It wasn't my example by the way. I was just quoting from a canonical text. You are questioning and rejecting very basic principles in epistemology. Th...
Income per capita is today a multiple of what it was in the golden era of the 1950ies but expectations are much higher than back then. So, everybody n...
No, I don't think qualia can be supported, since we can't simulate the stuff even without doing qualia. So, no, flag the feature request as either WON...
So, we are going to build the Theory of Everything from scratch, starting from an empty virtual inference machine (VM). Of course, we'd better load th...
One word: Israel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUTm850BIc Well, yeah. Obama was apparently not too keen on it. So, Benjamin did not manage to get ...
Not sure. I suspect that there will be a bout of serious chaos for a long while, before the new system will finally materialize. It is a bit like the ...
The ones who understand the T&C do not accept them. Since marriage arrangements are also mere biological behaviour, there are still quite a few men wh...
Look, when the shit hits the fan, and when things become seriously violent, people are not going to vote over the solution; which means that only comb...
It is not just the marriage rate that is plummeting. Cohabitation is collapsing as well. That is a important factor in the latest drop in the fertilit...
There are a lot of people disgruntled and waiting for the earliest opportunity to "get even". In fact, the list of grievances seems to be endless. A r...
Hence, the knowledge-discovery process is not rational. The output product, knowledge, clearly is, but the process clearly is not. They are not the ou...
There is no justification for why they discovered it. That is in fact the case for any discovery. If it were possible to discover new knowledge by rea...
Well, neither the knowledge statement (Fermat's last theorem) nor its justification (Wiles' proof) can be discovered through reason. Why Pierre de Fer...
Reason cannot create or develop knowledge statements nor their justification. Reason can only verify them. For example, it took 350 years to discover ...
The common understanding is as following: You are questioning the validity of very, very basic epistemic principles. I really do not see what you want...
If the fact that knowledge is transmitted through sound, vision, or tactile sensations makes it empirical, then non-empirical knowledge cannot exist. ...
Reasoning is the procedural act of verifying the justification for a knowledge claim. It is an entirely mechanical activity, in the sense that a machi...
In my opinion, the most successful offshoot of set theory is relational algebra, for which the canonical language is SQL: Relational algebra is massiv...
Yes, I think so too. Furthermore, the mapping back to the real world must go through the regulatory framework of an empirical knowledge discipline, su...
Computers do not require empirical input either. You could learn how to accept a text stream, character by character, through a device that makes a sh...
So? That does not mean that language can only be used to describe the physical universe. It can also be used to describe imaginary universes. You can ...
By visual procedures, I mean a procedure in which the use of circles, lines, triangles, polygons, graphs, and similar visual representations are essen...
Provability and falsifiability are epistemic criteria. So, there is a way to back the proposition with objectively verifiable paperwork of a particula...
Even though I very much appreciate Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I am still not one of his cheerleaders. On the one side, Kant says that pu...
No, not possible. For example, I came to realize that conclusions about ethics outside the regulatory framework and system of religious law can only b...
In mathematics it is trivially easy. If the claim is provable, then nobody will contest it. In science it is also relatively easy. If the claim is fal...
Well, in Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant pointed out the existence of a type of knowledge that is not empirical. It is synthetic a priori. At t...
I think that all axioms are non-self-evident, especially in mathematics. The idea that axioms would have to be self-evident stems from classical Greek...
Many axioms aren't self-evident in any fashion. For example, take the axiom of regularity in ZFC set theory. The reason why it is there, is because in...
Agreed. I have indeed warned my brother-in-law for that problem. Programming requires some kind of talent which is probably innate. It will be up to h...
If you come from the world of science, which is staunchly empirical, you will naturally tend to think that mathematics should be a bit like science an...
Yes, in mathematics, the syntactic entailment of the "=" operator is defined -- axiomatized really -- for each different data type. For example, you w...
Well, I got recently confronted with how clueless education can be. It defies imagination. I sent my brother-in-law to a supposedly practical training...
Applied philosophy is much more accessible than general philosophy. The philosophyOf(X) is straightforward if you have a reasonable understanding of X...
Starting from Carnap's diagonal lemma, the proof strategy for Gödel's first incompleteness theorem is really easy. Once you have established the first...
The theory needs to be consistent to be usable, but you are not allowed to prove that it is, because in that case this theory is provably inconsistent...
It is inconsistent and/or incomplete. Therefore, it could also be complete and inconsistent. Hence, there may not be an unprovable truth as long as th...
He clearly wants to replace religion by a simplistic and childish exercise in infinite regress, the kind of which has never produced anything of value...
I certainly agree that this is the case in the empirical domain. Science certainly works like that, even though mere experience is clearly not enough ...
Yes, in the current state of affairs, they are not. The common factor in the terms "scientific method", "axiomatic method", and "historical method", i...
Both mathematics and science use their procedure to justify their knowledge. So, in both cases, it is about following the correct procedure. In that s...
The "philosophy of X" is much easier to grasp than "general philosophy", especially if you already have a reasonable understanding of X itself. In tha...
Originally, in Greek antiquity, over 2500 years ago, i.e. primarily in Euclid's Elements, axioms were meant to be self-evident. For a long time, class...
Well, it doesn't seem to work in even microscopically tiny Afghanistan, while you can still see the trillions of dollars sitting in the ever growing d...
Concerning the proof strategy for Gödel's incompleteness theory, the Wikipedia page makes the following remark: At the same time, I have found the fol...
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