Pierre-Normand

My main point was that the original sin that you ascribe to theology has been co-opted by modern (late-seventeenth to eighteenth century) metaphysics ...

Alas, the Augustinian predicament doesn't merely afflict significant parts of the philosophical scholarship about the conundra of freedom, determinism...

Answers to stubborn "why?" questions need not lead to a regress when the events at issues are acts of the will or of the intellect such as the intenti...

Trump just tweeted: "The Democrats are working hard to destroy a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Cour...

You have moved the goalpost quite a bit, from arguing that Ford's allegations are implausible to arguing that it is possible that they are untrue. But...

There were only five people attending this party according to Ford. There was only one witness, Mark Judge, in the room where the incident allegedly o...

In the wake of the new allegations, the shares for the question "Will Brett Kavanaugh be the next confirmed Supreme Court justice?" at the Predictit p...

I think @"Hanover"'s argument appears to derive some of its force from the considerations @"Bitter Crank" brought up regarding the societal consequenc...

The potential political motivations that Ford and Kavanaugh may have aren't the only ones that must be alluded to in order to make sense of their clai...

It's been reported that the State of Maryland doesn't have a statute of limitations for the crimes of rape and assault.

This comment seems misguided in two respects. First, there is the issue of the standard of evidence. That the accused must be proven guilty beyond rea...

:up:

@"Ryan B" Your discussion appears premised on the assumption that belief in the existence of free will precludes belief in determinism. However, among...

Maybe Pantinga didn't reply to you at the actual world but I'm fairly sure he did at some other possible worlds.

I agree. Which is why I said: "...It's rather to foster understanding..."

Of course. I quite agree. The purpose of theorizing isn't to provide a blueprint for perfect use. It's rather to foster understanding. Hence, that the...

I don't have the slightest doubt that this conjecture is true.

In all of those cases what is shown and what is said is the very same thing: the very same rules. When Wittgenstein commented in PI that 'there is a w...

Some people can also play the piano "by ear" without being able to say anything about the rules of harmony. I am also reminded of Antonio de Nebrija, ...

Indeed. There is a reason why Evans's posthumously published masterpiece was titled The Varieties of Reference.

I think you should allow that, in this imagined case, the conventional reference of "Shakespeare" might be construed to have shifted rather in the way...

This is tricky. (We are to assume that Francis Bacon is the author the plays being widely attributed to Shakespeare, right?) Your intention clearly is...

This is a case similar to the case of Madagascar discussed by Gareth Evans. It makes trouble for Kripke's possibly excessively 'inflexible' causal the...

There is a special convention in the case of names of famous people or historical figures where public uses of their names can be assumed to uniquely ...

If you don't know how someone who uses a word intends to be using it, then you don't know what is being said by her. If someone tells you "Steve is th...

When you are repeating to someone else that the author of the book is Steve, you are intending to use "Steve" in the same way in which whoever informe...

Yes, there is a difference because the second sentence harbors a potential ambiguity. In some communicative contexts, it could be meant to refer, as a...

You're right. I mean that she knows that there is a famous mathematician named Kurt Gödel who wrote some famous theorems about incompleteness, or what...

You do have a point, here, but that is a point that Kripke, and others who follow him (such as Soames, Sperry, Donnellan, Recanati, etc.) would readil...

@"Snakes Alive" :up:

Kripke was reasonably well acquainted with the late Wittgenstein. The only real book that Kripke wrote is titled Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Lan...

I am unsure why you would straddle Kripke with this binary choice. Kripke doesn't view proper names as devices that primarily elicit mental states, wi...

You are thus treating "Clark Kent" and "Superman" roughly as definite descriptions: as singular referring expressions that express, roughly, the gener...

I'm unsure what work the word "intends" does here. If I judge that it is raining outside (because I looked though the window and saw that it is rainin...

Here I would only object to your use of the term 'copula'. The 'is' of identity isn't the copula. The 'is' in the sentence "The apples is green" is th...

The proposition P is the content of those various propositional attitudes (here expressed by means of a subordinate "that"-clause), so it's not in the...

I am not subsuming the hope that P under the same category as P. The hope that P is an intentional attitude, as is the belief that P. P is the proposi...

I was thinking of propositions as Fregean propositions: or as ways the world (or aspects of the world) might conceivably be thought to be. Judgements ...

That's right, but the two readings of the sentence correspond to two distinct propositions. Let us suppose that Superman exists. In the office where h...

Only if it's true in some possible world. Only if they share both sense and reference.

I am unsure why you think that the notion of Fregean sense is dubious. For one thing, it appears to solve the problem that you raised for Kripke regar...

It's just a modeling tool. It has a potential to mislead or confuse, especially when the processes of model construction are misconceived, or the mode...

For sure. Singular senses aren't shorthands for definite descriptions. But they are quite useful in accounting for the fact that co-referential names ...

The rules of chess indeed are arbitrary conventions but it is only thanks to those arbitrary conventions being what they are that the chess phenomena,...

It seems to me that Kripke can avoid this problem since although "water" and "H2O", construed as co-referential natural kind terms, have the same refe...

In that case you are using the term "water" to refer to a general definition and hence what you are saying about water, and possibles worlds in which ...

Saying that something is metaphysically possible just is to say that it isn't inconsistent with the way things can be in accordance with the constitut...

There is an interesting issue that arises here. When we talk about ways the world might have been (or possibly could have been), some features of the ...

It's the exact same sort of thing that makes it the case that "A" and "B" are numerically the same in the actual world: criteria of identity and indiv...

This is awesome. Please, keep going ;-)