Marchesk

Right, but verification-transcendent propositions support the meaningfulness of metaphysics. I believe this is a Michael Dummett distinction for settl...

The Andromeda Galaxy is probably far enough away that we'll never know whether an intelligent civilization exists there. Yet we have every scientific ...

No, I was giving an example of a situation where we have good reason to suppose that the truth is verification-transcendent. You can't verify whether ...

Beyond our light cone, or even a few billion light years away is probably not ever going to be verifiable for us. But I don't know what advanced techn...

No, but whether or not there are aliens too far away for us to know about it is unverifiable.

Not sure I agree with that last part. Just because metaphysics might be undecidable for us doesn't mean there isn't truth. It's undecidable whether al...

For some people in the Western world, but it seems pretty vibrant in South American and Africa. I'm an atheist, but to call a religion with 2+ billion...

Exactly. For example., It can't all just be a dream, because a dream implies a waking world. If I"m always in a dream, I can't fall asleep to dream or...

This is confused. Our perceptual experiences are about things or events, but the experiences themselves are a mental activity. There is an important d...

But does that work as well with the other senses? Overly relying on vision can distort one's philosophical "picture". Csalisbury brought up the sun as...

Come on! Unicorns aren't hard to understand, anymore than drgaons or wizards are. They're just fictional creations. That doesn't make them meaningless...

That might be so. Colin McGinn postulated this is because we lack the cognitive makeup to answer such questions, although we can ask them somehow.

Seems rather obvious on the face of it. Did empiricists really believe that the raw sensory datum could be used to construct an understanding of the w...

That's what makes sense to me. I suppose a third person could come along and claim the disagreement is meaningless, as what happens in this thread. Bu...

We can and we do with science. The properties that don't depend on how we perceive the rock are how science describes a rock. But really, it's the obj...

Hahaha, funny! Do you wish you had an essential substance that didn't rely on properties?

Sure, and no doubt that is ammo for the anti-metaphyics side. Questions raised about meaningfulness in this thread: Can a debate be meaningful if the ...

I think essences in the things themselves would be an alternative to Platonism, but it's not without it's own difficulties. So sure, what you said is ...

Better already exists as a comparison in language. There's no problem saying that MJ or LJ are better than the average player. You will get consensus ...

Well then: Do you find that also too vague? I listed the well established positions in the debate, about which much has been said. My argument is that...

Good question. It's the contents of the mind which are not always real. We can both perceive a tree, which means there is a tree independent of your m...

Real in these discussions means mind-independent. Objects of perception are generally taken to be mind-independent things that exist without humans pe...

Let's take a sports example. Is athlete A greater than athlete B in a sport? Is Lebron James better than Michael Jordan? (pick your athletes and sport...

At least until you get deep in the theoretical physics weeds. Does superstring theory, or colliding 11 dimension branes in the multiverse count as a m...

The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning? From my experience of also...

Exactly.

That sounds like conceptualism, which is one answer to the problem of universals. It doesn't really matter for this discussion if universals exist. It...

So basically Kantian? Did Kant think that on Hume's account, knowledge was impossible? That these categories of thought have to already be there becau...

So I can talk about a particular dog, call him Beast, who happens to be bigger than most dogs. Notice that Beast is grouped into the category dog. All...

Right, but we go one step further and assume there is something necessitating the relationship, such that any future ball will break any future window...

I'll go ahead and answer these directly (numbers my addition): (1) The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk ab...

You did so on the grounds that anti-metaphysical statements are meaningless. You even stated as much in the first sentence of the previous post. That'...

Can you explain in what way it's senseless? Because I'm failing to see how it is. The only sense I can make of the claim that it's senseless is a pree...

Or someone will cry out that it's meaningless to point this out, because metaphysics.

That's an interesting thought. Philosophers do seem rather focused on the visual. Makes me wonder what would happen if we met aliens whose primary sen...

Good question. Revisiting: I would say they are claims about epistemology. Can epistemological claims be settled by psychology (or neuroscience)? I do...

Yes, thank you. The problem for empiricism if (1) is false is that non-particulars are often about things in the world (dog, tree, planet, force, soci...

How our language comes to have universal concepts when the world is full of individuals. What is it about the individual things that leads us to form ...

Let's take a related topic. Our ancestors realized the could count different things. Three rocks, three sticks, three birds, etc. From this they gener...

I have it explained it. But some of the posters pretend that they can't understand it to support the verificationist argument against metaphysics. The...

Right, so from that I infer that I'm a physical being. However, the mental is not so easily subsumed under the physical, so maybe I'm not entirely phy...

How is it that the dispute doesn't make sense to you?

Now it's just a matter of time before Quantum Mechanics makes its introduction into a metaphysical dispute.

Oh but we all know that gravity is so much more than our experience of it, from bending spacetime to relativistic frames. And before Newton, there was...

The same way I account of differences of opinions on anything. It doesn't make the disagreements meaningless, the questions that led to the disputes, ...

Any dispute on any topic will require moving beyond vague terms. If I ask whether Thor is more powerful than the Hulk in the Marvel Universe (comics o...

Actually, we can do so by noting that while we perceive individual things, our language is full of universal talk. This is at least partly based on th...

This is a silly game to play. How could they not be understood once one is well enough versed in the debate?

Well hopefully one isn't just talking about linguistic analysis when asking questions about the world. Seems like that's what the anti-metaphysical cr...

LOL! That's just the very, very beginning of the discussion, and people are going to want to know what you mean by a human being conscious. It can mea...