Srap Tasmaner

Btw, you can't delete posts, but you can edit them after you've posted. You could replace the whole thing with "" or something.

This helps a lot, in understanding what you have in mind. I'll do some thinking and reading and get back to you.

Okay. I suppose we could think of these as departures from the ordinary, practical, everyday run of things. Imagination seems to insinuate itself all ...

I don't understand your point here. Can you elaborate?

No no no. You have to be clear about the distinction between "being a member of ..." and "being a subset of ..." The null set has no members. It is a ...

I think you might be misreading the axiom of induction. It doesn't say that every natural number has all the properties of 0. It says IF 0 has the pro...

Yeah, I almost went back to change what I said there about cardinality. Then I decided that what I had written was probably already too much.

Does your question reflect honest philosophical consideration, or is it merely determined by your rightist/theist bias?

I had to chuckle at this. "Counterfactual" refers here to a world in which there are not miracles. That's meta, dude.

I have often thought that knowledge of the religions of other cultures, other societies, presents a challenge of some sort to religious belief. There'...

(There's a generic "you" throughout this post, who isn't you, @"Mariner". I trust you to point out where they overlap, if you'd like to.) I reread the...

We probably should have done this at the beginning. P = "All actual or possible conscious systems must be allowed to develop." Q = "Unrestricted procr...

Can you elaborate?

Everyone agrees, I assume, that there is nonverbal experience, and nonverbal communication. It is also common for philosophers to claim that we have k...

Mariner, would you say all these things you describe, are things you experienced as existing, rather than reasoning that they exist?

This is your claim, but I don't think it is sustainable. There is a distinction, which people clearly do recognize, between actual entities and possib...

0 isn't the null set {}, it's the cardinality of the null set, the number of elements of that set. (And given that, you can define 1 as the cardinalit...

I think there are people around here with some training, who might have some good advice for you, given your sister's history. I'm just a dad. I'll ju...

The only genuinely wise thing I've ever heard anyone say about parenting comes from a humorist from years ago named Erma Bombeck: It's come in pretty ...

I saw what you did there.

It's my impression that, in the United States at least, scientists feel more unified as a group now than they had for, I don't know, generations, prec...

But what if you look at it the other way round? Suppose we start with the goal of controlling the growth of the human population, and are given two op...

I see. Your argument is that if you're against abortion, you should be in favor of unrestricted sex. And that conclusion you do not block because, in ...

The word "justification" is unfortunate, because in ordinary usage it admits of degrees, the same way you might talk about having a lot or a little ev...

Gettier cases always feel to me like magic tricks or confidence games. You're elaborately given the opportunity to verify things that don't matter, an...

I appreciate your response, but I still don't understand the argument. The Roman Catholic Church has traditionally taken exactly the option you sugges...

You're close, @"Arkady", if readers will tend to have an intuition that this doesn't count as knowledge, but they'll think that because they'll feel t...

I don't think you need most of paragraph 3 of you're just trying to build a Gettier case. You just need "Bob in fact stole the money." Your case seems...

I think this is the weakest part of your argument. Surely we make a distinction between an actual, existing entity already on a trajectory toward cons...

I think this is a very nice point, but I would say science is a problem only for a certain sort of theism. Here's a story: I recently had a used copy ...

You're maybe not "eager," but let's say "comfortable" concluding that if Joe and Pete both assert that 2 + 2 = 4, then there must be something similar...

I'd be happy to try to explain what I understand of Frege's philosophy of mathematics, if you'd really like me to, but honestly Frege's writings are a...

Sure, "4" refers to 4, "2" refers to 2. I think Frege construes 2 + 2 as a function. "2" has a sense, and refers to 2. "+" has a sense, but doesn't re...

"2 + 2" and "4" are, usually, different ways of referring to 4. They have different senses, but the same reference. For mathematics and logic, the ref...

And "thinking a proposition" is a state of an individual's brain, right? It is not a relation between the individual and an object, the abstract objec...

I think this is a false dichotomy. The choice is not between manning the barricades and being a whiny little girl. One of the main things citizens do ...

The sky is filled with glowing blue dots. I had always been a little uncomfortable using conditionals talking about cause and effect. Where the condit...

I googled it -- I had forgotten about "Rayleigh scattering," that the small gas molecules will radiate the same wavelength they absorbed, so that's wh...

Oh my, no, not humoring you. I've enjoyed and learned from both sides in this argument. I only pointed out the misreading to give you a chance to resh...

Fair enough.

There are legal challenges currently working their way through the court system. But hey, why bother, amirite?

I'm nearly convinced but this part throws me a little, so I could use an example. For the "why is the sky blue" example, you would do something like t...

You misread@"andrewk"'s last post. Those were examples of "here's the cause" explanations, not the sort of explanation he was advocating.

Everybody does it, but it's well known that the GOP has turned gerrymandering into a way of life. It's easy to find sources: here's one. As for voter ...

Isn't the obvious modern correlate of "final cause" "purpose"?

Very funny.

Should have addressed this before... Can you name me one business, government, non-profit, in fact any institution of any kind anywhere in the world t...

Would you grant that this is a somewhat different way of establishing the truth of a proposition than obtains in, say, physics, history, politics, bar...

I'll grant it was poorly worded. Sometimes we are uncertain until we have carried out the calculation. So I'll say it this way: if you think you can p...

If you think that 2 + 2 might be equal to 5 rather than 4, then you have not yet learned what these symbols mean.