Who says they know things to be false or there obviously is no issue? Their opponents? Why trust someone's opponents to give an accurate psychological...
Hmmm, I'm not so sure about this. There was a serial rapist who after being caught said he didn't understand what was so bad about rape, because he di...
Yes, I'm asking a question about the human ability to put individual things into categories and hierarchies. It's either an epistemological question o...
Being pole of? Problem is you can't reference which pole without it being an arbitrary linguistic decision. Pole of A makes it sound like A is first o...
The idea that there are individual things classified as "electron" is the issue. How do we make this classification of individuals? Not just similar p...
True. The spatial relation of being closer to one pole versus the other exists, though. And that can matter for climate and other things. Russell shou...
Are you making a case for nominalism ... :razz: Plato's forms aren't the only kind. Aristotle's are more grounded. Let's just take one example from ph...
That "north of" is a universal relation in that it doesn't matter what sort of locations there are on a spherical region of space like a planet, some ...
So you're saying it's self-evident that universals refer to nothing, and yet people have debated whether they refer to something. If one can understan...
What if space and time are not fundamental, but emerge from something more fundamental which we can only allude to? I bring it up because the bedrock ...
Except that a university is also a social organization, and organizations are more difficult to be relegate to a name for a group of individuals, land...
That's a good summary of the arche-fossil argument. What I take from all this is correlation is limited by the fact that we're born and die into this ...
I believe the argument is that science references a time where we didn't exist which gave rise to our correlated existence in which the world appears ...
That would be dissolving the issue as meaningless to debate on any side of the issue as you set out in the OP. But what does it mean to say the univer...
If it was self-evident, there wouldn't be long-standing philosophical debates over universals. Platonists think they can. Not if it's motivated by a p...
Isn't it a bit more than this? That the special sciences are in principle replaceable by a single fundamental science, usually physics. That means cau...
@"Snakes Alive" It should be noted this is similar to Hume's issue with causality. We talk as if all sorts of things cause or cause other things. That...
We're conceptualizing the particulars into abstract categories for some reason. And it ranges from laws of nature to chairs and dogs. Now, you can say...
If it can be answered by linquistics and psychology. Note that it needs to avoid using universals to do so. Rather, it needs to show how universal con...
Has the question of why our language is full of universals when all we experience is particulars been satisfactorily answered? Even if you say that th...
Look above as well. I updated my post. That sentence does remain and I stand by it. You were asking for a story depicting the existence of universals....
Right, but that's not how metaphysical arguments go. There is a definition for universals that differs from particulars. It's just not something avail...
Sounds like that could be turned into a metaphor. There was a philosophy book on embodied cognition that made the claim all of western metaphysics was...
The problem is that the world we experience is going to be the same with or without universals. That is the debate. You could have someone become enli...
It's only empirical if you can unplug. Otherwise, your senses are going to tell what the Matrix shows them. The universe being a simulation would be o...
I did edit my post to add a sports analogy. Fans will debate endlessly who's the best in a sport. It's meaningful, but is there a right answer? That's...
We have stories like Plato's cave, the Matrix, Inception and what not. Metaphysics is difficult because often claims are being made of reality beyond ...
But as I tried to point out before, you will find this sort of thing with any popular unsolved question. But maybe a sports debate like who is the gre...
You want me to write two novels, one where the plot demonstrates one side of metaphysical claim, and another where it demonstrates the other? As inter...
Here's the rub. I've said I can understand metaphysical statements. But then others of your persuasion will come along and claim that I don't really u...
Fair enough. But that's a fundamental problem, isn't it? We can't even agree on what makes a statement meaningful. I don't know what that means for ph...
Whether there exists universal categories which material things take their form from. There are different possibilities. Nominalism says nope on one e...
The mind-independence part is substantive enough for Berkley to declare materialism incoherent. Whether he succeeds is another matter. But we can just...
Okay, well let's take universals. What Platonists are tying to do is explain why it is that our language is populated with universals, while particula...
And idealist can make this move for experience, but that differs significantly from the move the materialist is making. Let's take the double slit exp...
Is that not verificationism? The thing here is that there if you don't agree that meaning depends on verification, then there's no reason to dismiss m...
It means other animals can perceive things we can't. It means X-Rays can pass through solid objects. It means a beam of photons can produce either a w...
I think it has naive realist claims. Material things would be different since their properties and behaviors are not exhausted by our perception of th...
Right, of course the real world in the Matrix is presumably physical. Another version of this would be an interpretation of QM where consciousness col...
But that's not quite right. The unreflective way we take the world to be is physical. As in there's this material stuff we perceive and interact with ...
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