Yes. That's meaningful. But episodes of star formation are events. They are not points in time, and neither are they "specified time frames" existing ...
But I quite agree that it's perfectly meaningful to say that things occurred billions of years in the past (I am just agnostic regarding the exact mom...
For sure. But that is just to say that it is meaningful to say that things occurred yesterday, and that they thereby occurred earlier than today and l...
That's correct. Because moments in time when specific sorts of events are truly said to have occurred are coarse-grained in a way that must be consist...
This question can't be answered meaningfully unless it is being interpreted within the conceptual framework of some fundamental physical theory. It's ...
Yes, OK, you said that also. That's not very helpful. Should we now be talking about space-time point singularities in the context of general relativi...
Not quite. You mentioned a moment shortly after the big bang. But then you are asking me if there was a "point in time" at that time. This is just lik...
What does a "point" in time look like? This sounds like the propositional reification of an unsaturated predicate. I can tell you if there was a point...
I am not sure exactly how to evaluate the proposition "there was a time billions of years ago". What would it mean for its being the case that there i...
I've explained to you that your question conflates two different ideas. I've explicitly disambiguated those two ways to read the question. The answer,...
You must resolve the ambiguity between the idea of (1) its being logically possible (according our conception of logic, now) that something could have...
The claim that it's not logically possible for no intelligent beings to evolve conflates two things. It conflates the idea of this scenario not being ...
This is not an example of something that is a metaphysical possibility and not a logical possibility. It's rather an imagined scenario (for instance, ...
OK, fine. I would call De Morgan's law, modus ponens, modus tollens, or the axioms of first order propositional logic "laws", but if you would rather ...
You are the one who brought up the topic of logical possibility and claimed, contrary to traditional wisdom, that logical possibilities are a subset o...
What's logically possible is whatever isn't ruled out by the laws of formal logic alone. Whatever isn't self-contradictory is thus logically possible....
The words "possible", "possibly" and "possibility" have a multiplicity of senses and not just one single conventional sense. Just look up the two or t...
I am simply trying to understand *your* suggestion that it may be incoherent to interpret epistemic possibilities to be "about" anything else than nom...
Of course not. But you were the one expressing doubt that epistemic possibilities could coherently be thought to be "about" anything else than nomolog...
What you asked me was this: "Actually this is a better question: why wouldn't epistemic possibility be beliefs about nomological possibility? I'm not ...
I'm unsure why anyone would think that the only sort of propositions which, for all one knows, might be true, are complex propositions regarding the n...
There isn't any proposition that she is claiming to be nomologically possible, if I understand you. Rather, she is claiming that one and only one amon...
That's because in the case you are describing, as I've displayed through formalizing it, there are two different sorts of modalities involved. It is a...
Everyone has inconsistent beliefs but there ought to be a consistent core. Who said I wan't prepared to deal with it on a personal level? We were disc...
No trouble. I must however retract what I just said. I hadn't actually said "both impossible" originally, but rather "not the case that they're both p...
It rather seems to me that applying De Morgan's law to ¬?A ? ¬?B yields ¬(?A ? ?B). If either A or B are impossible, then it's not the case that they'...
What epistemic possibility "has to do with" is rational people's consistent sets of beliefs, and what they are about is specific propositions in relat...
You are freely mixing up metaphysical and epistemic possibility operators in this paragraph, so the question seems ill posed. I already mentioned that...
You can't possibly be serous. Just listen to yourself. I am patiently replying to your rapid fire quibbles over a simple notion (epistemic possibility...
Really? You can't wait ten minutes? Should I take an appointment with your personal secretary, next time? I am allowed more than one bathroom breaks i...
Yes, if you are using 'possible' in the epistemic sense; no, if you are using it differently. If I don't know whether or no my girlfriend is home, tha...
If the person isn't badly confused, and she genuinely doesn't know, this tends to imply that she doesn't know or believe something on the basis of whi...
If it means that both the proposition and its negation are consistent with everything that you know (or believe to be true), then that's 'possible' in...
I was just trying to be helpful in providing links to the commonly discussed issues (in the free will literature) that I had mentioned and that you cl...
Because it an extremely common and everyday use of the words "possible" and "impossible" (Did you know that P? I don't know, that's possible, for all ...
You still seem to be missing the point of the concept of epistemic possibility. If when I am claiming that for all I know my girlfriend may (epistemic...
Getting acquainted at least with an informal statement of van Inwagnen's consequence argument (also credited to Carl Ginet) is useful because it has b...
You are misunderstanding the definition. It's not an illusion, it's a claim of ignorance. Saying that P is an epistemic possibility (always relative t...
I was using the term "epistemic possibility" in the way it is commonly used in philosophy. From Wikipedia: "In philosophy and modal logic, epistemic p...
Thanks for that. It would be interesting to compare this exegesis/reconstruction of Epicurus's account to Chisholm's, Clarke's or Kane's more recent l...
I agree with you that the topic of responsibility is centrally important to the 'free will and determinism' debate. Some philosophers, such as Helen S...
On your view, in a world where microphysical determinism obtains in such a way at to enable an ideal Laplacean predictor to foresee all future events ...
No, of course not. But you were suggesting that the idea of top-down causation doesn't have any "correlate" in the real world. So, I thought you rathe...
That's because in the case of rational agency, our understanding of what we are intentionally doing is normally part of the cause of our doing it. Jus...
They are multitudes of correlates in the real world. You should keep up with recent literature on the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology...
Indeed, I am not. But I do share with compatibilists the commitment to the idea that free will and responsibility are compatible with the causal closu...
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