Isaac

Yes, fair enough, "not" was only a rhetorical device to make my sentence shorter. I was using (misusing, it would seem) that quote as a summary of you...

I think you basically answered your own question. The idea that the Bison were brought to extinction by Europeans must be "soul-feeding misanthropy", ...

"What is it and what do you need? This, of course, requires value. In general, we talk about language users when discussing common concepts. It is saf...

Yes, when I looked at the English translation in Google it said. "I share some words with you, but unless you are already familiar with the Welsh lang...

Ond, gall unrhyw un ddeall unrhyw beth os oes ganddynt Google yn cyfieithu?

Your blind faith is quite astonishing. Yes, today the best evidence is broadly that. Up to 2016, the advice was to use toothpaste, until a systematic ...

Yes, this is key I think. I phrase it in terms of dealing with uncertainty. We don't know more than we do know, by which I mean that the proportion of...

This is nonsense. Why would a predictive model become useless just because it is not certain? We are not 'certain' it will be sunny tomorrow, just bec...

FGM is not a maths sum, it cannot be erroneous. A person committing it could be in error in thinking that doing so will lead to an outcome they desire...

I'm not getting notifications from your post for some reason, so apologies in advance if I miss a response. A difficult question for sure, but I think...

It's OK, I'll translate. Religions all disagree with each other, and with science, that doesn't look too good for the modern theist, so let's make up ...

I find that hard to believe, given the range of opinion on the matter, but I'm happy to go with another example. With regards to FGM, I only know what...

I should add, however, that even on the understanding that you are not claiming we have a moral duty to trust some particular data source over another...

That's fine, it didn't come across that way, but that must have been my misunderstanding.

What I agree with is neither here nor there. 99.9% of the world could agree with it and would still not make it morally right to believe certain facts...

This is like saying you use the rules of mathematics to work out what to have for dinner, they just don't apply to the type of problem we have here wh...

No, but that's irrelevant if we can't access that fact reliably. I'm not saying the concept is useless. Complete nonsense can be dismissed this way, b...

And how's that going? Can you give me a single example from the whole of academic philosophy where one of two competing ideas has been rejected by the...

My first posts in this discussion were along the lines of "I can't see how theories which assume it could be much use to us..." "I'm asking what the d...

Doesn't matter, its still someone's 'boo', and someone's 'hurrah'. It's still someone's 'rekon' about telos, and someone's feeling about what comes fr...

... And this is exactly why the moral subjectivists do what they do, because of bullshit like this. Vaccinating your child (or not) is not an objectiv...

This is a really nice summary. Once you take into account the pragmatic necessity of dealing with other people's preferences, the statistical facts ab...

Your first paragraph seems rather disdainful of 'boo/hurrah' ethical judgement, but the rest of your post seems to be advocating it. Which is it?

I ask because Feynman once said "Will you understand what I'm going to tell you?... No, you're not going to be able to understand it... That is becaus...

Yeah, that's fair enough, if it's less confusing to you to treat it as if the working theory describes the world, I see no problem with that, within s...

Thanks, I think I understand your position now. We're not too far apart to be honest, I'm just far more casual about having a wider range of modes of ...

Fair enough, my apologies. I do agree with that, I just think there is the same quantity of evidence for unconscious mental states, but as I said in t...

Great, then you win the prize for the only one who has a method that has even the slightest chance of yielding any useful result in the next millenia.

Probably not at this stage, to be honest. And you'd be absolutely right to ask, but it's a very big topic and each fork splits a thread like this in h...

No, which approach works is connected to which approach works. One might presume a successful approach works because of its corresponding to the way t...

I know, that's the point. There are masses of evidence, but without actually checking you've just decided to believe there isn't. I have no problem wi...

By which works best to achieve our goals. Yes, and I've asked you several times now for an explanation of how we judge which arguments are true, if no...

No, I've not made my analogy clear enough. I'm not referring to the facts themselves about unconscious states, I'm referring to the fact that you dism...

I didn't say there was. Evidence for the existence of mentality is a far cry from having directly identified the meaning of a word located in someone'...

No, you can have as much machinery and other senses involved as you like. You still won't be able to 'detect' the meaning of a word somewhere.

Yeah, I get that. What I'm confused about is that it seems like your answer to the question "does meaning exist?" would be to check if you can see it,...

OK, with you there.

So ontology as a philosophical exercise is pointless then? One merely need go look for a thing (rigourously) to check if it exists?

As I thought then, just a shorthand. To me, the statistical facts (average, most common, range...) are truths with respect to moral stances, but we're...

You've slipped in 'examine' there, which is a loaded term. If 'examine' is part of your process, beyond simple observation, then how do you check the ...

You keep conflating these two things when you talk about ethics, I don't know if it's just shorthand, or if you actually mean it, but on the face of i...

So (again I suspect a serious axiomatic difference looming) how are you judging "what things are". When there is some disagreement as to what things a...

You'll have to spell out the connection there as I'm not seeing it. As far as I'm concerned, I've just said that it is unproblematic to refer to the u...

But this is exactly what your opposition here are doing with words and meaning. I don't get why you're turning this molehill into a mountain. It has p...

I'm not quite sure what it is you think I'm doing, so I don't know whether to argue the point, or correct you. If 'it has' anything, then the thing 'i...

I'm not following you. Trivialise how? And what things? I get the first bit, you're saying the empirical evidence isn't the only evidence of a thing b...

Categorised as 'blue' by what? Exactly my point. We say the cup is blue, we say that its blueness is a property of the cup. Its being blue, however, i...

I was. You dismissed the question I asked as not necessary. End of discussion. What else do you want me to say? I thought I was taking part in a discu...

Sorry, I thought we were discussing the matter. My mistake. You crack on with your lecture, I won't interrupt anymore.

I guess this is the point of our axiomatic disagreement. I don't accept that my knowledge of my mental states extends to being able to describe them w...