As Frege pointed out, names have a sense and a reference. For a time, it has been contentious whether the Fregean senses of proper names are equivalen...
I don't understand what your full objection purports to be either. Your objection seems to rely on analyzing "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" as definite d...
Yes. The SEP has a good entry on rigid designators. Another good place where to start is Gregory McCulloch's book The Game of the Name: Introducing Lo...
That may be so but if you ask ordinary people what they mean when they say that something is possible or impossible (and not provide determinate conte...
I'm not sure you are disagreeing with the OP. I don't see what @"hypericin" is proposing as undercutting norms of trying to avoid political bias or of...
I appreciate your separating the case of particulars from the case of propositions. What I am unsure of is what it might mean to be denying that a pro...
Either that or, as I suggested earlier, following Peter Geach, one endorses a relative conception of the relation of numerical identity between substa...
Your comment may be tongue in cheek but you remark relies on interpreting "non est" as the negation of numerical identity and "est" as the copula rath...
You seem to be using "A" as the name of a proposition rather than the name of a particular. The "=" usually names the numerical identity relation, whi...
As I mentioned in another thread recently, Peter Geach has been an advocate of the thesis of relative identity. According to this thesis, two objects ...
That might be a fair characterization of Geach's motivation for coming up with the thesis of the relativity of identity. But that would be a bad misch...
Peter Geach, who was Elizabeth Anscombe's husband and a very fine logician-philosopher, developed his thesis of relative identity in order to account ...
Great! I discovered this aria a couple years ago, through watching the very same YouTube video, and was blown away by the richness and boldness of the...
Wittgenstein was reportedly fond of Bishop Butler's aphorism: "Everything is what it is and not another thing". Arguably, this isn't so much an anti-m...
I concur with @"StreetlightX" and yourself. In line with this modern alteration of the meaning of "objective", and together with the rise of metaphysi...
I don't quite understand what you mean. What are you referring to as one's "past performance"? Is that the amount of money in one's envelope before on...
One way to adjust the game so that your own money is at stake would be to merely write down the two amounts in the envelopes. The cost for playing is ...
There is an abundant contemporary literature on what's called scientific practice. The focus on scientific practice is a focus on what productive scie...
Indeed, if you assume it to be equally likely that the odds of winning (irrespective of the amount) are stacked in your favor as that they are stacked...
This is a nice example but you seem to be offering it as a purported counterexample to the principle that what makes it rational to play a game (and a...
I just want to note that we seem to be in agreement on everything. The only reason why we seemingly disagreed in our recent exchange is because you ob...
It is obviously different since on the assumption that you are equally likely to win as lose it follows that the expected value of switching is 0.25*v...
In the two envelope case, you don't know the odds of winning. But you do know (or ought to be able to deduce) that the odds aren't either in your favo...
That only makes sense if you favor taking the chance of gaining a larger amount A than the amount B that you can possibly lose irrespective of their r...
I would say that, if it's not a winning strategy over many games of the same kind, then it's not a rational strategy over just one game of that kind; ...
Thanks. Since I am not familiar with the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, I downloaded the new paper by Kastner, Kauffman and Eppers...
It is to be applauded that some physicists will grant existence to pure potentialities, but it seems to rub against the spirit of Aristotelian metaphy...
It's not necessarily equally likely. It may be equally likely, conditionally on £10 being the value of the first envelope, but it may also be morel li...
Yes, this is true of the unconditional expected values of sticking or switching. But those are not the same as the conditional values of sticking or s...
What you are saying is correct in any case (most cases?) where the prior probability distribution of the envelope values isn't unbounded and uniform. ...
Edited: I had posted an objection that doesn't apply to what you said since I overlooked that you were only here considering the case where both envel...
That's fine with me. In that case, one must be open to embracing both horns of the dilemma, and realize that there being an unconditional expectation ...
It has to do with the sorts of inferences that are warranted on the ground of the assumption that the player still "doesn't know" whether her envelope...
I did not say that it has to be centered on zero. Normal distributions are unbounded on both sides, however. They assign positive probability densitie...
I am not sure how you would define a normal prior for this problem since it is being assumed, is it not, that the amount of money that can be found in...
I agree with this, and with much of what you wrote before. I command you for the clarity and rigor of your explanation. I am not so sure about that. T...
The OP doesn't specify that the thought experiment must have physically possible instantiations. The only ideal, here, consists in pursuing strictly t...
That was a very pointed challenge, and I think it has force in the case where the analysis is assumed to apply to a game that can be instantiated in t...
This is a very neat analysis and I quite agree. One way to solve a paradox, of course, is to disclose the hidden fallacy in the argument that yields o...
Well, that's missing the point ;-) My purpose was to highlight a point that @"Srap Tasmaner", yourself and I now seem to be agreeing on. Suppose, agai...
Hilbert's Grand Hotel Revisited Here is an improvement on my earlier Hilbert Grand Hotel analogy to the two-envelope paradox. The present modification...
Your ignorance doesn't preclude you from facing a choice and making a decision. What it precludes you from doing is basing your decision to switch (if...
On the assumption, of course, that the player takes this initial distribution to be bounded above by M for some (possibly uncknown) M; or that, if unb...
Yes, it is tempting to say that if the game is only being played once then the shape of the initial distribution(*) isn't relevant to the definition o...
I was not referring to a specific example but rather to his general resolution of the apparent problem. It both justifies the zero expected gain for t...
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