Physiological I'm afraid. Philosophers, scientists and forum posters all share the same primal fear of not being able to predict the outcome of their ...
And yet there's a 109 page thread about it, full of budding Nostrodamus's, exhibiting the seemingly universal human trait of defining what is 'true' b...
Wow. That will come as shocking news to the millions of people who use it every day to add something to their assertions. "It's true...I really do hav...
This is a point which is in danger of being lost in the weeds, so I wanted to re-raise it. @"Banno" is (as he did last time we discussed this) trying ...
That's pathetic. You make a simple assertion and you can't even back it up on request. This is what passes for philosophical discussion here, a series...
You'll have to give me an example of someone arguing that (where 'injustice' refers to the negation of the virtue, not the actual law as it happens to...
No. I'm using pedagogy in it's strict sense here, in that no actual direct teaching took place. Sapolsky even tested directly for this with the tribe ...
Thank you for the links. I actually had the good fortune to work with one of Kahneman's doctoral students for a short while so I'm fairly familiar wit...
Not necessarily. It depends if you take a pragmatic definition of 'wrong' or not. Being 'wrong' can amount to nothing more than having a theory which ...
But literally no one either here or in the entire moral philosophy canon is arguing that a law which is 'wrong' is best left unchanged. I can't think ...
No. If we have no reasonable grounds or mechanism by which the two could be assumed to be the same then we must conclude that they would only be so by...
How do we establish if the law is indeed wrong? That's the point. All Along you're using these terms 'just', 'injust', 'innocent'... As if they had cl...
Right, but we seem to be back to the beginning again. Say I'm in a society fundamentally opposed to homosexuality, so much so that it is illegal. You'...
Yeah, fair enough. Although I would say that historicism has the equal and opposite problem. If we say some state of affairs was the result of some le...
Really? Innocent just means 'has committed no crime', right? So if there's a state where certain bad acts are nonetheless not illegal, you have an inn...
I don't think Diamond is guilty of that though. The question he set out to answer was why the modern white western civilisations dominate the world an...
I don't know what any of your rant has to do with my comment. I said that I doubt "Shirk is the only sin that will not be forgiven on the Day of the L...
Innocent and guilty are nothing more than labels for what those in power intend to do. If I was part of a community for whom being 'guilty' of somethi...
Fair enough. That sounds the same as "don't question this one" to me. What's the difference? You seem to be saying nothing more than "don't question t...
That's exactly the point I'm making. The moment you say "don't question this one, it's just a basic moral fact" you can slip in just about anything el...
How do you explain the strong link between support for Trump and the religious right then? Or the link more generally between religion and social cons...
I think it's far more complicated than that, and I think there's a good argument for the "I just won't countenance that" position being to blame as mu...
I wasn't aware that it had been criticised a lot. I'm aware of one or two points of dispute, but I always thought it was quite well regarded. Who are ...
Jared Diamond "Guns, Germs and Steel", I think pretty much answers your question. It's well referenced and there's lots of research avenues to go off ...
I don't think Anscombe is that concerned about committing atrocities (in the article, I mean, not on a personal level). I think you're adding undue we...
Well, that would be the place to start then wouldn't it? Why don't you lay out a little of that evidence? This would be a good place to start with tha...
Interesting. So you're saying that 'believing' is one attitude we can have toward a proposition's content, but there's some other attitude we can have...
No, I think what's meant by 'pretending' seems to require a concious deceit. With morality, there doesn't appear to be anything to be a deceitful vers...
Important or not, it simply cannot be done and, especially in philosophy, I'm just not seeing the merit in being inaccurate for the sake of...what, ex...
I had a vague memory of someone mentioning that before, but just the last few days I've had four replies from @"Janus", only one of which I was notifi...
Right, for which it would have to both think and feel, otherwise it would neither have the data nor the processing power to act, walk or talk. So what...
You've measured the successes of zombies? Aren't you worried about the whole flesh-eating thing? You've seen the films, right? It rarely turns out wel...
Eh! The quote of yours I was responding to was No mention of quotes, sources or plagiarism. Just what seemed to be a complaint about the use of the te...
Well no, not really. The term 'function' does in fact mean the job a thing is meant to do, it's function. So to say ""what morality is" is a function ...
"The function of something or someone is the useful thing that they do or are intended to do" - Collins Dictionary. I'm pretty sure @"Galuchat" just m...
Not quite. She says "that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology". Now depending on your approach, that i...
I'm pretty sure that's what's meant by being a function of. Theories about what types of proscription are classed as 'moral' are the product of descri...
@"jamalrob" Notifications aren't working in the way I'd expect them to, I understand it might be a forum software thing, so I wonder if you could look...
I see. You'd said that... ... as a means of distinguishing anger (as an example of a 'natural tendency') from civility (which I introduced as a conven...
There were only two parts to the post to which you responded. One was an assertion about animal culture... "But all creatures like us are embedded in ...
'Truth', in the sense you're referring to it here, is a category in which we place certain propositions and from which we reject others. To say ""Pari...
Well that can't possibly be the case because otherwise we'd never use it. We don't know how things really are, we only know how we believe them to be,...
Not sure what you mean here, could you expand a little? Yeah, always bearing in mind of course, the massive caveat that it's more complicated in the r...
No. One scale is to do with confidence in the data, the other is confidence in ones social group. I don't intend that these two scales exhaust all pos...
I don't think anyone would use 'true' in that situation. 'Likely' maybe, or 'possible'. Either way, I'm not ruling out niche cases, only aiming at a s...
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