Chomsky has a coherent philosophy of language as outlined in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, and sees himself as directly descended from the continen...
Phil. language doesn't really have 'great' figures so much as incremental technical advances. If I had to pick, probably Frege, for the principle of c...
The recent obsession with 'post-truth' is a media-manufactured panic and strikes me as incredibly, incredibly naive. The idea that politicians have ev...
Sometimes I will, but just because it's one of the things I know about. I won't bring it up first, though. I get a kick out of pretending to believe t...
I missed this before, but I just feel like this should be preserved as an example of bad philosophy. Obviously the scenarios are not physically the sa...
In 1988, Fates Warning brought the long-form rock medley, adopted in prog rock for over 15 years, to metal. It has been a staple of so-called progress...
How exactly is that nonsense? No, here you used "person" as a sortal. We might say, for example, that Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis are the same supe...
Clearly not, since in due time the White House might become something other than a building due to gradual changes. Yet it would still have the contin...
The point is that your view cannot say this, because as you've just gone through explaining, you cannot tell the difference between these two scenario...
The difference is the two have different truth conditions. For example, what you say is truth condition of the counterfactual could be fulfilled by su...
No. "Same" does not have to mean "exactly the same in every respect." Then yes, you can say "what if the White House were blah blah blah," including s...
It's still insane though. As if the only relevant criterion for remaining the same is exactly the same in every respect. We're not talking about names...
It can retain a functional identity, a physical identity more loosely grained than identical in every respect, a social identity, etc. Sure it's insan...
Why are those the only options? Obviously it's insane to insist that any object can only remain the same so long as it remains physically the same in ...
I don't know what you're looking for when you mean 'in what sense.' Does the example not make sense to you? Do you not understand how a building can b...
I don't know what you're talking about. You mean a building with different parts? Suppose you knocked a brick off a building. Is it a different buildi...
I don't understand what you mean by 'the nature of the difference.' Bricks are hunks of construction material, and a building is an edifice. An edific...
A brick is a chunk of material, and maybe a chunk of material in a certain physical configuration, or posed to be in such a configuration, and maybe a...
No, the building is a building. It's made of bricks, sure, but it's not identical to them, just like people aren't identical with the cells that make ...
Well, I agree. Of course when we're talking about Obama we're talking about Obama. And of course the actual Obama can be supposed to have different pr...
Agreed. But then I don't see the force of what you're saying. Individuals are just what individuals are according to vulgar opinion, various sorts of ...
So suppose someone hears the word 'Richard Nixon' and asks me what it means, or who it refers to. I respond 'it means whoever you want it to mean.' Is...
Nope. An individual is whatever it is – a person, a brick, or whatever. Individuals as formal objects in models do just that; they model. It's not as ...
Something's extension is what someone has in mind as its extension? Why is it not just its extension? Clearly I can't give a speech and use 'Richard N...
I think this is confused as it treats properties like mereological parts of an individual. They're not – a property is just sort of a mapping from ind...
This was just my point. Hence the revisionism, insofar as 'contingency speech' is an ordinary feature of language as revealed through counterfactuals....
I think to claim like andrewk does that larges swathes of discourse need to be reinterpreted because they are literally senseless (and we only say the...
Although it should be noted that it's possible for a name to refer to the set of properties that an individual bears relative to a world, rather than ...
What I am telling you is that counterfactuals do work, and in this way, Q.E.D. Your other option is massive error theory or linguistic revisionism, or...
There's some sort of misunderstanding here. An individual is whatever it is. So I'm an individual, and I'm concrete, not abstract – a person, of flesh...
I'm not interested in mass revision of ordinary language or mass error theory. Such talk isn't 'wrong' to the extent that the sorts of counterfactuals...
An individual isn't essentially a person. That individual may be a person in the actual world. So for instance I'm a person, and an individual, but I ...
I don't agree with Kripke on this, and his belief seems to stem from scientism that's at odds with ordinary usage. In ordinary usage 'water' likely de...
Being Barack Obama is what Barack Obama does, presumably. We don't stipulate that. He instantiates that property just by being who he is. That should ...
Rigid designation isn't dependent on essential properties. It's not that hard people, rigid designation means the individual denoted is invariant over...
The use of the sitting U.S. President as a stock example of a proper name in AP goes back at least to Harry Truman, I think. Kripke's lectures use Nix...
I don't really believe in impasses except where there's some cognitive difference, and it doesn't look like there is. I think your insistence on impas...
It wouldn't, since the semantic patterns referred to above involving how names versus definite descriptions must be interpreted in modal contexts woul...
First off, there's no what it means 'to you' or 'to me.' There's something the words mean by convention, and you can't arbitrarily decide what that is...
What reason is there for this? Why can't we talk about the same person, with alternate properties? Prima facie we do this all the time. But this is ri...
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