It's a thought experiment. Physicists also make use of those aplenty, not just philosophy. Their purpose is to tease out hitherto unnoticed consequenc...
Moore was envisioning a situation where the speaker (MacInstosh) doesn't know nor does he have any reason to believe that it's raining outside. The sp...
At today's news conference, while answering a journalist about precisely this issue, he essayed another metric. He said that if we exclude the deaths ...
You seem to be arguing that the predictor's being able to reliably predict your choice doesn't rob you of your freedom to see to it that you obtain $1...
This doesn't show that the concept of a predictor (or of someone having an infallible predictive power regarding the behaviour of some external system...
How individual people come to judge what words mean also is dependent on social facts regarding how they are conventionally used. Else, per impossibil...
Its not just because *I* personally think that a word has a certain connotation that it has this connotation; and neither is it because of my personal...
Yes, that may be a better argument to make than the more simplistic argument (seemingly made by BC) that the symbol didn't have its current connotatio...
The word I was thinking about isn't 'nigger' but rather 'negro' (or, in French 'nègre'). They weren't originally pejoratives and indeed were routinely...
Betsy Ross also lived further back in time than the appropriation of her flag by white supremacists, just like the originators of the swastika are muc...
It means that sensitivity to salient features of the historial and social context (and not just origins) is required and the display of such sensitivi...
On the other hand, using your own reasoning, it ought to be perfectly alright for Nike to put zwastikas on their shoes since the zwastika was an ancie...
It's been more than 15 years since I've read Naming and Necessity back to back. So, I must acknowledge that I may now tend to conflate some of Kripke'...
Well, for sure, you yourself attempted to supply a more nuanced account. But there is some unfinished business above since I have claimed that your ow...
That sounds about right, with the caveat that there is nothing wrong or inadequate about referring to an item purely descriptively (and thus ensuring ...
Kripke isn't arguing that it isn't rare that all of our beliefs about an item that we are making reference to non-descriptively (e.g. by means of a de...
That the intended reference might already have been determined by a true description (e.g. andrewk's "...at twelve o'clock") might be a requirement of...
Remember Kripke's explanation that he intended to use the phrase "reference of the description" in order to match up with the descriptivist logical tr...
Of course. It only needs to be true in order to refer descriptively, in case the intended reference would be singled out descriptively by the predicat...
I was only considering the set of persons (person-1, ..., person-4) who are perceptually present and can reasonably be thought of by the intended audi...
That's interesting, but what I meant to say is that for reference to be successful, on Kripke's account, it's not a requirement that the descriptive c...
That's not an argument against Kripke, neither does it help @"andrewk" who does appeal to the content the speaker's belief in his account of reference...
That the descriptive content can represent false beliefs about the intended target is common ground. What we're inquiring about is the positive accoun...
In order to establish that the speaker and his intended audience share (a sufficient part of their) beliefs about the same individual, to whom they ar...
This is common ground. The issue is to explain how the speaker's belief comes to be about the speaker's intended referent in the world. @"andrewk"'s a...
On your view, the person you are making reference to is person-1 on account of the fact that, between all four people who are perceptually present, on...
Well, strangely enough, this rough account of demonstrative reference seems to me closer in spirit to Kripke's causal/externalist account that it is t...
I think I can imagine how Davidson's coherentist and somewhat internalist account of meaning would raise problems for Kripke's externalist (or "purely...
(I have completely rewritten this post because my initial reply was misguided and based on a misreading of your position.) OK. I see what you mean now...
However you also said: "It seems to me that, if the DD picks out a unique individual based on the speaker's beliefs, then that explains how it is prec...
In that case, the person who the speaker is looking at does not match the DD (since the DD expresses a false belief about that person), and hence, by ...
Those are empirical estimates that have huge margins of uncertainties associated with them. The atmospheric CO2 concentrations several million years a...
I have no idea what Russell would have said since he was mainly interested in the logical reconstruction of a scientifically rigorous language (just l...
The problem in the OP stemmed from only considering CO2 variation and ignoring solar variations. The faint young sun paradox stemmed from only conside...
In recent times solar variations have provided very small forcing variation compared with the enhanced greenhouse gas forcing. See the second and thir...
The total forcing (solar + greenhouse) and the continental mass distribution effect on albedo feedback and ocean circulation tack large scale ice ages...
One mustn't confuse the glacial/interglacial periods that are occurring within the current ice age with major ice ages. The former is governed by the ...
The Sun is only four and a half billion years old. 300 million years ago is about 7% of its age. One estimate that I've seen is that the total solar i...
Over large timescales, glaciation is an effect rather than a cause. Snow and ice albedo functions as a feedback. It's the sum of the forcings (mainly ...
The Sun is a yellow dwarf main sequence star. Main sequence stars grow brighter over time. The Sun was thus several percents dimmer several hundreds o...
Yes, he sets out this notion as the notion being used by descriptivists in order to show descriptivism's shorcomings. Immediately following the passag...
Kripke is saying "Nevertheless..." because although we would, in ordinary cases, understand the speaker to be referring (and indeed, to intend to be r...
I would have thought that it was, on the contrary, one of the main strengths of Kripke's "causal" account of de re reference (by means of proper names...
The issue was: must this (minimal) description be true in order that the referent of the thought be determined by that thought? What if both you and I...
The issue isn't whether or not it's frequent or plausible that one might encounter something and totally mis-remember its appearance. That's not a phi...
I don't think it makes much of a difference to the validity of Kripke's argument against descriptivism about de re senses (by means of either proper n...
What happened isn't mainly that potential Bernie voters voted for Trump but rather that, after Hillary won the primaries, they didn't bother to vote a...
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