Banno

Strawberries don't count as berries when one is doing botany. They do not grow from a single ovary. But if folk order berries and cream, one might exp...

Yes, indeed. Thanks for the link, which I will take on notice.

The berries are there, counted or no. Those berries can be divided evenly. Dividing berries evenly is something we do to the berries. The direction of...

Pretending 8/2 = 5 won't get you very far. You will not be able to divide the berries between two people fairly. It will be functionally inadequate. I...

Wouldn't you conclude that one of the terms had been mistranslated? Perhaps "8" was their symbol for 10, or "5" their symbol for 4. That is, we might ...

Cheers, Wayf. Keep trying to say more than can be said.

You don't need to go all quantum to say "mathematical constructs can correspond to real physical entities". The three sticks will do exactly that. And...

There is a bit more going on. Our issue was, what sort of things are numbers? And one answer is that they are real, like trees, sticks and rocks, but ...

The next step in the argument is to supose that a difference in domain just is a difference in the definition of the quantifier, that since ?xf(x)=df ...

Nice example. The issue is whether ?xA(x), whether there is something that is an apple in the domain. The existential quantifier plays out as a disjun...

The joke was quite intentional. :kiss:

~~

:rofl:

perhaps logic has advanced since then?

If you want to say "nouns are a human invention," that seems like fair game. But there has to be some sort of explanation of their usefulness and deve...

Ho hum . Now to be sure there are issues when applying this to quantification in modal logic. But those issues are to do with the nature of the domain...

Oh, and this bit is salient: And the conclusion to that section, , it seems is talking about some supposed ontological role, the E, not quantification...

Sure. I don't see how what I have said counts against this. Maths as a language, a set of (or sets of) grammatical rules that set out what we might co...

Yep An incipient notion. It probably relates to Austin's treatment of abstracts in Are There A Priori Concepts Something I wrote quite a ways back. Th...

You still want mind on one side and matter on the other. It's inveterate in your posts.

Ok. No surprise there. You've differentiated between things that exist and things that are real, and while there are issues here that at least makes s...

I'm not so enamoured with causes. Nor do I take evolutionary explanations as inherently fundamental. But leaving that to one side, isn't it enough tha...

I'm thinking that in order to make explicit quantifier variance we would need a case in which it is clear that the difference between two languages wa...

Well, I've long argued the incompleteness of naturalism. So I don't agree with the premise of the argument - that naturalism is our "best" epistemic t...

I don't see a problem. A crow that collects three sticks or whatever is acting, as is a child who cries on seeing it's sibling has "more". An understa...

Well, you want to deploy the indispensability argument, no? Which is that mathematical entities are indispensable for naturalist methodology, naturali...

Odd. These "best epistemic theories" are, as is set out in the section on Quine, naturalism. Seems an odd position for you to be defending. See this c...

Respect. There's a real problem with this view. If "seven" is a structure in your brain, then your "seven" is not the same as my "seven", which would ...

I wasn't quite able to follow your point here. Are we in agreement that advocates of quantifier variance have failed to give an adequate account? That...

Well, then the problem is yours, and not mine. The account I gave has no need to give further account of the nature of numbers. The difference form Jo...

Oh, Ok. "world three" corresponds, in broad terms, with the stuff invented by playing language games that I describe in the post above, to @"Wayfarer"...

There are three clear ways of using "is". Quantification, "There is something that is green"; equivalence: "Superman is Clark Kent"; and predication: ...

Your immortal soul is indentured to @"Jamal" for eternity on posting.

okay. For the sake of addressing the OP, it is worth pointing out that we do indeed quantify over numbers. There is an X such that X is greater than s...

Meh. I could say that that's a cop out. You are just excusing yourself from answering my critique. But that doesn't progress the discussion. I've made...

I just think there is a category error in supposing that numbers must exist or not exist. Rather, they are something we do. A way of talking about thi...

Go on - you've nearly caught me, in terms of post count! :wink:

I don't recall this - where is it? Nice use of Russell. It looks to be a precursor to discussions of private language. seems to want two sorts of quan...

There's a logical gap between the ought of ethics and the is of natural laws.

Ok. See also 's other thread. And had one, too.

Amused to see that Hirsch's latest publication is "On ontology by stipulation". Might be interesting.

Davidson is just the ubiquitous On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. The argument presented there is that languages are translatable, an argument ...

So you have said. But what they might be, apart from hand waving, remains obscure. And not so germane to this conversation.

Indeed, a distinction that I can't make sense of. Ontology is choosing between languages. It consist in no more than stipulating the domain, the nouns...

This looks agreeable. Isn't there variation in the domain, in what we are talking about, while quantification remains constant? That is, we can bring ...

Oh, that thread dropped of my list. I didn't see your last reply. Still the most anoying question on the forums. Yes, that's the issue on Tarskian's t...

Ok. That's right, in so far as what is enshrined in law is what we enact. But of course there is no equivalence between the law and the good. There ar...

I didn't say it did. My point was more that you might be accused of accept realism in your premise, in supposing that ? exists. But the point is now m...

Odd choice of phrasing. It might be thought of as defining ?. I don't have a clear idea of what you mean by "exists" here. Same for "preexisting" in t...

Why?