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

Isaac

Comments

So how do we go about actualising a potential? Talk me through the neurological process.
October 03, 2020 at 05:46
In the first sentence you use 'experience' as the measure, in the second 'facts'. I am to take it from this that the answer to my question is 'yes'? Y...
October 02, 2020 at 18:22
So do you universally trust your experience to give you an accurate account of your neurological processes, or is it just in this matter that you do? ...
October 02, 2020 at 16:36
The start of your second sentence contains a contingency which contradicts the first.
October 02, 2020 at 16:13
Yeah, I can't really stand "...therefore X doesn't exist" conclusions (where X is some common feature of our language). I think, 'well what on earth h...
October 02, 2020 at 16:00
I can't at all see how you got from rejecting certain theoretical neurological mechanisms by which we make choices to rejecting the entire idea of ran...
October 02, 2020 at 15:46
How does it 'demonstrably' happen? We're talking about the mental processes preceding a choice, how do you propose to demonstrate them? Nearest to the...
October 02, 2020 at 12:14
Fair enough, that's kind of where I'd got to. This I struggle with. It seems to 'define away' responsibility. Once one assumes determinism, as Strawso...
October 02, 2020 at 11:43
You've still not provided any argument that either of these things are the case, only that you believe them to be (which I'm already well aware of). T...
October 02, 2020 at 11:36
The donkey is irrelevant. It's the circumstances you're placing it in that I'm claiming is impossible. If your not going to respond to what I actually...
October 02, 2020 at 10:18
At the risk of sounding pedantic, the answer to your first question really does depend on what you mean by 'we' and what you mean by 'the world'. I th...
October 02, 2020 at 07:06
That all makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.
October 01, 2020 at 21:29
Quality argument. I'll bear the technique in mind for next time. 1. Restate assertion. 2. Add "Trust me on this".
October 01, 2020 at 21:24
Yes, which is where the similarity to Stove's Gem lies. If his 'self', his 'one', just is some mental state, then to say it cannot be responsible for ...
October 01, 2020 at 19:12
No. If my theory is correct it would be impossible to set up. It would be impossible to create two bags of barley so equal in every way that there wou...
October 01, 2020 at 19:02
Well then we would indeed need to add some other mechanism of choice to our model. I just just don't see that we need to, or even ought to. Is the evi...
October 01, 2020 at 17:06
It's this that I'm not getting. Without words, what is it that you're referring to the meaning of?
October 01, 2020 at 17:03
It was the explanatory need I was trying to establish. It would not be at all difficult (let alone necessarily impossible), to model the choice betwee...
October 01, 2020 at 15:30
None. But neither is there (yet) any reason not to. Hence my comment about the inadequacy of the model. But what I was actually interested in was how ...
October 01, 2020 at 12:46
OK, but the theory goes that if the phobia makes you want to behave a certain way (and you consider yourself not responsible for it), then we have a m...
October 01, 2020 at 11:52
Seems in opposition to Haven't you just asserted the exact thing you said was yet to be demonstrated? Your phobia of spiders is a 'dislike', which you...
October 01, 2020 at 09:18
Just catching up on reading through this thread (haven't time to actually analyse the paper itself, much as I'd like to, so just a bystander here), bu...
October 01, 2020 at 09:14
The main issue with Strawson's argument is that he separates 'how one is mentally' from 'one'. Such that there is this 'self' which is other than 'how...
October 01, 2020 at 09:05
Absolutey right, and for good reason. People can suffer loss of volition in various forms, and woe betide the clinician who then announces that they n...
September 30, 2020 at 14:06
In: Gotcha!  — view comment
Although at its most mundane, a gotcha is often just an overly self-important pedant pointing out an error or omission in an otherwise perfectly salie...
September 27, 2020 at 17:21
First, a straight line is possible. Second, why must I even imagine a shape at all? The expression seems to get its job done without my needing to.
September 27, 2020 at 07:46
I didn't ask what it is, I asked where the sides are in my use of the term. I imagine three people, co-involved, one of whom is the subject of my expr...
September 27, 2020 at 07:29
Except children, apparently.
September 27, 2020 at 07:14
I'm not sure what you're trying to show here. I'm in no doubt that it is possible to draw three imaginary line between the actors. I'm asking about th...
September 27, 2020 at 06:38
If I say to someone "She's involved in a love-triangle" and do not bring to mind your 'each person represents a point. The shortest distance between t...
September 27, 2020 at 06:29
You answered where the sides could be, I asked where they were.
September 27, 2020 at 06:18
They could do. What necessitates that I imagine this when I use the term to communicate?
September 27, 2020 at 06:15
At the risk of getting into another "trite" side-track...where are the sides in a love-triangle?
September 27, 2020 at 06:10
Yeah. To be fair I was expecting an initial response like "Fair enough, what I meant to say was..." followed by a more coherent definition, such that ...
September 25, 2020 at 11:35
Since you said... ... were examples of 'meanings' and since in all other cases we can succesfully replace specific examples with general cases in any ...
September 25, 2020 at 09:30
As I wrote previously, if I was referring to the word 'pain' I would have quoted it or otherwise indicated by context. I wasn't replacing the word 'pa...
September 25, 2020 at 09:01
Only when quoted. A cup is a type of drinking vessel and Tea is a drink made from dried leaves. 'Cup' is a word and 'tea' is a word. They were not thu...
September 25, 2020 at 07:48
Which is the tautology we started with. "All language conveys meaning" is tautological if 'meaning' is just 'that which is conveyed by language.
September 24, 2020 at 12:14
I asked what the membership criteria was for the category {meaning}. You answered that it was any mental structure or event. Generic names can indeed ...
September 24, 2020 at 12:13
This is not a use of 'meaning' I've ever heard. I think if, on hurting my leg, I said "I have a meaning in my knee" I should not be very well understo...
September 24, 2020 at 11:52
Only if 'meaning' is understood as 'that which language conveys', and so the proposition is tautological. Otherwise what determines members of the cla...
September 24, 2020 at 07:25
What they agree or disagree to is the entirety of human belief, it's the most relevant, and arguably, the only, subject matter in philosophy. As I sai...
September 23, 2020 at 08:47
Your assertion was that they wouldn't disagree as to the facts, not that neither of them would be wrong. A would indeed be wrong, but only by virtue o...
September 23, 2020 at 08:19
Only if they've been previously apprised of relativity theory. Otherwise A is more likely to consider B to be lying, mistaken, defective and vice vers...
September 23, 2020 at 08:14
Well said. Philosophical versions of invariate truth are inevitably introduced as "There is an invariate truth", and equally inevitably appended later...
September 23, 2020 at 08:13
In: Privilege  — view comment
My dictionary has 'privilege' meaning I'm struggling to see how it is so obvious that its use in 'white privilege' is "just not what word means". Its ...
August 29, 2020 at 12:29
In: Privilege  — view comment
In this context, yes. Are you really only just getting this? I didn't say it was a question of ignorance for you to not share mine. I said it was a qu...
August 29, 2020 at 11:58
In: Privilege  — view comment
There exists a definition of racism which is a) the most common definition, and b) extremely offensive if one is accused of it. You're either ignorant...
August 29, 2020 at 07:31
In: Privilege  — view comment
Yes, of course. As I thought I'd made clear in my previous post, no one cares about trivial attribution errors. Racism is about the oppression of peop...
August 29, 2020 at 07:06
In: Privilege  — view comment
Why on earth would you premiss judgement of any act of discrimination with "besides the whole oppressor/victim narrative"? The oppression is literally...
August 29, 2020 at 06:11