Fafner

Ok, maybe 'assignment' was a misleading choice of words. I didn't mean to say that sentences are made true by calling them so. I simply meant that a s...

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Anyway, you are free to define truth in your own way. I don't claim that my definition is the only 'right' o...

Consistency, Coherency and Validity are three different things. Logic indeed deals with consistency and validity, but coherency is an epistemic term, ...

In any case, in logic (and philosophy of language in general), a truth value is simply an assignment of "true" or "false" to a sentence. So "Trump is ...

Logic has nothing to do with coherency either (though I'm not really sure what you even mean by that term - it can mean different things in philosophy...

I don't see what truth values have to do with coherency.

I introduced these terms because the word 'truth' itself is ambiguous (for example, it is not clear to what things it applies). So talking about truth...

I don't quite understand what your example is supposed to show. 'Cats fly' was just a stupid random sentence that I chose for no particular reason, an...

So if it is a tautology, then there's nothing to explain, and that means that OP's question is confused.

Actually no, I don't think this is true, and it doesn't follow from my definition of 'truth' (or of truth conditions). Let me explain. Recall that I d...

A truth value is simply the truth or falsehood of a given sentence (the truth value (in the present) of "Trump is the president" is "true", and the tr...

But there is a sense in which a sentence such as "this world is the actual world" expresses a tautology, since you would be saying something true by t...

Because (to paraphrase Sidney Morgenbesser), even if our world weren't the actual world, you'd still be complaining. (what I mean is that the question...

And just to clarify a little ambiguity in my formulation. I wrote: and now I think that you can object here that the truth (in the sense of the truth ...

Let me try again to explain myself. You wrote: But it all depends on what you mean by 'truth' here. Are we talking about truth conditions or truth val...

And just to remind you why your argument is logically invalid. Your argument goes like this: 1. Truth depends on interpretation 2. Interpretation is s...

As I already explained, it is uninteresting because your definition of subjectivity ("involving subjects") is perfectly compatible with the possibilit...

Here's one way to illustrate what's wrong with your account of intention. Your basic idea seems to be that the relation between the intention and the ...

Translation of literary works is a somewhat different topic than translating between languages, let's say for purposes of simple conversation. What I ...

Yes, why not? Otherwise bilingual dictionaries would be useless.

I'm not saying that there are no intentions to do things, only that intentions don't work the way that you think they should.

Now your are just arguing in circles.

This is not so. On my understanding of 'action', what you described doesn't count as a genuine action. Slipping on a banana peel is not something that...

I was just trying to help you... This only makes your argument even weaker than I though it was, because the conclusion is trivial and proves nothing ...

I think that what really matters for free will is not that your 'intentions' must control your action, but that you should control what you do. And wh...

Can you explain the "just not right now" part?

Right, I think that I picked this idea from McDowell, and it is interesting to know that it goes way back to Aristotle.

One way to block the regress is to say that an intention to act is not a separate event from the free act itself, and so there is no need to postulate...

On second thought, I think that there's something to what you say. Actually I'm not quite sure what is supposed to be the actual paradox in the ship o...

Exactly, you've put what I had in mind better then I could. The sorites problem and the topic of material constitution seem to me like two quite diffe...

I don't think there's a general answer to your question. One has to look on a case by case basis. There's a sense of 'object' on which a heap of send ...

Right, you could say that.

I'm not sure whether I understand your question. Are you asking under what conditions some bit of material becomes a concrete object? As Pierre-Norman...

Sure, but the definition goes from the stuff to the molecules, and not the other way around. First you identify a bit of material as some kind of unit...

Because as I said, you know absolutely nothing about the particles that compose things like lumps of clay (you can't name them etc.), so the definitio...

Not necessarily, but still the particles must form some sort of unity (like calling it a lump or even a heap). Well even if you call a cylinder of wat...

But you know nothing about those bits: you haven't counted how much molecules composed the statue and how much are there in the lump etc. and confirme...

To complement Pierre-Normand's answer: if you take a slightly different example, that of a clay sculpture, I think it becomes more intuitive to think ...

Excellent explanation, thanks. What you said about a murder and a death being two distinct events now reminds me of Wiggins' claim that two distinct o...

What do you mean by 'dummy sortal'?

You have never observed what? I'm not sure what your are referring to. It doesn't prove that there are no such boundaries though. The question doesn't...

I don't think that fact about cats (or whatever) are in any way any less real or objective just because the subatomic particles from which cats are co...

I don't see how this is relevant.

If this is what your argument really comes down to, then surely you've given no reasons to think there's no "fixed reality" (whatever that means). The...

If I'm a moron, why don't you fuck off and leave me alone?

Whatever that means...

At least give some sort example to illustrate what you meant (that is an example of "dealing with the meanings of words in isolation").

What do you mean by "deal" and "meaning of words"? It seems to me that you have something different in mind than what Frege and Wittgenstein had.

I think this you are exactly right, and this reflects correctly both Travis' view and of the later Wittgenstein. There's a wonderful paper by Putnam c...

I don't believe that conceptual inquiry is a way to 'disclose' the essential metaphysical nature of things (and therefore I also reject the idea of a ...