all there is, then there is nothing to reference outside of it. The reason why mass curves spacetime, if that's the right question ...

Not a specific argument, just an observation. I think framing physical laws in that way implicitly assumes Platonic dualism. That is, Platonism assume...

Physical laws are expressed as mathematical equations. So they are not merely descriptions of the past but are also predictions of the future. Scienti...

This reminds me of Gilbert Ryle's example of a foreigner visiting Oxford and remarking that he had seen the colleges and the libraries, but was wonder...

Then you don't have a model. Whereas special relativity is a self-consistent model that makes predictions that have been experimentally confirmed in n...

Do you think light reaches the front and the back of the traincars simultaneously for both observers? If so, then what is the speed of the light? Is i...

So apart from rejecting Lorentz invariance (in favor of Galilean invariance?), I'm not clear on what your model is. When the light is emitted from the...

David Wallace has a good discussion of this in his paper Decoherence and Ontology, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love FAPP. As he puts it, de...