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I have mostly been exposed to Davidson through Rorty. That said, I think coherentist approaches are likely to be found among charitable conversational...
December 16, 2019 at 02:02
I connect with this Heidegger. We are being-in-a-world-with-others-in-language, a unitary phenomenon. Our language discloses or unveils a shared reali...
December 16, 2019 at 01:57
I agree with you. I'd call this the speculative truth. For practical reasons, we often have to understand ourselves as a meat-box of thoughts and feel...
December 16, 2019 at 01:28
It is nice to win arguments. To me it's a temptation I try to manage. As you say, it's an addiction. Perhaps you'll agree that learning is often a cas...
December 15, 2019 at 23:50
I will humor you. The number of points in is uncountably infinite. Measure, however, is only countably additive. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Countabl...
December 15, 2019 at 23:36
You are asking math to do what it cannot do and does not claim to do, namely metaphysical philosophy. If you want a deep investigation of time, look i...
December 15, 2019 at 23:25
'Foundations' is a misleading metaphor. In general, applied math comes first. Calculus was invented and successfully applied long before a careful def...
December 15, 2019 at 23:10
It is indeed a complicated issue. I have been quite attracted to intuitionism at times. I haven't studied it closely because my institution was not on...
December 15, 2019 at 08:47
We need the sensory domain, though. Since we are fundamentally social beings, it's our sense organs and our flesh generally that make language and tho...
December 15, 2019 at 08:30
I wonder how relevant the finitism still is. Note that we apply math with finite computers, and we use a finite subset of rational numbers to do so. O...
December 15, 2019 at 04:33
What occurs to me is that, when we discovered that 2 had no square root , we just invented a new kind of number, extended the concept. To me it looks ...
December 15, 2019 at 04:29
With formal languages perfect translation (between media) is not only possible but common. And I agree that this is fascinating indeed. But non-formal...
December 15, 2019 at 04:25
We might say that this orientation is meaning. The mind/matter distinction is a historical contingency. The beetle in the box is problematic. https://...
December 15, 2019 at 04:08
Indeed. The human being is a radically historical and social being. What I am pre-philosophically inclined to call 'my' reason is the work of centurie...
December 15, 2019 at 04:01
Clearly we think as individuals. Wouldn't you agree? But we think in the words of the tribe.
December 15, 2019 at 03:30
The problem is that you think you can do philosophy of math with only pre-school mathematics. If you don't know how to read and write proofs, then you...
December 15, 2019 at 02:17
For me the main problem here is that God ends up functioning as a piece of explanatory machinery, Himself unexplained. It's like painting a beautiful ...
December 15, 2019 at 00:52
I think that's a good question. To me it's fair indeed to operate at this level and engage in a philosophical debate about the rules of the game that ...
December 15, 2019 at 00:36
I agree. As I understand Derrida, one of the deep fantasies of philosophy is meaning without 'physical support,' meaning without a vessel that is dire...
December 15, 2019 at 00:02
I agree with you. To me this is humanism, the 'religion' of intellectuals. There is one human rationality. This 'transcendental pretense' is central b...
December 14, 2019 at 23:54
Did God create some to be slaves and others to be masters? Perhaps He marked their skin to help us figure out who's who. This offensive thought is use...
December 14, 2019 at 23:50
I suggest looking into statistics. That explains how the macro world is quasi-deterministic. Resolving that difficulty, however, doesn't (in my view) ...
December 14, 2019 at 23:31
The issue is even bigger than math. 'Meaning' is external. Sure, we have various intuitions, but intelligibility is primarily a social phenomenon. Thi...
December 14, 2019 at 23:19
It can and has all been done with symbols. It's like a game of chess. In practice words are used to abbreviate formal proofs and aid the intuition. ht...
December 14, 2019 at 21:15
To me this frames infinity as an object that already exists, already has a nature. Philosophers can compare their intuitions in natural language, but ...
December 14, 2019 at 21:05
A case can be made that knowledge isn't something other than our conventional use of the word 'knowledge.' To learn a language is to learn how to use ...
December 14, 2019 at 09:51
Thanks. I think there is some truth in that, but those linguistic problems are also the problems of what it means to be human, as I see it. What is la...
December 14, 2019 at 09:30
The ellipses aren't necessary. We have an increasing sequence of partial sums that is not bounded above. This sequence has no limit in the real number...
December 14, 2019 at 09:12
Later in the text, after being told that philosophy evolves toward the truth, we find that If you successfully made sense of the quotes above, you alr...
December 14, 2019 at 08:43
Perhaps we should (as some of us already are?) think of justification in terms of convention. A false belief is justified if it is obtained according ...
December 14, 2019 at 06:36
Right. Heidegger, indeed. But (and I hope you'll agree) not on his authority but rather on his successful unconcealment of the phenomenon. Since I've ...
December 14, 2019 at 06:27
I think I agree with you here. 'Fame' and 'money' are masks in a certain sense for some impossible enjoyment. In a narrow context, though, there is no...
December 14, 2019 at 04:34
Indeed. We are forced to trust experts, but only an expert can distinguish between a genuine and fake expert. There is too much human knowledge. The h...
December 14, 2019 at 04:22
I'm tempted to agree with you. But I do have concerns. The collapse of trust only emphasizes our passivity. The 'decapitated machine' of capitalism do...
December 14, 2019 at 02:09
I just thought I'd add that I think that gods function as emotion-generating community-binding symbols. The temptation for many is to somehow take rel...
December 14, 2019 at 02:05
I think the way forward here is to investigate the ideas of causation and explanation. We sometimes say that we've explained something when we have fi...
December 14, 2019 at 01:48
I agree. It's an intermediate phenomenon. But trusting language (as you did when you wrote the sentence above) is usually at least as automatic as tru...
December 14, 2019 at 00:00
0 has no multiplicative inverse, hence 1/0 is an undefined or meaningless symbol. That's true. That there are an infinite number of points in a unit l...
December 13, 2019 at 23:02
I think he's making a useful distinction. While I understand the temptation to interpret trustingly reading a clockface as 'belief,' the event is so a...
December 13, 2019 at 08:49
This is a good point. We can extend it. We don't check the meanings of the words we use as we use them. All our conscious decision making depends on u...
December 13, 2019 at 08:42
I should have mentioned that it was from 'Existentialism is a Humanism.' https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm Is t...
December 13, 2019 at 08:23
Awesome. We agree. 'Pragmatic middle ground' is a good phrase.
December 13, 2019 at 05:58
I think you are on to something here, especially with 'collective intuition on morality.' I connect this to Sartre. I think Sartre gets it half-right....
December 13, 2019 at 05:56
This seems like the prototypical or ideal lie. Beyond that we have metaphor and ambiguity. ' 'Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies.' 'Truths are li...
December 13, 2019 at 05:48
Right. Roughly he can say 'I know X' when he has done what is roughly expected to justify such a claim. Since we actually use the word 'know' all the ...
December 13, 2019 at 05:46
I tend to agree with you. I wonder whether you'll agree with me that this follows from convention. We just don't tend to use 'knowledge' for false bel...
December 13, 2019 at 05:43
I agree with all of this. At the end you hint at just how complex the problem actually is. Our 'toy' examples are great for showing the problems with ...
December 13, 2019 at 05:41
This seems correct and well expressed. This JTB & clock example is new to me and illuminating.
December 13, 2019 at 05:26
I suggest that we be careful with this distinction. 'I know that X' is a statement that we know how to use. Perhaps we should also be wary of grammar....
December 13, 2019 at 05:22