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Isaac

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Yeah, I should have made that more clear. The bolded bit is my opinion on what follows from Anscombe and constitutes pretty much a wild guess as to wh...
February 06, 2020 at 07:12
I think that's what Anscombe is saying here though. 'Ought' doesn't make any sense without laws. Something just is 'unjust' because of the definition ...
February 06, 2020 at 06:57
So you want a revival to lend some 'appeal to authority' weight behind 'stuff you reckon' against those pesky scientists with their 'falsifiable theor...
February 06, 2020 at 06:46
Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying, you're looking at this the other way round. I think you're missing a couple of steps in your thinking. Polit...
February 05, 2020 at 11:36
Why do you think that is?Is it a complete coincidence that people are so easily swayed by something as rhetorical as polling and this just happens to ...
February 05, 2020 at 10:40
In my view people's expectations have been watered down by advertising and the media. As I said, no-one really wants a speaking toaster, or a razor th...
February 05, 2020 at 10:18
In: Truth  — view comment
I don't see how. The moment we are wrong about a proposition, it is no longer likely that we would say that proposition was 'true'.
February 05, 2020 at 10:07
So what motivates that choice? Why do we choose sometimes to act according to morals and other times not?
February 05, 2020 at 09:51
Isn't <telling people they should or shouldn’t (intend to) do things differently, without giving them any reason why> a thing people do? You just said...
February 05, 2020 at 09:41
This is potentially just historicism. You've no alternative history of consensus-run groups during the same era to compare with. You could equally say...
February 05, 2020 at 09:33
And from where did anyone learn which of our tendencies are 'natural ones' and which aren't? I've studied fMRI scans and EEG. I didn't notice any labe...
February 05, 2020 at 09:33
But the limits to your imagination aren't evidence of anything, are they? Let's say people do need policing, let's say they're motivated to act badly....
February 05, 2020 at 09:28
Free-will, used in this sense, is a completely incoherent concept, so there's no traction with it here. If the desire to act in a 'good' way somehow d...
February 05, 2020 at 09:09
I think nomadic hunter-gatherer societies provide an interesting example, but I wasn't really thinking about it empirically (as in 'every society that...
February 05, 2020 at 09:06
In: Truth  — view comment
So by 'right' you mean 'true'? How do you go about justifying a claim that a theory of truth is true? Isn't that where we started? This, quite nicely,...
February 05, 2020 at 09:03
Nonsense. Engines don't naturally kill people. Put one in a lifeboat and it contributes to saving thousands of lives. Put one in a tank and it contrib...
February 05, 2020 at 07:51
Are you an expert on range of problems requiring solutions? Are you an expert on how long each verification algorithm would be? No. So I shall take yo...
February 05, 2020 at 07:35
In: Truth  — view comment
No. The first statement you just wrote also has six words, the second has six words. They both have six words. I'm being facetious, I know what you're...
February 05, 2020 at 07:30
It's not a criticism. I'm pointing out the sense in which this piece is more than just a technical criticism of the current state of moral philosophy....
February 05, 2020 at 07:23
In: Truth  — view comment
And it's not sophistry to try and claim that "the cat is on the mat" is something epistemically different from the cat is on the mat, simply because o...
February 04, 2020 at 22:44
The gun was an example. It could be nicer motives like duty. Notwithstanding, what makes you think we live in a free society. The builder is already b...
February 04, 2020 at 21:34
No we don't.
February 04, 2020 at 20:56
You haven't explained what you're asking for. That's why you're being met with disdain. There's not even a question there because you've rejected phra...
February 04, 2020 at 17:53
I've said this like 10 times already. I even bolded it for you in my last post, yet you seem to have some pathological inability to read it. We might ...
February 04, 2020 at 17:43
Possibly. I've just noticed that @"Banno" gave a link to Anscombe's paper on brute facts which I must have missed when scanning through the thread so ...
February 04, 2020 at 17:29
I'm not going to get into another discussion with you be because you just end up avoiding the issue, but I raise this here for others. You have given ...
February 04, 2020 at 13:40
Reject as being right, or reject as being reflective of Anscombe's intent? I'd agree on the former, but not the latter. It's always intrigued me that ...
February 04, 2020 at 13:08
My question - why do you think that the list of government services you want provided (and those you do not) amounts to more than just your personal p...
February 04, 2020 at 11:59
The trouble is that if anyone were allowed to do anything to anyone, then one of those things they'd be allowed to do is collect together, from an arm...
February 04, 2020 at 07:42
No they're not. If I held a gun to your head and said "build me a house" I suspect you would do so, regardless of whether the market demanded it. You'...
February 04, 2020 at 07:31
Yeah right. You could have filled a book out of all the crap you've written in defence of Trump and now suddenly it's too much effort to summarise a s...
February 04, 2020 at 07:06
Yes, but there's no shortage of housing which means presumably there's no shortage of people who've chosen to build houses of their own free will. If ...
February 03, 2020 at 21:33
But you haven't provided any arguments whatsoever. All you've done is said things you prefer. You prefer states to only "limit government power while ...
February 03, 2020 at 21:20
I'm not talking about the government's tyranny. You said that the government should protect your property, protect your right to free speech and defen...
February 03, 2020 at 18:24
Right. And why (apart from your own personal preference) should government services be limited to protection against tyranny? Why (apart from your own...
February 03, 2020 at 17:53
Well, I'm not so sure. The children of the elite certainly end up with sufficient paperwork to get into whatever institutions they desire. I'm not sur...
February 03, 2020 at 17:46
Yes, there's that. It's probably only swing voters who would be affected. But then it's only swing voters that ever matter anyway.
February 03, 2020 at 17:29
What you 'call it' is a pointless waste of time on a philosophy forum, we're not discussing your pet names for things. If you want to establish a diff...
February 03, 2020 at 17:25
Yeah, my definition of 'political' is also much broader than just getting votes. Yeah, I certainly think it can't hurt, and may just eliminate a littl...
February 03, 2020 at 14:18
I'm not even sure we can get there, but I agree it's probably true. Technically, the disasters of excessive state control could have been caused by an...
February 03, 2020 at 14:00
I agree, in general, but we need also to agree on objectives as no empirical data can tell us what our objectives 'should' be. I fear that, in this, w...
February 03, 2020 at 13:50
Indeed. What I've been trying to get at with both @"NOS4A2" and @"BitconnectCarlos", is that if we're not referencing some objectively justified crite...
February 03, 2020 at 13:32
But this is the case with all governments I know of, yet the debate does not seem to be settled. I don't know of any government which has totally unre...
February 03, 2020 at 12:57
So no answer to the actual question then?
February 03, 2020 at 11:22
You're not providing, in this binomial assessment, any means of dealing with uncertainty. There's knowledge who's paperwork can be verified, we trust ...
February 03, 2020 at 10:59
I'm not twisting anything. You called rights 'wants'. You never mentioned that some had 'reasons' to be included as rights while others didn't. So wha...
February 03, 2020 at 09:58
Why don't they have a choice in it? Where did I suggest we get slave labour to build houses? Nope. Someone could have a qualified right to housing. A ...
February 03, 2020 at 07:56
You keep getting sidetracked into your evidence against big pharma and missing the point. I completely agree with you that Big Pharma do not have my w...
February 03, 2020 at 07:42
In: Truth  — view comment
'Better/, 'Fruitful' for what? What is it these systems are trying to achieve that you think this approach might make more likely?
February 03, 2020 at 07:23