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I absolutely agree that interpretations of QM have both relevant and interesting philosophical implications. But I would also insist that any attempt ...

Not the intention, the fact of it being asserted to be so (and not: 'the fact of it being asserted to be so'). I need to respond to this in more depth...

No, again, this is just equivocating on seemingly ambiguous words to create pseudo problems. 'Finding', of course, means being interacted with: probab...

I don't know what to tell you other than that that's just what those terms mean. Observation is measurement is interaction. And at no point in any of ...

I've always wondered what it's like to not know how to read the English language while attempting to conduct discussion in it.

Greene is correct: it isn't the effect of clumsy experimenters, it is the nature of quantum effects to be determined by the physical appartus in that ...

That much is clear.

It's pretty simple dude. Measurement means something very specific in the context of QM, and that specificity has nothing to do with 'consciousness'. ...

Perhaps that's a good question, but it is one that has nothing to do with quantum physics.

Only if you understand 'appearance' in a non-causal way, which of course, you shouldn't. One could say: 'will cause interference effects (wave) or non...

Everytime you see the word 'observation', replace it with 'interaction'. The specific physical set-up of a (quantum) measurement device will interact ...

No, you misunderstand. The 'observer' in QM has a causal role: the physical set-up of the apparatus will determine, in a double-slit experiment, light...

'Observer' in QM has always meant a physical apparatus. Always. If this has caused confusion among those unversed in QM, then so much the worse for th...

One interesting thing about Sellars, in this regard, is that - again, as far as I understand it, and I'm still working through it - he actually takes ...

"It is not up to philosophy, in the usual manner of science, to exhaust the phenomena, to reduce them to a bare minimum of propositions. On the contra...

I suppose I don't quite understand how (S) is a property, at least in the sense that 'redness' or 'triangularity' might be a property. I honestly mean...

Hey, sorry, I didn't mean to ignore this, I just literally only had time to make one reply the other day! As an immediate point I think yes, any attem...

I think there's a misunderstanding here. It is not the case that jumbelese is better suited to our ontological needs. Ordinary language is fine enough...

I'm not very optimistic about the whole endeavour.

I think this is basically exactly it. One way I like to think of it is that all 'definitions' - whether of words, names, concepts or whathave you - ar...

Haha, I wanted to throw a 'meh' in there.

The blog post is weird in that it acts as though it's exposing some hidden or esoteric aspect of science that scientists have been doing their best to...

Man, I was just thinking the other day that I'd take an essay of Heidegger's over a page of Sellars anyday, stylistically speaking. Also, you had me w...

If I understand you correctly, this is something Sellars actually addresses pretty early on, with respect to Russell's presentation of the problem. Se...

OK, just to be clear, it is not just that predicates are dispensable that is important, it is why they are dispensable that matters. If the latter can...

Cool.

You tell me.

But the point is that this is exactly not the case. A predicate does not denote a particular meaning, and it is not its particularity which gives it m...

Nope.

The argument is not that because we can dispense with predicates, they have no ontological standing. It's more along the lines of, given that we can d...

I think it is. One interesting thing to note that is that Sellars refuses to give up the vocabulary of 'representation'. He continually calls for a mo...

Yeah, thinking of language in terms of what it commits one to really is the key here. That said, I borrowed the vocabulary of commitment not from Sell...

I think this is right, although I'm more conceptually unsteady here than with respect to predicates. Basically, Sellars develops an account of meaning...

Sellars speaks of this strategy in terms of 'unsaturated' propositions, but says that it doesn't do enough to diffuse the 'temptation' to treat partic...

This is the crux of the issue and it's important to clarify: what is the 'function' of the predicate? What work is it doing? This is the most delicate...

I don't think the two claims are as incompatible as they look. As a practical matter, it's true that its simply impossible to drop predicates. But, to...

Hah, I think would be a particularly apt way to put it.

I don't think so, at least not for Sellars. He often drops the copula entirely, preferring to use logical notation like 'Fa', or even alternative expr...

One thing that's important to Sellars is that he's not advocating that we give up using predicates (how could we?), or indeed, locutions like 'to be' ...

Yeah, this would definitely be kind of close. That said, Sellars actually doesn't address existence as such insofar as he thinks doing so would open a...

I'm not sure sure about this. It seems to me - but I won't press the point too much - that rational thought itself is categorical - i.e. we think in c...

Not lambdas per se, but he does make use of Quine's virtual classes in order to try and conceive of Frege's 'concepts' in a nominalistic manner. That ...

To be fair, it's a distinction that's positively medieval.

My easter present to me. 14% and hoppy as hell. /uploads/resized/files/8g/bf6hy6ith1n31mcc.jpg

Interesting. I'm familiar with the distinction as employed by Kant - although he prefers to distinguish 'discursive' and 'intuitive' understanding - b...

I dunno I reckon Trump is making America Great Again it's pretty awesome. We need someone like Trump to Make Australia Great Again. Wouldn't even have...

A quick response to this, as I'll be out all day: self-organization is most definitely a property of non-living things. Hurricanes are textbook exampl...

My favourite reading of the lawgiver is Bonnie Honig's in Democracy and the Foreigner, the first chapter. Alternatively, check out William Connolly's ...

With respect to the Jablonka and Lamb quote, it's made in the context of their book in which they try and show that (1) Genes are not the only mechani...

I guess at this point I remain somewhat agnostic on the issue, or at least open to convincing one way or another. As it stands though, I see no intrin...