Banno

If someone were to say that all circles have three vertices, and then offer in argument that a circle is a plane figure with three sides, one might do...

Your post is a rather neat example of why I find definitions suspect, presenting nothing of how the word is actually used, but instead inventing esote...

Give an example.

Another article I read long ago. I gather you are enjoying this? Between Analytic and Synthetic. The title is curious. Quine's two dogmas was then a r...

...as if he never published.

No worries. If you are not sufficiently interested in the article to read it, let alone look at the background material then I'll go back to ignoring ...

This errs in failing to notice that science is social. One individual making their own observations is not science. A group actively engaging in a con...

Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism

The return of fascism? Why this is the wrong question to ask

So, set it out clearly for me.

Oh, yes. Feyerabend would have torn a new arse hole in such an argument. It has the pretence of rationality but on analysis, fails. That's pretty much...

You seem to think there's an argument there, but I can't see it. The missing piece seems to be a presumption that doing one's duty is the only thing t...

...those were the days...

, I don't think I can help you further. I'd presumed a common ground of realism; that we agreed there were things in the world about which one could m...

There's quite a body of discussion on falsifiability. SOme familiarity with that would be helpful.

Circumscribing reduces all-and-some statements to falsifiable form. Conservation laws, for instance, are used in particular cases to predictable and f...

Nevertheless, no argument is offered for the supposed conclusion of the OP.

SO fix it.

...there isn't an argument in there, so far as I can see, to which the conclusion is that " freedom is exactly freedom to do one's duty, and nothing e...

Well, three levels are offered; disguised analysis; Lewis-Carol-like nonsense; and the intermediary of not having any truth value. For my part I don't...

Pretty much. It's important to note the specialist use of "metaphysical" to mean "unfalsifiable"; and "unfalsifiable" as being of specified logical fo...

No worries.

Yes. Different ways of articulating the same thing, such that they have little in common.

...nothing in that rules out the mental as an outcome of the physical. Indeed, you did not address the causal link between mind and body.

Isn't this dealt with in the article - being the topic of Section VII? Or have I misunderstood you? In Lakatos' formulation, and without checking his ...

Yes! Brilliant, aren't they! They work because they change the whole picture, like seeing the rabbit as a duck, or better, like seeing that you can ch...

But would you go so far as to agree that science is about conduct, not method? That Demarcation is not in a process but an attitude?

Better, a good scientist - and I mean that as an ethical judgement.

This is the issue that Davidson addresses with anomalous monism. I choose to raise my arm and the darn thing goes up, as Searle points out; undeniably...

I'm not so keen. I wonder if we can do better by demarcating in terms of ethical principles. IF an astrologer were willing to change their predictions...

I do not understand what you are saying here. A straight stick looks bent in a bucket of water. A being inside a block universe sees a sequence of eve...

SO, to put on Feyerabend's hat, astrology is a science in so far as it makes falsifiable claims; that the moon is in Sagittarius implies trouble for f...

Yeah. I agree. I think we can put it down to a few folk not being familiar with Popper's account.

Cheers.

Yes, that's it. The paper gives a clear account of what theories are to be counted as metaphysical and what are not, based on their logical structure....

Well done. Watkin's article is in the same vein as Lakatos, in that Popper's demarcation criterion was seen to rule out far too much as unscientific. ...

What is it you think "unfalsifiable" means?

We might best start today by considering a straightforward argument showing that one does not have all of one's beliefs in one's mind. I take it that ...

Did anyone actually read the article?

Yeah, just put your hands over your ears and hum loudly and it will go away.

Yep.

Sure, folk say silly things. The way the universe appears to us is exactly how it would appear to a being inside a block universe. That is making sens...

Yeah, that sort of thing. Conservation laws are bookkeeping strategies for physicists. Odd, how they work.

That't be a book rather than a post. No, I'll not go into it. It's outside the scope of this thread, it's outside my present interests and in the end ...

The debate between myself and Creative is along similar lines - that some particular belief does not have a correlate item in the believers mind or br...

Well, no it doesn't mean the flow of time is an illusion. Further, the way the universe appears to us is exactly how it would appear to a being inside...

My thoughts exactly.

Alright folks, I'm pretty sure you already listened someone saying x or y about trolling. First of all, there are many people just randomly repeating ...

Mad, you've a good basic understanding of critical rationalism. Nice summation. Well, not quite, although that's the pop view. Unfalsified theories ar...

Logical positivism is not the whole of analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein, despite being adored by the Vienna Circle, rejected them precisely because t...