As long as 'pilots' have ultimate control over a plane's technology, then they can validly said to be 'in error' when that control was inadequate. Giv...
I suggest there are no conflicting 'appearances' ... only conflicting 'potential contextual expectancies'. The depth signs round a swimming pool are w...
Human knowledge evolves. It involves the coexistence and coextension of what we might call 'observer states' and 'world states'. At any historical sta...
Rule 1 When dealing with 'language' concepts about 'concepts are all we've got ! And 'existence of life elsewhere' still a functional question relativ...
I suggest the 'language on holiday' issue here applies to the word 'exist', which is itself a concept like any other. Concepts stand or fall on the ba...
Thankyou to all above It seems to me that the single word most resistant to discussion is 'understanding'. In that respect it seems ridiculous not to ...
Thankyou for that popularist Rovelli article. The impression I get is that this (commercial) reactonary 'posture' is to suggest 'philosophy' could be ...
You still don't get it. Nobody except perhaps a religious fundamentalist is likely to question 'the age of the universe', because current views on the...
I suggest you use the word 'nonsense' as a response the demise of 'the given' identified by pragmatists like Rorty (which equates to 'the 'pulling the...
If the statement, "the only ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth" carries 'meaning' for you (as it does for me), then what we call 'think...
You are trying point out to 'absolutists' what to me seems the obvious untenability of their position. It seems to me the substantive problem here is ...
As a pragmatist I consider the 'reality' debate to be futile and I doubt whether 'refinement of limits of applicability of scientific paradigms' can b...
The word 'fact' comes from the Latin facere -to construct. Facts are human consensual constructions based on their expected interactions with what we ...
I did include retrodiction, which would cover your paleontology query. That is a process where proposed antecedents predict/explain current observatio...
You don't understand. I am not 'denying' common human scenarios like 'dinosaurs before humans'. I am saying that the act of constructing such scenario...
We cannot 'know' anything about the 'ontological status' of the entities we conceptualize other than they are 'useful' in our epistemological quests t...
There would appear to us to be 'transient systems' of interactive 'entities', some of which we call 'living', which operate either individually or as ...
On the contrary, I have asserted we SHOULD reject 'existence' not mediated by human understanding because 'existence' is a human concept like any othe...
Hands up who has been in a situation where the idea of 'a heap of sand' has been an issue ! Surprise...surprise !...I don't see any hands !...Maybe th...
As far as I am concerned, ' where concepts originate from' is just another vacuous endeavor played by ' aspiring 'realists' desperate for 'axioms'. Bi...
I'm taking a Pragmatist (Nietzschean) perspective that there is no way of seperating 'description' from 'actuality'. All we can ever have are 'descrip...
This so_called 'paradox' is similar to that of 'the Ship of Theseus,' in that they both illustrate the inability of classical logic to deal with the d...
Your query about 'numbers' is perhaps handled by the Lakoff & Nunez idea that all 'mathematics' can be be related to 'bodily metaphors'. This is a sid...
In the beginning was the INTERACTION. 'Agents' doing 'deeds' are concepts privileging one side of the interaction. (Note the biblical backcloth which ...
Foolso4 Fine if we discount the fact that 'before' and 'after' are also parochial human constructs. We were born into a world of concepts which WERE o...
LOL. I know you didn't...but I did ! Naive realists think that what we humans call 'the physical world' has nothing to do with the active perceptual n...
You presumably mean that in your current human mind's eye with your current language and current psychological construct of 'time', your sentence 'mak...
I suggest '5' is merely the ubiquitous cultural expectancy involved of a verbal utterance associated with a human activity we call 'counting' used for...
A pragmatist might ask why 'the physical world' is not also 'a language object'. Why is 'physicality' not merely 'a set of experiential expectancies' ...
'Rationality' is merely a mental exercise with a particular 'coherence' claim, 'logic' being merely one such exercise. And you appear to be using 'tru...
The best refutatation is these...my socially acquired words which you are reading now! (apologies if this has been covered in the comments from others...
Why do believers need 'proof' ? On the basis that 'proof', 'existence', 'thinghood', 'limit' and 'God' are all concepts with contextual utility, I sug...
It is my 'real life' experience of a monthly philosophy discussion group, that not a single one of us has significantly changed their core positions o...
What do you mean by 'a productive conversation' ? Suppose we take the cynical view that 'philosophy is merely mental recreation for those of us fortun...
The OP puts 'language' and 'consciousness' in the same context. From the pov of the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language determines tho...
I don't see the phrase 'human context' being used in any of the above. (apologies if I missed it). Without that context, the behaviour we call 'using ...
IMO There two sorts of atheist. The first, and most usual type are those that simply consider 'God' to be a useless concept for them. The second, some...
No. Agnosticism is the one which 'defies reason' because agnostics are merely sitting on a fence of whether a 'God concept' is useful to them or not. ...
Theories are not 'provable'. They are paradigms which are offered 1. to fulfil explanatory criteria and 2. to yield new applications. In terms of the ...
Surely, on the basis that 'language' is a necessary aspect of 'consciousness', the central problem is that 'language' is trying to 'explain itself'. I...
Correct ! "Things" require thingers to thing them ! The apparent persistence and independence of 'things' is promoted by the abstract persistence and ...
That is more or less Maturana's position on 'languaging', which rejects the concept 'information' as a requirement for 'cognition'. http://www.enolaga...
Understood. However I still see the issue as one of 'applicability' rather than one of 'metaphysical assumption'. Nietzsche's dismissal of the distinc...
(Edit problems) I can't see that the law of identity makes any ontological claim at all other than that 'objects' might have static fixed identity rat...
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