Aaron R

But that can't be right, can it? After all, the claim that experience can't be known in the third person is itself a third person claim about experien...

Hi Wayfarer. I’ve seen you write paragraphs like the above several times and am always struck by the ironic nature of the fact that in order for what ...

In my opinion Reichenbach does not make clear what he means when he says he doesn’t “sense” his impressions. On the one hand he says that he never “se...

Continuing on… Again, the evidence provided by “looks” claims seems to be parasitic upon more fundamental “is” claims. Jones’s “looks” claim is counte...

Hi @"Cabbage Farmer". You're putting me to shame here with the sheer volume of your replies. Sorry I'm not keeping up, but I'll go ahead pick up where...

I’m not sure I’d agree. My understanding is that Aristotle ultimately argues that substance is the unity of matter and form or, more generally, of dun...

Thanks and thanks!

My take on scholasticism: 1. Hylomorphic dualism provides an interesting and worthy counterpoint to the dichotomous substance dualism that undergirds ...

Chipping away... The anstoss concept goes back to Fichte. The self posits the "not-self" in order to posit the "self". The anstoss is the spontaneous ...

More thoughts: Right. Both Lewis and Price (like Reichenbach) tend to elide the distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts. These are e...

There’s no way I can keep up with you @"Cabbage Farmer", but here’s a start at some answers to your questions: I’d say that C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price ...

Here’s an extended summary regarding Sellars's analysis of "Looks" talk. I don't spend much time justifying my interpretation or explicitly engaging w...

Nothing wrong with that. I imagine this is the way most people work through a difficult text, whether they realize or not. You asked about historical ...

I think this is spot on. My take is that he's ultimately pressing a distinction between two senses of "immediacy": the immediacy of the act of sensing...

You've really analyzed the hell out of this paper. Nice work, man! Like Calisbury, I'm short on time otherwise I'd participate a little more.

Yes, Sellars will ultimately agree that claim, though in the context of the quote that you’ve been discussing he’s not mentioning it in order to agree...

For Sellars, raw sensory content is epistemologically inert – it has no propositional content and it has no inferential consequences. Sensory content ...

The difference is that sensations are not the kinds of things that can be veridical or non-veridical. Unlike beliefs (of which perceptions are a speci...

I have come to have a very high regard for Sellars as a philosopher, and for Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind in particular. It's great to see pe...

Fair enough, and I think I agree, for what it's worth. Brandom claims to be a prosententialist about truth (and he is with regard to the use of the ph...

Haven't you said (elsewhere) that you believe that metaphysical realism comes down to the theory truth?

The way I expressed it was misleading. For Descartes the concept of thought literally excludes the concept of extension (and vice versa). Nothing is e...

Hmm. Not sure that helps much. Here's what I'll say, then: Brandom is not a correspondence-theorist with regard to truth or reference. When Brandom sa...

Could you explain what you, specifically, mean by "non-deflationary"? There's a few different things this could mean, so I just want to make sure I un...

Can you elaborate on what you, specifically, mean by "a strong metaphysical sense"?

Yep. It attempts to be epistemologically "thick" while being ontologically "thin".

To be fair, I am presenting Brandom's deflationary realism as a response to something more like Berkeleyan Idealism rather than to what Chalmers has c...

In Brandom's account reference to objects is cashed out in terms of the semantics of singular terms, which is cashed out in terms of the semantics of ...

Let's refine the formulation of sense-dependency and reference-dependency, since my original formulation completely sucked: 1. A is sense dependent on...

Interesting. Most here seem to agree that the argument either fails or is not decisive, and for similar reasons. I thought we'd see more defenders of ...

The statement that "one ought not do wrong things" is practically a tautology. You can query whether a particular action is wrong, but asking why wron...

Is part of philosophy's role also to find answers to the questions that philosophy poses? In your opinion, would you say that the defense of the accep...

So let's take stock: The common thread running through many of the replies (with some exceptions) is that dogmatism errs insofar as it sacrifices "rea...

More convinced, perhaps, but not unconvinced as a consequence. I’m more convinced that 2 + 2 = 4 than that Fermat’s Theorem has been proven, but I don...

The dogmatic realist believes realism is true, and will attempt to justify it when pressed. But at the end of the day he admits that no metaphysical s...

Yeah, I mean a common refrain you’re going to hear from the dogmatic realist is that idealism collapses into solipsism when taken to its logical concl...

No worries, I was just being a bit cheeky.

Sorry for three posts in a row, but here are some additional thoughts regarding the OP: Generally speaking, I think that there are three main approach...

In my opinion, Harman's object-oriented realism ends up collapsing back into Kantian noumenalism wherein the "in-itself" (i.e. "real objects") is simp...

Thanks for the link to the Murti book. Looks like a worthwhile read. As you can probably tell, I am one of those unsophisticated ignoramuses that tend...

I agree with you regarding the etymological point, but I'm not sure there textual evidence supports your interpretation of Kant's own use of the word....

But in Kant's system, knowledge only occurs at the level of judgement, right? Since the noumenal world (i.e. the world in itself) epistemologically an...

Plenty of realists would disagree. "In itself" need not denote Kant's "ding an sich", which is just his particular take on the concept.

I think that any realism worth the name will require a metaphysics that can explain how it's possible for the world as known and the world as it is in...

What do you mean by "makes sense"? I mean, there's a fairly cogent story we can tell rooted in evolutionary theory that "makes sense" of why organisms...

It is, generally speaking, I was just simplifying for the sake of discussion.

Yep, that’s usually where appeals are made to second-order perceptual capacities and/or defeasible/non-monotonic reasoning processes. “Error” is what ...

Yes, or so the argument goes. Not everyone agrees, of course. My understanding is that Ray Brassier, for instance, would consider such a view to be no...

Right, so that's where you have guys like McDowell, Brandom and Haugeland arguing that the world itself is "in conceptual shape". I think it was McDow...

There's an ambiguity here that needs to be clarified. "What is the case" here refers to the form of truth as a concept or an idea governing discursive...