The Great Whatever

Not at all. Your example of mercury in a thermometer is precisely an example put to use for the purpose of quantitative measurement. Number in of itse...

I think there is some sort of confusion here. The point is not that there could be 'negative mercury,' but that an amount of mercury could change in h...

So my problems are: -I don't see why an analog system can't deal with or include negation or identity -I don't see why nature would have to be analog ...

LOL Scott Soames senpai noticed us ^_^

So then let's try this: -There is negation in language. This looks indisputable. -By your argument, language must therefore be a digital system. -So t...

Okay, even accepting these are true, this just seems like goalpost-shifting. I never said that to say something is identical to itself is nonsensical ...

But isn't this only saying that identity statements of this sort generally have communicative functions that they're put to? Surely this is compatible...

I don't think there is an online me. Yes, I go online, but that doesn't mean there are multiples of me, or something like that, just that sometimes th...

I don't think I mean any of those things. That might be implied depending on the situation, sure. But that's not what the sentence means. For example,...

I'm not sure what you mean by an identity parameter. Do you mean some quality with respect to which things are identical, like color? If so, there see...

But what does it matter whether identity is an imposed category? Have I argued for any specific construal of what numerical identity is? I've only tri...

Not so, after all I'm TGW, and no one else can be me. Of course, other people could have the name 'TGW.' But that is not the same thing as being me (T...

Okay, but is it true? Surely if it's redundant, if it adds nothing to what you already know, you recognize that it's true? And yet, I'm predicating id...

So what is it with respect to, in this case? And what about the 'Adam is Adam' sentence? Surely this is true? There is not going to be any parameter o...

Also, just to note, even if none of this goes through, 'Adam is Adam' is still a true sentence, and one that makes sense. The fact that one isn't goin...

The sentence doesn't say that the man has two names. That may be a requirement for its being true, and it may even be what we intend to convey by usin...

The value of 'Mr. Jones' is Mr. Jones. The value of 'Adam' is Mr. Jones, too. So the meaning of the sentence is that Mr. Jones is Mr. Jones. It assert...

But that's exactly the point. Since they refer to the same thing, we're saying of one thing that it is itself (that is, it is identical to itself). An...

I don't know too much about this, but as I understand it the relative identity has a non-relative identity underlying it, with a domain of non-sorted ...

No, but people say things like, Mr. Jones is Adam. They're the same person. And so if Mr. Jones went to the bathroom, Adam went to the bathroom. There...

Language, Truth & Logic - A. J. Ayer Syntactic Structures - Noam Chomsky Word and Object - W. V. O. Quine Aspects of the Theory of Syntax - Noam Choms...

I am not too familiar with dialetheic logic, but my understanding is that dialetheism doesn't have to do with identity, which is a relation, but with ...

Yeah, that sounds right. But I think value for authority is the norm in human life generally. So it's only in the context of an oddly liberal society ...

? Men don't get any of that, I'm not sure what you're talking about. An undesirable man won't be married in the first place anyway. Do men want that? ...

I don't think angry virgins are powerful enough to do anything tbh. Men don't really have any power in that domain, least of all undesirable men. I te...

Honestly, this criticism is too vague to process. You'd have to say what you mean.

Initially I think no. As it's becoming popularized it's taken on a Trump wing, it looks like. But people like Milo Yiannopoulos that have fomented thi...

That sounds plausible to me. In general there is an odd tendency to see sex as preferably 'free market' in a context where most people despise an unre...

What do you mean by a term? I ask because the word has a technical meaning in logic, a well-formed string with a denotation (usually of an individual,...

That's a weird thing to wonder, since analytic philosophy is positively drenched in reflection on the nature of logic, and always has been.

That's interesting. Maybe not quite what I have in mind, but I do think you can get stuck in this sort of world-wise complacency that empties any fiel...

On first pass I'm inclined to dismiss it as professional solipsism of the type that aging academics always have when they see the new generation inter...

Maybe -- BLM seems to me sinister because it equates being black with being criminal, and defending criminality as equal to defending black communitie...

My personal take on this is that rightism is more or less the natural state of things and leftism is a historical aberration that has to be fueled by ...

The alt right as I've come to understand it is a resurgence of genuine rightism, as opposed to mere modern conservatism (which is just a brand of clas...

That's not how it works in standard modal logic. Individuals are not 'in' worlds, they are assigned properties relative to worlds, while the domain of...

I asked a layman about this yesterday and he said Pluto was never a planet. I asked, what about before 2006, when the consensus was that it was a plan...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usR6ubBdmx4

That's precisely it, though: 'what if?' The fundamental philosophical question to my mind is not 'why' but 'so what?' If there were such a good, it wo...

About Nixon? That's not even on the subject.

The idea that whether a property of an individual is essential or not is stipulated is not found in Kripke's works.

Man, I hated Naming and Necessity once I dug into it. I still think to this day that it's an example of how not to do philosophy, and although ultimat...

This seems wildly implausible. Surely you learned this fact in school?

I'd be interested to know why (you think that) Russell thought it was a good idea, because I don't have a clear sense of that myself. It might be I ju...

Paris is the capital of France, and it may be the property of Paris most people are familiar with: but the word 'Paris,' so the thought goes, simply d...

If you thought that the sense of 'Paris' somehow encoded its referent being the capital, though, you might not think that. It might be that Paris' (th...

I don't have a firm position on essential properties, but I do think there are levels of tolerance people as a rule are more or less willing to accept...

Maybe, I think it depends. There are empirical facts about what people agree to, but some of these 'agreements' when they amount to nothing more than ...

Sure, there is? There are capitol buildings and government functions. Do you really think being a capital consists in nothing other than people callin...

And clearly, we can imagine Paris not being the capital of France, so I don't see what the problem is.