Banno

The argument is pretty straight forward. Suppose that it turned out that nothing we thought we knew about Thales were true; that he did not think all ...

You are stuck in empiricism, it seems. Sure, the universe does not consist of two identical iron balls. At issue is not a situation in the world, but ...

Hmm. Seems @"Leontiskos" has yet to reveal the essence of the issue.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descriptions/#MotForRusTheDes To a large extent it was to sort out ambiguities of scope. If anything, the situation...

Yep. Something for @"Sam26" to consider later.

Your conclusion does not quite follow. "it would not be used as the name of a thing" – you conclude that the thing in the box doesn't have a name, whe...

Well, no. Of course descriptions can pick out unique individuals, and names can be ambiguous. At issue is whether a given name is shorthand for some d...

Well, something along those lines happens when we say that little Jenny can count.

Hmm. What is a pattern, if not some sort of rule-following? OR perhaps, there are two ways of showing that you understand a pattern - by setting it ou...

Sometimes names do not work. But sometimes they do. Your conclusion that names do not work is odd. I gather I must be misunderstanding your point here...

Sure, why not. Yours was also a valiant attempt to drag the thread on to something more compelling than @"RussellA"'s misreadings. Happy to continue o...

What, now? Sure, the class of present kings of France is empty, but it can't both exist and not exist. Indeed, attributing existence to a class is its...

Here's the danger, of back-reading Kripke into Wittgenstein. The paradoxes of rule-following are from Kripke, not Wittgenstein. Characterising @"Russe...

You might re-visit this. The remainder of the section is a rejection of that suggestion. And see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9va-GPDLnmU

A good read. I liked Cavell would not be my got-to for this stuff. There are others who had more direct contact with Wittgenstein. That's not to say t...

yep.

I gather that Labor had its heyday in the States with the new deal, dropping off after the war, but in Europe and Australia that heyday came post-war,...

Yes, it's tragic. I'm suggesting it goes hand-in-hand with the lack of a strong relation between unions and a political party.

Of course you do. It's an insidious habit, leading to all sorts of problems - see Wittgenstein. Here, you think that you have explained how important ...

That's interesting - an act of desperation? The result is a health system that is overly expensive. Australians receive free health care at public hos...

That business of locking health care to employment is insidious.

There might be something there, a modal argument against a causal theory of reference. But that the causal theory might be wrong does not weigh in on ...

Fair enough, so far as it goes. My point might be seen as that the word "subjective" makes the situation more problematic rather than clearing anythin...

Yep, folk disagree. Concluding that therefore there is no truth to the issue is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It doesn't follow. Some folk...

By way of background, I'm pointing to the issue of definite descriptions, claiming that the arguments to the effects that one does not need a definite...

Something seems to have gone amiss with the post window. It neither grows nor scrolls, making it clumsy to navigate editing a post of more than a few ...

And I'm saying that, for example, if someone says that it is fine to kick puppies for fun, they are wrong. Mine seems a more useable approach. I have ...

This...? Sure, he has a description. That description fails to pick Thales from all the other men who lived a long time ago. So I don't see how it hel...

Ok, so names require a description, even if it is a wrong one that does not "pick out" the individual being named. Not sure how that would help. Again...

So any description will do? even one that is wrong? Supose the student thought Thales was a Spanish fisherwoman.

Oh, OK. The article is paywalled on the links I found, so I guess we will have to take your word for it. Nice crevice. Yep, the generally agreed view ...

About what? Everything?

Are you saying I should take your word for it rather than trust my own view?

I don't see that they are. A novice who asks "Who is Thales?" does not have at hand a description of Thales, and yet they are asking about Thales. If ...

What could that mean? And if you did, you would presumably be wrong. Then perhaps you need to think about it differently.

Hmm. I think I'm still missing your point. Following Anscombe, which I take as being as close as we might get to how Wittgenstein might have dealt wit...

Oh, Tullianus, you cynical ingrate. You should be giving thanks to for explaining how things are. After all, it's not as if anyone else around here ev...

There's a basic flaw in the assumptions of this thread; actions are what are good or bad, not people, and not genes. Pretending otherwise has profound...

You are pissing upwind, my friend.

Not beyond a slight historical curiosity, no. As discussed, I think more recent approaches more... interesting. Well, no. I don't see what it does. Wh...

Ah, OK, so you are not actually talking about duty on your thread of that name, but instead about manipulative leadership, and pretending that we call...

Hmm. Not sure how this is going to work. I've written a bit about Kripke elsewhere. The article here agrees that there is a distinction to be made bet...

"Ouch!"; "Hello"; "Fire!". No.

The parrot might have an intent to elicit a peanut, so yes, that seems right. Those requirements are the "form of life", presumably? Good stuff, altho...

Yep. That "potential" is usually thought of as "intention", and hence Anscombe's interest in that topic. :cool: And what is the purpose of this questi...

Show me a parrot that runs a peanut farm. Parrots do not participate in what Witti called the "form of life" in the way that farmers do. That is, ther...

Yep.

The argument is clear, and valid: Doing your duty is you first and highest duty. Just not all that convincing.

:razz: If that's the choice you face, you are properly fucked. A laughable OP. Only, it's no joke.

That's no more than an uninteresting fact about your thinking, showing a lack of imagination on your part. Lust, thirst and hunger come to mind as muc...