Pfhorrest

On the whole I have no real objections to any of this. I do think it's not really an argument against anything I've been saying, because I'm not claim...

Ojai Valley, CA.

Last night around sunset I took a walk around a nice neighborhood with my girlfriend, discussing the election as we went. As we passed a house with a ...

I did, and the gist of it seemed to be that conservatives have good points that we should all be able to agree about, on a list of issues where progre...

On my account philosophical claims are not properly claims about what is or isn't real to begin with, and so are not the kind of claims that are made ...

Yes, I call that “transcendentalism” and reject it precisely because it demands fideism. I considered mentioning that in my response to Isaac just abo...

We can’t necessarily tell what epistemological method someone else is using in the third person. We can plausibly guess at it, judging from their disc...

So instead we should just preemptively concede to the conservatives on everything? The common ground that Trump’s base and the progressive base have i...

Is that not a new development since the advent of Trump-Russia collusion? I remember in 2017 thinking it strange that it was the Democrats not the Rep...

A fideist thinks at least one of their beliefs is not subject to question. In any of the A-B-C scenarios we've been discussing, they hopefully will ad...

Being epistemically compelled to change beliefs just is falsifying them. It feels like you're being intentionally obtuse here. If you can't (without i...

Assuming that there are some invariant laws of nature or another is not itself induction. Only seeing a lot of examples of a pattern and taking that a...

On a justificationist account, sure. The critical rationalist / falsificationist account is aiming precisely to rectify that problem. Induction is fin...

The whole point is that inductive reasoning is not valid. No number of observations of the consequent of an implication can tell you that the antecede...

They underdetermine precisely because they are theory-laden and those theories with which they are laden can always be changed to change what the obse...

Are you also upset at all the Jews and gays and Poles etc who lived in 1930s Germany and failed to stop the rise of the Nazis? They were Germans too, ...

But other (background) beliefs would compel us to interpret our observations (i.e. laden them with the theory contained in those beliefs) as demonstra...

I am reasonably confident that Biden will win the presidency, but much less confident that the Democrats will take control of the Senate, which IMO is...

Say you think fire is phlogiston. On account of that you expect to see certain things. You go make observations and you see those things. On that basi...

In Georgia, for instance, which will probably decide control of the senate, the Republican is currently beating the Democrat by a reasonably small mar...

Large population, like any state with a lot of them.

I'd be happy to work less and for less money, if people would demand less money from me to just keep on living where I am, so I didn't have to go work...

The logical forms of falsificationism and confirmationism/verificationism are completely opposite: one is the valid deduction of modus tollens, the ot...

I think the Georgia senatorial election is probably actually the most important one this year, as the real big bad of recent politics has been Mitch M...

:up: I'm not sure exactly what point you're arguing for here. Previously I thought you were arguing along the same lines as Isaac and Banno that you c...

See earlier about strawmanning falsification. Actual falsification that Popper et al supported is not the dogmatic falsificationism that Quine et al o...

The meat of the process happens when "you're also going to have to rearrange the rest of your beliefs somehow or another to accommodate whichever of t...

I was thinking of the murderer at the door. What exactly did he say that was not quite that?

Kant though lying was always wrong even to save a life but capital punishment was A-OK. Whatever merits his formal philosophy may have had, as a perso...

Is this some neologism for "their"? In any case, as to the actual question, I suspect that people's intuitions don't separate mind and body when it co...

Ceter parabis clauses are exactly the thing at issue here. Falsification in the Popper sense, but not the strawman sense, doesn't assume there are any...

Yes, I think perhaps you're attaching too much significance to the word "believe". To me, to believe something just means to think it's true, not any ...

You got that D = (A and ~B and C) where C = ~(A and ~B), so D = (A and ~B and ~(A and ~B)) and so is flatly self-contradictory, right? That's why we c...

Yes, but an important thing is that some beliefs are about the relations between other beliefs. If C = "A implies B", then you can rule out the possib...

Cause it’s actually lizard people from inside the hollow earth, right?

It's the same topic you derailed the other thread into, it's not the same topic as the OP of the other thread. ETA: Actually it's not even the same to...

In all of these cases, I've already argued for "A" elsewhere, and I usually link back to earlier threads where that was the case. I'm slowly stepping ...

I'm trying to move that discussion to this thread so that people who aren't interested in the OP of the other thread don't miss out on it, because the...

Yes, that is the kind of narrowing I'm talking about. As I said above, there are two parts to this view as I construct it, a "critical" part whereby w...

Yes. “Seems best” was speaking loosely. Jump out of the way of that car, in any direction you want, unless you’d be jumping into the way of something ...

I’m not a fan of Feyerabend (though I’d think you and Isaac would be), but in the case of picking which belief to tentatively hold until you’re oblige...

It’s not so much entitled as it is obliged, on pain of inconsistency. Like a car coming at you, you’ve just got to get out of the way somehow, it does...

Say you think that doing a certain dance (A) causes it (if A then B) to rain (B). You do that dance, or at least you try to do it right, but it doesn’...

But it does, as I pointed out without refutation in turn. That is compatible with a falsificationist approach, as I'm going to elaborate in another th...

Now I'm wondering what the fallout would be if some horde of crazy Trumpers ended up "accidentally" killing Biden himself. (I'm picturing Biden himsel...

My understanding of falsificationism is that it is founded on rejecting the very concept of conclusively proving any one particular belief, in favor o...

Contradiction is not argument. You keep claiming things I already agree with somehow refute my views and it’s getting tiresome. All it shows is that y...

I’m quite aware of Hempel and the good points he makes against confirmationism, which I am also already against.

Only of you ever thought falsification was supposed to prove one particular belief (or set of beliefs) as the sole unique correct one. That was never ...

I covered that already: Rejecting the new observation is always an option. But then there are other things you would have to reject in order to be con...