Banno

Good reply. The obvious response is that what it is we recognise when we recognise a tiger is, well, the tiger. In that way essences are another examp...

Then what need have we for essence? What do they do?

Amusing, since this is a thread about Quine, yet you have tried your dammdest to make it a thread about Aristotle. And me.

Perhaps the pivot point in the election will be how scared folk are.

:grin: It's complicated. I had a go at addressing J. . I inadvertently did not add your name until after the post, so you would not have received noti...

Cheers. It may be at p.93 here. There seems to be a small industry in reinterpreting Lock in modern modal terms. I'll have a look. I'd like to express...

Much of the work done by essences in mediaeval philosophy is now done using other mechanisms. While they are still discussed, they are far from centra...

Well, it makes sense. We can get by without essences. Hence, as it were, essences are not essential... And recall that my conclusion was not, as you r...

Probably not. Kripke would presumably say something like that the name "Socrates" is joined by a causal chain to that individual, and part of that cha...

No. One would not have to be an essentialist to agree that a robot is not a man. Socrates may have been a man. Socrates may have been a robot. Both th...

Yeah, talk of essences is interesting. It's apparent that essentialism requires a distinctly divergent view of many of the details of how the world wo...

Quite right, as an explication of Kripke's causal views. There was another thread on Kripke's Identity and Necessity, an early paper. I don't think we...

Yep. The Kripke threads were very helpful in articulating this.

It's been pointed out previously and by others that you tend to misrepresent folk and then critique what you want to see rather than what has been sai...

Indeed, and you might take a look at the associated sub-article, which addresses this issue in detail and concludes Which is not very far at all from ...

Quite odd. One does not have to be an essentialist to agree that these aren't the same sort of thing. In one possible world, Socrates - that very indi...

There are those amongst us who do much the same thing, but from a mediaeval perspective. Which to prefer?

:rofl:

Rather famously, Quine rejected the idea that we could not question analytic propositions. So for him perhaps even that a triangle has three sides mig...

Why not both?

@"Frank", Hmm. That's not so. What I said was And clearly it is. And later I offered by way of showing a path for making sense of essences. I starter ...

I don't see how that could be made to work. it would be up to others to present such an argument.

:roll: Ok.

I really do not think you have understood Quine. Hence your insistence on attacking me rather than addressing the issues raised. But maybe we can get ...

"If Quine is right, then how could we be confident"? See

The Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning? No, it's not very popular.

I'm puzzled as to what a liger is. Is it a tiger? Is it a lion? Is it neither, or is it both? Seems to me that this is not asking something about lige...

Yep. That's part of what makes Quine interesting. It's the whole web of belief that provides the explanation, not any individual belief.

Well, it would be more accurate to say that it doesn't matter if there is a fact of the matter... provided you get your rabbit stew. Yes. There would ...

:rofl: (sorry... had to post that. I'll read the rest of your response now).

Notice the difference to Putnam, who seems to have suggested that since we couldn't refer with certainty, there was nothing to refer to. There is doub...

Let's consider how Quine might have addressed induction. Induction is deductively invalid. That the sun has risen every day for eons simply does not i...

So after all that wind, you agree with what was said.

It's rather difficult to form an opinion concerning essence while what an essence is remains obscure.

This? So the claim is that we can refer to, or quote, a first-person statement: He said "my hand hurts". And we can turn this into a disquotation: He ...

But precedes mine. Never mind. It seems that the problem is not first person/third person but puting pain into an expression - "conveying" a pain as y...

Ok. Happy to drop pursuing this.

But it is "adequately conveyed" in the first person? Or is it just had? So can we "adequately convey the subjective experience" in the first person bu...

__________________ Good. So will we agree that is a misapprehension of the argument Quine makes?

Is it? Can we "adequately convey the subjective experience" of a hand that hurts in the first person, with "my hand hurts", more effectively than in t...

The way things are: the tree is dropping its leaves. A report about the way things are: "The tree is dropping its leaves". A report of a thought: I th...

From my first post here: Now, what do you make of the gavagai example?

:grin: That's close to what I just asked you, I believe, concerning think2: Is the thought "The tree is dropping leaves" or is it "I think the tree is...

Interesting. One of mine refuses to engage in the topic at hand.

You are attacking me instead of addressing the topic. Show us where Quine is wrong. Or agree with him. At the very least, show some recognition of the...

Davidson was talking about Quine, so yes. Address the Gavagai problem. It's the basis of this thread.

Show that you have understood the argument that Quine presented. You entered this conversation with "Yes, it is clearly wrong". Show us how by address...

Quine showed a problem with interpretation. Davidson showed how charity allowed us to be confident of our interpretations. @"Darkneos" misunderstood t...

If you would progress this thread, address the gavagai example.