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aletheist

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It is fascinating (if somewhat tedious) to watch the centuries-old debate between realism () and nominalism () hashed out all over again.
December 18, 2016 at 19:50
Your concept of science seems too narrow. It encompasses not only the empirical study of physical objects, but also any other form of collaborative hu...
December 18, 2016 at 18:01
You believe that nothing is real unless it exists - i.e., that there are only material/efficient causes and brute facts?
December 18, 2016 at 16:37
Your concept of logic seems too narrow. It encompasses not only deduction (explication), but also retroduction (conjecture) and induction (evaluation)...
December 18, 2016 at 16:31
Right, it is a matter of how we are mapping the (ideal) diagram to the (actual) universe - both in formulating the model, along with its accompanying ...
December 18, 2016 at 16:16
Yes, that is what I would have guessed. Just curious, then - how do you explain the element of surprise, the fact that there are genuine discoveries i...
December 18, 2016 at 16:15
As I suspected - that is not how either of those words is normally defined, especially within philosophy.
December 18, 2016 at 16:02
Not necessarily, on both counts. I will ask again--how are you defining and distinguishing "intelligible" from "intelligent" in this thread?
December 18, 2016 at 02:49
You deny that we can observe (through experimentation) that force is directly proportional to both mass and acceleration? How else have we ascertained...
December 18, 2016 at 02:31
We are mapping F=ma to the real relations that we observe in experience among force, mass, and acceleration. This is true, in the sense that mathemati...
December 17, 2016 at 22:53
I still suggest that using the term "existence" in these two different senses is counterproductive. I would say, instead, that the essence of the obje...
December 17, 2016 at 20:06
F=ma is a diagrammatic representation that embodies the relations among force, mass, and acceleration--all of which are concepts that we have defined ...
December 17, 2016 at 19:44
The terminological point that I have been trying to make is that universals do not have to exist in order to be real. It is nominalism that insists on...
December 17, 2016 at 19:31
As I posted in another thread: The hierarchy of Being involves an infinite continuum (Thirdness) of indefinite possibilities (Firstness), only some of...
December 17, 2016 at 19:24
To clarify--constructing the model requires creativity and imagination (retroduction), but processing the model is entirely a matter of necessary reas...
December 17, 2016 at 19:15
How about when it facilitates understanding? In any case, on what basis is "usefulness" the only criterion for intelligibility (or anything else) to b...
December 17, 2016 at 19:07
As you might have guessed, it is something that I picked up from Peirce. He favorably cited his father Benjamin's definition of mathematics as "the sc...
December 17, 2016 at 18:54
Every mathematical model is a diagrammatic representation of an ideal state of things. As such, any ontological commitments are manifested in the mapp...
December 17, 2016 at 18:32
When I first started getting acquainted with Peirce's thought, several people warned me that it would take a while--and I have found that to be very m...
December 17, 2016 at 17:21
The OP stipulated that we are talking about an omnipotent being. It sounds like you are suggesting that there is something that such a being cannot do...
December 16, 2016 at 23:10
What if the omnipotent being chooses not to exercise complete causal control over everything? Surely that power would be among those that such a being...
December 16, 2016 at 22:43
Peirce called himself an "extreme scholastic realist" and eventually developed a cosmology that, at least from where I sit, explains both similarity a...
December 16, 2016 at 22:25
When we talk about whether something is conceivable, we do not usually mean whether a particular person is capable of conceiving it at a particular ti...
December 16, 2016 at 14:29
Are you suggesting that spirit is somehow not being? Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being,...
December 16, 2016 at 01:01
Late in his life (1908), Peirce wrote about "three Universes of Experience." The first "comprises all mere Ideas," everything "whose Being consists in...
December 15, 2016 at 23:17
Peirce confined existence to Secondness/particularity/Brute Actuality. Therefore, strictly speaking, Firstness/possibility/Ideas and Thirdness/general...
December 15, 2016 at 02:28
You are not adhering to the definitions that I am using, which come from Peirce and are well-established in semiotics, so we are just talking past eac...
December 10, 2016 at 04:46
A portrait does not represent the person whom it portrays (resemblance)? A weather vane does not represent the direction of the wind (connection)? You...
December 10, 2016 at 02:18
I have in mind the idea that different statements--in different languages, even--can express the same proposition. I can even express a proposition wi...
December 09, 2016 at 22:40
Fine, we are back to words and their combinations being symbols that represent their objects by arbitrary conventions. Stipulating that we are using c...
December 09, 2016 at 22:19
Consider the proposition that the moon is made of green cheese. Can we say that this proposition is representing the fact that Abraham Lincoln was the...
December 09, 2016 at 21:51
I am not sure that it makes any sense to talk about "unstated statements." However, a declarative statement expresses a proposition, and a true propos...
December 09, 2016 at 21:38
Given the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief, there is evidently a distinction between justification and truth; otherwise, one ...
December 09, 2016 at 20:28
My understanding is that it is a sentence, not a proposition; which is presumably why this is called the semantic theory of truth, and is not simply (...
December 09, 2016 at 20:20
Gravitational attraction occurs whether the antecedent obtains or not, so that cannot be what the conditional proposition is representing. It says wha...
December 09, 2016 at 20:13
That is what I anticipated. Then what object--if not a real habit, necessity, law, or regularity--is that conditional proposition representing? Given ...
December 09, 2016 at 19:46
Habits, necessities, laws, regularities--take your pick. Are they real apart from their instantiations? Can a conditional proposition--if I let go of ...
December 09, 2016 at 19:29
I just tried to clarify what I meant. A symbol represents its object only because it will be interpreted as doing so, not because of any resemblance o...
December 09, 2016 at 19:24
Or if we are PF participants talking about whether possibilities and habits are real, not just existents; but that is another thread. I am not sure wh...
December 09, 2016 at 19:22
You are missing the point. I am looking at HOW a particular sign represents its object. There are only three options--by resemblance (icon), by direct...
December 09, 2016 at 19:18
Of course not--TS has made it quite clear in this and other threads that he is not a realist, he is a nominalist. Again, the usual caveats about label...
December 09, 2016 at 19:13
It is arbitrary in the sense that there is no particular reason why that particular arrangement of those particular marks on a page (or pixels on a sc...
December 09, 2016 at 19:12
Interesting ... any other notion of correspondence is an incoherent idea on my view. No, what makes it a convention is that it is arbitrary--there is ...
December 09, 2016 at 15:10
I have been reading a lot of his stuff lately, so I am trying it out in order to ascertain the extent to which I agree with it.
December 09, 2016 at 15:02
To a realist, it means that possibilities are real, even if they do not occur; i.e., are never actualized. In other words, there is more to reality th...
December 09, 2016 at 14:51
Whether a proposition corresponds to facts is itself an objective fact. The judgment does not determine such correspondence, it evaluates it, and can ...
December 09, 2016 at 14:37
A proposition is not itself a judgment; rather, a judgment is an evaluation of a proposition as either true or false. If I judge a proposition to be t...
December 09, 2016 at 03:05
Would you mind clarifying what you mean by "subjective" vs. "objective"? Are you saying that my judgment makes a proposition true or false, rather tha...
December 08, 2016 at 22:19
Peirce's basic definition was that something is real if it has properties sufficient to identify it, regardless of whether anyone ever attributes them...
December 08, 2016 at 20:59
I concede that I am not fully up to speed on QM, but it strikes me as a bit presumptuous to claim that we know the other worlds exist, and that they i...
December 08, 2016 at 20:47