Isaac

Seems odd to say that evidence for such states existing unconsciously is problematic epistemically but you seem fine with the existence of them concio...

I think you and I must have different definitions of unconscious mental states. I mean by it a state in which the brain can be which affect behaviour/...

OK, so firstly, it's not about what x really is, but what the reason really is. I don't think that entirely matters for what you're saying, but I thou...

No. I'm guessing you think that has some material effect, so perhaps you could explain how.

I'm not sure I'm following your objection. We're talking about what factors people are consciously aware of affecting their likes/dislikes. In the stu...

That's where we started, with your rather controversial claim that there was no such thing as unconscious mental content (or, in fact a gradation of c...

I mean other moral principles. You can hold that it is morally wrong to steal, not because you find stealing repugnant, but because you find the thoug...

Sorry, nothing whatsoever. There's some interesting work being done on tracking markers of taste preferences with neural imaging and I was going to gi...

Well, the evidence I gave directly below, as an example. People who claim not to like white wine can be fooled into saying they like the white wine th...

This seems like rather a controversial point of view given the advances in neural imaging, what reason do you have for persisting with it in spite of ...

If you say you dislike olives, but then, on trying one some years later, you find them to be delicious, at some point in the intervening years you mus...

I don't want to speak on anyone else's behalf, but by way of simply defending my previous praise of the position you've criticised, I think you have m...

Brilliantly written.

I've never been so insulted in my whole life!

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this post. Are you implying that because Wittgenstein had a high IQ we should presume he was right and any misunde...

Does the fourth word on page 265 of the current Oxford English Dictionary mean anything? I could wager it is not in use right now. It certainly meant ...

For me, our way of talking is all there is to discuss about the matter. Obviously our way of talking reflects, and to an extent constructs, a world-vi...

Of course not. How on earth could we possibly judge which position was true? The question is whether meaning is best seen as something that persists o...

How so? What is the property of 'being blue' if not the fact that any properly calibrated recording device (human or machine) when intercepting reflec...

I guess that's what I was trying to get at with the incorrectly calibrated spectrometer. There's still some other chain of events which have to all be...

Yeah, I thought you might not agree with that bit, but perhaps the whole argument about meaning as use is best given its own thread. Perhaps we should...

I feel like we're having the same conversation in two different places. I'm not talking here about the meaning of blue. I'm talking about blue, the wa...

Yes, you could say that. I'd more emphasise that I'm making the case for there being no purpose behind arguments to the contrary because there is no p...

The meaning of a word is the use it is put to (I haven't yet argued for this yet, arguments in favour are relatively common). The use something is put...

It does if you'd make the least effort to follow my line of argument instead of just dismissing as irrelevant anything which you cannot, after barely ...

But it has everything to do with it. The whole question is about where the property of meaning resides. You claim it does not reside in the object pro...

I never said "correct". What possible measure of "correct" could we be using here? Against which table of answers are we comparing ours to check if it...

Why "sufficiently complex" here? How is the meaning of a word being held in an AI any different from the colour blue? When we look at a cup, is the co...

I don't know about @"Janus", but this is not an accurate paraphrasing of my position. What I'm saying is that the meaning of a word is not what the au...

What does "... as if it's not just an idea" mean here? What do thunk we might actually do with potentiality if we talk about it as existing which woul...

That's what reification means. You're saying we shouldn't consider abstract exist because abstracts don't exist. That doesn't sound like much of an ar...

But that's begging the question. It's only ontological nonsense if we don't reify it. You still haven't answered why you think we shouldn't.

How would you describe what other people call the radioactive isotope Carbon-14. Would you refrain from describing one of its properties as being that...

I don't get what you mean by this. In the first part you say "potentials only exist...", and in the second "potentials do not actually exist..." and I...

No, but neither does the hammer. All use is contingent on a user. If you prefer we could refer to the hammer's potential use. It's still a property of...

Yes, I'm not sure what you want me to take from that. I'm saying, in the above, that the ink-mark pattern (a word) has a use (to pick out a dog in a s...

But it would, at least in part, be a property of the hammer. What I'm not quite understanding about your position is why you want to make such a clear...

You are mistaking 'acting as if...' for a claim that it is the case. The PI is a method, not a book of facts, Wittgenstein makes this pretty clear whe...

That's what I'm asking (or rather confirming, as I thought). I'll make it clearer as a direct question. Do you think the fact that a hammer is used to...

It's a question. If no properties of a hammer only exist in the mind of the person observing, then it's utility for driving nails (being a property of...

So it's utility for driving nails is not a property of a hammer? Unless I've missed something, I thought that was the topic of this thread, merely ass...

I'm trying to understand your position with regards to properties of objects which exist only in the mind of the observer. This seems crucial to the t...

So where is the fact that the hammer was used to hit nails? If humans capable of recollecting the fact ceased to exist would it cease to be the case t...

Right, so you're happy for the pattern to be a property of the text in an objective sense, but you determine 'meaning' to be some state of the brain o...

You claimed that the pattern is only in the mind of the person observing the pattern, it does not exist in the text. I'm asking what the difference is...

I don't see how this differs from Solipsism. The only reason we see an apple on the table is because we assign some meaning to the breaking of the sym...

Just catching up on this thread and came across this gem which I wanted to re-post to emphasise the importance of it to understanding the text, in cas...

No it doesn't. That's the point. People dispute the data. Scientists disagree about the long-term implications, the consequences are complex and open ...

I'm using the word 'means' is a term to capture both sense and reference in actual use. The question is why is it necessary in the example being used ...

Then we are in agreement. I'm sure large numbers of ethical vegans conflate the means with the moral good itself. As I said, this is an inconsistent p...