The Great Whatever

may of the things ppl car emost deeply about are things they don't have any way of figuring out. so in answer to your question, everyone i mean just a...

i demonstrate by example; you think no more clearly about 'the whole' for having studied philosophy, nor has anyone i'm aware of.

yes, we recognize that 'it's raining' is true iff it's raining. this has nothing to do with verification.

no it can't.

what are the truth conditions for "it's raining?" surely this is true iff it's raining. but as we just agreed, it's raining iff water is falling from ...

no, you don't stop thinking, you go study whatever it is you want to know about. philosophy has nothing to contribute to the special sciences.

philosophy doesn't help with that.

yep. so what's the matter? do you dissent to anything i've said? notice that i introduced truth with no reference to verification. so if what i say is...

OK, so, let's put the pieces together. what does it take for it to be raining? for water to fall from the sky. what does it take for it to be true tha...

i've never seen a philosopher do that in an interesting way, so probably not. in general philosophy contributes little to nothing to human knowledge. ...

the question has nothing to do with the word 'raining' and what it means. it has to do with what it takes for it to be raining. that's a meteorologica...

not at all. for example, philosophy is not about the valency of elements, or the valency of verbs. that's what chemistry and linguistics are about.

i never asked about the sentence 'it is raining' and its meaning, did i? re-read the post; i just asked about what it is for it to be raining. for tha...

philosophy roughly deals with those subjects of inquiry that take no special expertise. that is, philosophy deals with those problems you can solve ju...

ok, so for it to be raining, water has to be falling form the sky, nothing else. whether or not it's raining doesn't depend on whether there are any l...

let's try a different tack. let's talk abt. what it takes for it to be raining. here's my position: for it to be raining, water has to be falling from...

i'm not asking about statements right now, nor anything abt. perspectives. i'm asking the following question: does there need to be a method for verif...

how is it misleading?

does there have to be a method of verification that it's raining, for it to be raining?

does there have to be a method of verification that it's raining, for it to be raining?

michael: granted that in order to know whether something is true, you need a means of verification. but for it to be true, you don't.

no, for example, if i say 'it's true that it's raining,' i'm not saying anything about a statement. it can be true that it;s raining even if there are...

to understand what it takes for the claim to be true and to know how to verify it are distinct. i underdtand 'it's raining''s truth conditions whne i ...

yes, all methodology is granted by fiat. philosophy fails to have a methodology, probably because it has no subject matter.

if u look to its practical use, you'll find it's correctly used when it's raining. this has to do with water falling form the sky, not epistemic condi...

whether it's raining is a recognition-transcendent state of affairs (it doesn't matter whether you know/think/can figure out whether it's raining – al...

for p to be true is just for p. 'it's true that it's raining' means the same as 'it's raining.' that's it. this: is wrong. '"it is raining" is true' d...

why is that not an answer? it's the right answer, surely - we might say other things about what it means for gold to be found, having to do with what ...

truth can attach to sentence tokens, by having what those sentence tokens express be true. whether someone says something true is of course dependent ...

do not study philosophy. do something more interesting / worthwhile.

i take it that what's expressed by a sentence is distinct from the sentence qua linguistic object, since different sentences, both in the same languag...

yes. and gold melting at a certain pt. is also not a matter of convention; hence what's expressed by a sentence claiming that gold can't ever melt isn...

that sounds plausible.

that is not what i'm saying, although it may be a consequence of it. what i'm saying is super duper simple: to know what 'gold' means, you have to kno...

right. the above position claims, absurdly, that a competence in prospecting, metalworking, etc. is required to know what 'gold' means. perhaps some m...

they could fail all the time (say, if for some reason it became hard to identify gold, because the sign by which people identified it before went away...

i don't think competence with the word 'gold' requires an ability always to recognize gold. it just requires knowing that the word refers to that subs...

i just don't see what observations have to do with anything. if the ppl say 'gold doesn't melt,' and by that it's understood to mean it doesn't melt e...

yes, knowing how to use the word doesn't mean knowing everything about its referent. it means knowing what the word means - since the meaning of the w...

competence with use of a word doesn't just involve accidents, tho; if u don't know what gold is but just happen to use the word to point out what's ac...

the extension/intension distinction doesn't matter here. to use 'gold,' you have to be able to pick out samples of gold – that doesn't just mean happe...

i don't admit this. things we don't know about will very much affect us, and our language use. again the mistake is thinking language is self-containe...

philosophy has no method. have u read phil. books or seen prof. philosophers argue? they don't 'justify' shit. same with this thread, michael now seem...

actually sweetie, the way the world works doesn't depend on yr. hot philosophical 'opinions'

how hard to u have to get hit on the head to read shit like this and nod what kind of dumb premise is it, 'oh yeah, obviously everything must be somet...

i don't think it is easier, but i think professional philosophy as practiced allows this kind of move. all i ask is that ppl avoid it

i avoided my interlocutor's bringing their own worldview into the discussion by not conceding in the discussion when they attempted to do so

i just did it above y, the interlocutor failed to do this above

sure you can. whenever you use it with the pretense that it has argumentative weight, you simply note this and refuse to allow the interlocutor to pla...

that's not what's being asked, tho - the demand isn't psychological but dialectical. one ought not to bring one's prejudices to bear in the discussion...