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fdrake

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No, a reasonably held belief has a justification for it. Arbitrary beliefs do not. A justification is not required for a belief to be a belief, but it...
January 15, 2020 at 16:37
For claims like "there was a creator of the universe", which already play part in conceptual arguments and constrain empirical matters, the ability to...
January 15, 2020 at 16:15
No, not at all. A non-cognitive explanation for holding a belief describes a cause for it but is not a justification. No. What we know however limits ...
January 15, 2020 at 15:34
Because something has been believed historically and had social institutions devoted to that belief does not entail it is well justified given what we...
January 15, 2020 at 15:03
"The universe was created" is either vague and unsupported or entails things which are implausible given what we know. Was it an agent? Before the adv...
January 15, 2020 at 14:56
The fallibility, incompleteness and contingency of knowledge entails absolutely nothing about whether the universe was created by an agent or not. An ...
January 15, 2020 at 12:52
Let me flip the question around on you. Can you state all that you do when flipping an omelet?
January 14, 2020 at 23:23
To my understanding, paradigm shifts occur when privileged statements and techniques at the centre of a research paradigm get revised. It is rare that...
January 14, 2020 at 22:28
I have a nitpicky logical tone because I wanted to get a clear statement of your position. I apologise if it made you uncomfortable. Yes. I understood...
January 14, 2020 at 21:01
Can you justify this? It seems to me that I can use: "Is this universe a created universe?" Because there are an almost infinite number of different t...
January 14, 2020 at 20:50
I imagined the details linking your statements to each other. You didn't spell them out. (Hypothesis generation is arbitrary) & (Knowledge is fallible...
January 14, 2020 at 20:36
The negation of "the universe is an egg" has probability 0. Why would I consider things of probability 0? There is no evidence that the universe is no...
January 14, 2020 at 20:27
And what do paradigm shifts and the falsifiability criterion have to say about creation hypotheses again? It consists of two outcomes, the empty set a...
January 14, 2020 at 20:19
Tell that to any funding body, ethics committee or practicing scientist.
January 14, 2020 at 20:14
50/50 is impossible in that case. The only consistent assignment of probabilities to that set which satisfies the probability axioms assigns all proba...
January 14, 2020 at 20:12
Sample space: {empty set, The universe is an egg}, probability of the universe being an egg, 1! Logic! Mathematics! Probability!
January 14, 2020 at 20:05
Someone posits something arbitrary, is otherwise logical, and makes a sensible inference; garbage in, garbage out. But what if the universe is a egg? ...
January 14, 2020 at 19:59
The fallible and incomplete nature of knowledge is not evidence for any hypothesis of creation.
January 14, 2020 at 19:39
If pushed, almost 0%, it would be very surprising for me. It necessitates a lot of hypothesis with vaguely specified mechanisms relying upon incredibl...
January 14, 2020 at 19:24
"Devan is wrong about all conclusions he tries to derive from maths" or "Devan is right about some conclusions he tries to derive from maths", it's 50...
January 14, 2020 at 18:58
P (Is there a creator | inconsistency of creator concept ) = 0 There, equal validity to everything you've said. Therefore there's no creator.
January 14, 2020 at 18:47
Always a good idea. Advice I could do with following. Thanks for clarifying.
January 14, 2020 at 18:41
I have eggs or bacon on my bed. 50% chance of eggs, 50% chance of bacon. I look at my bed. No eggs, no bacon. What went wrong? Maybe I had salad or ma...
January 14, 2020 at 18:31
Thread has two years since the last post in it, original participants are less likely to respond. I don't understand the double negative distributed o...
January 14, 2020 at 16:08
My overall argument is for the claim that it is possible to be certain of things that we do not believe. "Do not believe" as in "lack belief in" rathe...
January 14, 2020 at 09:00
It seems to me your standards for someone demonstrating that there are components of know how which cannot be stated are to state them; that they must...
January 14, 2020 at 03:30
EG, here's a cooking guide for sunny side up eggs: This makes sense. I know how to gently crack an egg into a pan. But if I were to try and list what ...
January 13, 2020 at 23:26
Oh I have no compunctions about talking about things which are not numerically identical to language items. All that matters is that we can treat what...
January 13, 2020 at 23:05
Regarding the sense of necessity thing, maybe this helps spell out my suspicions that it doesn't tell us much. Define that a given statement x is poss...
January 13, 2020 at 17:42
I agree! "X is certain about P => X believes that P". This doesn't address whether we can be certain of things that are not numerically identical to t...
January 13, 2020 at 13:34
Only once you've fixed the underlying logic, I think. I'm not too happy with bringing in an exterior sense of modality to the theorems. If we're in a ...
January 12, 2020 at 20:31
I think this is about right. Though it's clearly true that not every first order structure has the empty domain as a model; eg "There exists an x such...
January 12, 2020 at 17:47
Maybe a logical reframing of this might be that it's possible to be certain of things that we do not believe that we believe? IE: Possibly If belief a...
January 12, 2020 at 17:29
Bit about the univalence axiom was in one of @"Mephist"'s posts, no idea what happened there.
January 12, 2020 at 11:45
In my experience, formal intuition works more like an open neighbourhood around a proof than of proofs themselves. There are essential details and ine...
January 11, 2020 at 16:15
But yes, thinking about it again, what you've said is accurate. I've not written down what sets are, natural numbers are, rational numbers are etc; bu...
January 11, 2020 at 00:06
IMHO you can start wherever you like, the "existence" of any object that satisfies some property is really only relative to some other object. Like "t...
January 10, 2020 at 23:57
I agreed very hard on this in my heart. Tutorials and seminars in abstract algebra mixed between people who preferred algebra and people who preferred...
January 10, 2020 at 23:38
:up: Great discussion. I don't really know if this contributes much to it, but I want to throw it among people I'm interested in reading talk about ma...
January 10, 2020 at 23:03
Thanks, banned.
January 10, 2020 at 21:49
In case it is not obvious why functions should be defined as having the property "if two inputs to the function are the same, the output should be the...
January 10, 2020 at 21:23
I think you're equivocating between: (1) If someone knows something, they obtained that knowledge through a process they can (at least) partially desc...
January 10, 2020 at 19:31
It's difficult to see if you're making an argument or making a series of unconnected statements about formal languages but not about the reduction of ...
January 10, 2020 at 18:19
Just look at the quote. "Reasoning within the formal system is much different to reasoning about the formal system itself". You don't even need a form...
January 10, 2020 at 17:25
So, we shouldn't trust you to know when a formal system is relevant for epistemology or not...
January 10, 2020 at 17:05
Ah yes, the MU puzzle, something which entirely resembles how humans come to conclusions using evidence and argument...
January 10, 2020 at 16:56
I think you found your own answer, then.
January 10, 2020 at 16:43
You mistake the claim that all stipulated axioms and formal systems are useful or arbitrary or relevant in every sense for the much weaker claim that ...
January 10, 2020 at 16:32
You're talking about what follows if you accept the axioms as true. Not about what justifies stipulating them in the first place. There are good axiom...
January 10, 2020 at 16:00
Unless I interpret the statement as false and study the consequences. :chin: But yes, there is a component of choice in setting up any formal system; ...
January 10, 2020 at 15:31