Agreed, though "realism" had a special technical meaning referring to the determinateness of quantum measurements before they are effected. As for "ac...
Yes it does, but the mention of an "action at a distance" is misleading. Nonlocality has long been seen as a consequence of QM (ever since Niels Bohr ...
Yes it is confusing because Bell's theorem isn't a theory but rather a statement of incompatibility between a set of assumptions. Physicists who endor...
Not quite. It is rather supposed to show that those assumptions are jointly incompatible with the statistical predictions of QM. If you then accept th...
You are paying no attention whatsoever to the ongoing argument or to the philosophical issue about free will and determinism. Merely using bold charac...
Yes. When inquiring about the usual meaning of a word or phrase we can sometimes ask "Qu'est-ce que ça signifie?" but it is much more usual to ask "Qu...
I am not an American and I don't hold the Constitution of be a sacred text. It doesn't define right and wrong, anyway. That some opinion, or some poli...
It is a bit unfortunate, though, that 'vouloir dire' is also commonly used, just as the English 'meaning' is used, to refer to the conventional lingui...
Yes, I agree that there is such a categorical difference between philosophical and political discourse and this can be accounted for as a difference i...
Donald Trump is talking in Toledo, OH, right now. I just caught a couple minutes. He said that he will make America great again. He proposed a detaile...
It looks like the old PhilosophyForums finally went paws up. It's not possible to view threads anymore. I had saved all my posts in one single text fi...
Bell's theorem just is the statement that the statistical predictions of QM are inconsistent with all local hidden variable theories. Since superdeter...
You are misunderstanding Bell's statement. Bell's theorem is derived from the assumption of local hidden variables. Hence, if experiments show Bell's ...
You are running together the concepts of determinism and the concept of free will. Only if you assume the validity of a specific form of philosophical...
The idea of QM and GR being fundamental while thermodynamics would be merely contingent and derivative (e.g. dependent on a low entropy initial state ...
Naturalism has many guises, some of which are distinguished in the various essays collected in De Caro and Macarthur, Naturalism in Question, HUP, 200...
It is a good thing, even when one is a naturalist, that one's philosophy of mind not conflict with one's metaphysics or with one's ontological underst...
Whenever you are deliberating about what to do, you are making a principled and pragmatically justified distinction between those options that you eit...
The phrase "could have done otherwise" can point to a human ability. Abilities are similar to dispositions. Dispositions exist (i.e. they are actual p...
I think truth-conditional semantics exhibit some of the flaws that you notice owing possibly to misguided attempts by their advocates to construe them...
I think such pragmatist accounts often encounter much resistance owing to the widespread tendency to understand "subjective" and "objective" to expres...
Yes, this is quite consonant with the pragmatist accounts of truth endorsed by Putnam or Wiggins (See David Wiggins, (2013) Truth, Pragmatism and Mora...
The main problem, for Descartes, it seems to me, it to account for the intelligibility of interactionism: how can immaterial souls have effects on mat...
I can't either. I was granting this possibility to Mongrel merely for the sake of argument. The conversation then moved beyond that. If we move beyond...
Whether or not an account can or can't be qualified as compatibilist depends on one's conception of what it is exactly the compatibility with which fr...
It would be a rather crude and philosophically uninformed stance, one informed maybe by some form of physical reductionism, or by Watsonian behavioris...
Laws can't be derived logically from mere sets of empirical observations. If all ravens are black, that doesn't make it a law that all ravens are blac...
Some online fora have a chat-box on the main page that allows users to chat in real time about random topics and trivia. This is a thread that has a s...
That was a bit of a shorthand but I thought the context made it clear what I meant with the phrase "... depends contingently on ..." If A depends cond...
What is absurd? You seem to equate actuality with necessity, and I can understand that from such a point of view the very idea of unactualized powers ...
It means that whether or not such a law applies here and now depends on the surrounding conditions here and now. The applicability of this law (and he...
We were also talking about the meaning of "could have been different". I don't know what the point of your comment about black holes is. Some natural ...
OK, yes, if the laws of physics were logically necessary, unbeknownst to us, then the difference between the two concepts of necessity (physical or lo...
Not quite the same. The necessity of identity is metaphysical, it is neither logical nor physical. No, its not a matter of faith since even if one wer...
Physicists investigate empirical laws of physics. They don't know them to be logically necessary. We may suppose, if you like, that, unbeknownst to us...
Well sure. Either the universe could or could not logically have been any other way that the way it actually is. Only in the case where it could not l...
No. If physical laws are logically necessary then the set of all physical possibilities is the same as the set of all logical possibilities. Rather, w...
Your only hope is that the propensity to have children is an atavistic trait. In that case, even though neither your parents nor yourself have had any...
You had issued a challenge for me to show "what properties physical possibilities have that logical possibilities don't or vice versa." I was merely r...
Rather, only if universally quantified statements that express physical laws are logically necessary does logical possibility entail physical possibil...
Some empirical proposition P is physically impossible if its truth is ruled out by physical law. But if the physical law is contingent, then the truth...
Yes, I also heard that the inclination to have children is a heritable trait. If your parents didn't have any children, then you probably won't have a...
There is neat explanation of Leibniz's compatibilist account of free will in this SEP article. The discussion of Caesar crossing the Rubicon makes it ...
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