But this is wrong. Horses don't stop being horses when we stop calling them 'horse.' They are still horses. This is because to be a horse is to be a c...
It does not depend on how we use the word. To be a horse is to be a certain kind of animal, which is possible even if there are no words. Horses were ...
How can someone become gay, without becoming homosexual, if to be gay is just to be homosexual? That makes no sense. And clearly since to be be member...
Of course it doesn't make sense. You think people became gay when a new sense of the word 'gay' was coined? No-- they were already gay. Furthermore, m...
What do you mean, 'so?' There is no 'so' about it: being a horse consisting in having certain properties is not causally dependent on people choosing ...
It is not like saying that. Common nouns are property-denoting, while names are not. There is of course a sense in which you are still Michael, even i...
Obviously people do more than manipulate symbols when they use language: for one, they employ these symbols in social settings for various purposes. A...
You'd have to ask a biologist that one (my hope is that in this tedium you see the error). Again, no, horses aren't horses because we call them 'horse...
I asked what you thought it was, or were claiming to in guise of philosopher. If you show me the two animals, I can show you by pointing! I certainly ...
The best way to explain grief to you would be to kill one of your family members. Except that's NEVER the answer anyone gives unless they're a philoso...
But I don't know the answer because you are a philosopher and have idiosyncractic, non-intuitive ideas about what it means to understand things, for e...
It rules out nothing, because to know what it rules out, you'd have to already know the answer to precisely the question you just asked. But this is h...
Just because it isn't maximally informative doesn't mean it's uninformative: there are also lots of things that are not feelings that this rules out. ...
Not necessarily. Which is why when someone asks what grief is, and so wants a kind of characterization or definition, saying that grief is what you ca...
No. Understanding the description is understanding what sorts of things fall under it. And yet there is no way in which 'grief' means 'thing I call 'g...
No, you can't do that, because then there's just a question, okay, so what the hell do you call horse? In response to that, you'd do what a SANE perso...
iff clauses are definitions. If someone is asking you what a horse is, they're roughy asking a definitional claim: what are the conditions that make s...
If a horse is that which you call 'horse,' it follows that if you do not call anything 'horse,' there are no horses. If there used to be horses but ar...
Then I'd ask if you were an idiot. That's not the appropriate way to answer that question, obviously. Horses aren't just the things we call horses -- ...
??? So what is grief then??? The evidence is that they display none of the qualities that make us think people feel, such as rigorously inspiring empa...
So people who don't speak English can't feel grief? I understand what a feeling is better than what a symbol is. We think other people feel because we...
Whatever it is, it is obviously not a mechanical response with an output such as "it's raining" upon feeling moisture. I take it we can agree that is ...
This sort of thing seems disingenuous -- if someone honestly claimed that if there was a computer designed to display 'it's raining' when water hits i...
A funny thing about this is that no one is actually taught math that way. Children aren't taught to output certain numbers when certain other numbers ...
That has been my experience. I tend to believe now that reading large amounts of secondary literature is actually positively harmful not only to your ...
This is philosophy, we don't care about random opinions. It's not my job to assume your random opinion as the default and then try to move you out of ...
I don't think the mere appeal to prehistory suffices, though, which is all these criticisms ever amount to. The past, if you like, is like a rule of t...
On the contrary it is in a way all we experience. We tell stories about it in refracted light because like the sun, you can't look at it too long. So ...
I agree that time is a kind of veil of Maya, and that life as experienced is timeless. Not eternal or immortal, but timeless, and time is a kind of pr...
Isn't the point of the Oscars that they're supposed to have artistic influence? Doesn't the fact that the don't make their pretensions ridiculous on t...
Because life's problems are structural, and individual gestures don't remedy them. If you were actually interested in 'teaching how to fish,' then by ...
That depends on what you mean by 'helping people.' Most things that you might think would help them actually won't, and those that do (like giving the...
The best way to end starvation is not to reproduce. You approve of the suffering of starvation because you accept that the world should continue as it...
It literally, factually is. And not only those who are starving! Sleep is another physical need. Life can't both be meaningless and filled with suffer...
Your life literally does revolve around eating, though. In order to have your needs met, you must spend the largest portion of your life doing things ...
I take representations to be impotent reactions to material conditions. Trying to change the material conditions by changing them is like trying to ma...
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