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Banno

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A different approach! In the most direct behaviourist account, a behaviour is rewarded and so reinforced. Am I correct that in IRL the reward is used ...
January 22, 2025 at 21:41
Perhaps the nature of language and its relationship to reality is not as uncertain as it might seem. Again, there is a presumption that the division b...
January 22, 2025 at 20:42
Here's an uncomfortable read... this article about Paxton's book on the Vichy regime. I noted this: Australia has a long history of collaboration with...
January 22, 2025 at 20:30
Well worth another look at Paxton's list, given the recent coronation in Washington. https://images.newrepublic.com/a6814c6c0ea7b2af8623e080ca698f9507...
January 22, 2025 at 19:50
I'm not able to follow what you are saying here.
January 22, 2025 at 04:12
Yes, I'll agree with that. Sellars might well caution that access to or articulation of this division is mediated by our frameworks, this doesn’t nece...
January 22, 2025 at 03:41
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0808/LEumbralshadow_ayiomamitis.jpg Stop motion of lunar eclipse.
January 22, 2025 at 00:52
How do you know? Take the question literally - what information do you have tat hand that shows that you and I are speaking the same language? The sug...
January 22, 2025 at 00:47
Sure. And they can do this by pointing to the difference between being made of wood and being a myth. That is, by quantifying over wood and mythology.
January 22, 2025 at 00:18
And how will you be able to tell that you and your companion are indeed "speaking the same language"? Indeed, what is "speaking the same language" apa...
January 22, 2025 at 00:16
Or drop "existence" altogether in favour of quantification. To be is to be the value of a bound variable. Which is Quine's approach.
January 22, 2025 at 00:13
Do you think Quine somehow posited this? In simple terms, there is an "explanatory connection between how we believe the world to be divided up into o...
January 22, 2025 at 00:11
How familiar are you with the notion of a family resemblance? Is there an "essence", common to all and only the members of a family, that makes it wha...
January 21, 2025 at 23:39
Again, there's a presumption that if there is a name then there has to be a something named. After all, it has a noun; and nouns name things, so there...
January 21, 2025 at 23:35
Harking back to General Semantics, again? It's "The map is not the territory", and reminds us that any map is incomplete. Sound advice. The map may be...
January 21, 2025 at 22:49
Cheers.
January 21, 2025 at 22:32
It's clear that someone can show us a lead weight, but not a kilogram. Mass is not directly observable. But this is not to say that there is no such t...
January 21, 2025 at 22:31
By trying to make sense of your post. For instance, I didn't say that you said that essences is "what it is to understand something", rather that unde...
January 21, 2025 at 22:27
There are few atheist flat earthers.
January 21, 2025 at 21:59
The Earth doesn't orbit around the sun, nor the sun around the earth, but both orbit around a common centre of mass, under the influence of the other ...
January 21, 2025 at 20:57
I quite agree, indeed it seems we all agree, that relativism is inconsistent. It remains unclear who, if anyone, is being outed as a relativist. I sup...
January 21, 2025 at 20:54
Oh, very much so. Nothing here should be construed as suggesting that there are no such thing as beliefs. And I'd even go along with reifying them, wh...
January 21, 2025 at 20:34
Well, what exactly is a concept? You won't find one by dissecting a brain. It's the way we use the associated language, the things we do in the world,...
January 21, 2025 at 00:30
There's a presumption that it has to be a something. After all, it has a noun; and nouns name things, so there must be a thing that "belief" names. Wh...
January 20, 2025 at 23:53
Lovely. But not quite right. It's rather that tools are for using than that used things are all tools. And I do Consider Quine a rather fine philosoph...
January 20, 2025 at 22:07
It pleases me that you have taken such a keen interest in my writing. Tell us more about me.
January 20, 2025 at 21:57
Presumably the process of recognising a tiger takes place in the neural web in one's head, and recognising patterns is what neural webs do. Attaching ...
January 20, 2025 at 21:53
My approach to answering this is quite different to , but that should not be taken as implying that he is mistaken. Would that I had the text, so I co...
January 20, 2025 at 21:44
"A believes that P" is not a restriction on what one might do, think or feel. It is a stipulations as to which of those things might be best called a ...
January 20, 2025 at 21:09
So if McDowell has a good argument, set it out for us. What is it that you understand from the lecture? Anscombe's discussion of intentionality is exc...
January 20, 2025 at 08:13
Does the pro-Israel vote outweigh the pro-palestine vote? More Australians are in favour than in opposition of recognising Palestine as an independent...
January 20, 2025 at 01:56
Of course they can. That's one of the things they do - explaining our actions. An example from my Bio But if some posited "belief" cannot be put into ...
January 20, 2025 at 01:49
I pointed exactly to the limb - the issue of indexicals. I had in mind Kaplan's Demonstratives. Cheers, Leon.
January 20, 2025 at 01:33
It was a proposal for addressing reference, rather than universals. Nor was it offered as a complete solution. Though it could also work for universal...
January 20, 2025 at 01:19
Righto.
January 20, 2025 at 00:46
Now you're getting it. One pertinent thing about a tool is that it is used to do something. We do things with words. Watching what philosophers do wit...
January 20, 2025 at 00:38
Linguini on tap. Yep.
January 20, 2025 at 00:29
It isn't? Ok, then that's about your use of the word "tool", such that you do not use it to talk about words... :wink: there's that semantic ascent ag...
January 20, 2025 at 00:25
And then... But... Well, yes, interesting. So what is the mistake here? Not grasping the essence, if grasping the essence is just using the word; not ...
January 20, 2025 at 00:15
The premiss of this thread - that for Quine, scepticism is "the first principle of philosophy", is both unsupported and incorrect. A better instance m...
January 19, 2025 at 22:44
:blush: You say that like it was a bad thing... But this is a mischaracterisation. There is a problem with utterances such as <Paris is a city in Fran...
January 19, 2025 at 22:36
I quite agree! But what will these be like? One solution is that they will involve some sort of stipulation; that this counts as an "a". That's the po...
January 19, 2025 at 22:29
Another ambiguously attributed post - did I say that? I do make use of Quine's joke, "To be is to be the value of a bound variable". It's another usef...
January 19, 2025 at 22:19
An odd interpretation of what I said: Quine accepted naturalism, but is not much considered not part of the "linguistic turn" - although Semantic Asce...
January 19, 2025 at 22:08
Do you think I hold that view, Tim? Edit: Or that such a view is implied by linguistic philosophy generally?
January 19, 2025 at 21:42
Back to this. Cool. For Quine, a belief was a propositional attitude. So for Quine, yes, beliefs are attitudes towards propositions. And any propositi...
January 19, 2025 at 02:59
The general form of the contingency argument is: Here is a series That series has some prime item on which it is based And this we call god. Now I don...
January 19, 2025 at 02:39
Ok, so why did Quine object to essences? He rejected Aristotelian metaphysics. In general, he rejected the idea that objects have an intrinsic nature,...
January 19, 2025 at 01:29
Isn't learning about tigers doing something? Dragging this thread again back to Quine, it's building a common web of belief. I gather this is some bli...
January 18, 2025 at 23:53
Being of the linguistic persuasion, I again can't help but ask how "how to recognise a tiger" and "what constitutes a tiger" are anything more than qu...
January 18, 2025 at 22:27