Srap Tasmaner

Sure, so long as you understand that now you're not saying anything about what's in the natural universe--your predicate is coextensive with it. Not w...

You know you just emptied the predicate "has a cause" of all content by extending it to everything, right? Some of us are going to balk at extending t...

One more vote against a word-like editor, which they wouldn't do anyway.

I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about causation, but it seemed most natural to me to describe it as a relation that held between events rather ...

So, you've been at this for over week, how's it going? There are some things you could try if you get stuck: Linguistic ascent: instead of looking at ...

I was just pestering @"Owen" for no particular reason.

I'm still not sure what you're up to here. It's starting to look like you're deriving existential generalization in a roundabout way. You don't need t...

I think you followed him okay, but it's not yet clear what he's up to. Yeah, that's a distinct possibility.

Somehow I missed that you're doing this the other way round. You have the quantifiers ranging over the predicates. Is this deliberately second-order l...

If you're wondering what other way there is to take quantifiers, I think--and I'm no expert--the principal alternative is to take quantifiers as "subs...

It's Quine. He takes the existential quantifier as really talking about existence, in the "ordinary" sense. So if your system needs a formula such as ...

Almost forgot--as soon as I wrote that, it occurred to me that anything qualifying as a "greater cause" in the defined sense, would have to be self-ca...

You're on the verge of reinventing S5. There is a lot of prior art here, and a lot of disagreement, even controversy, among philosophers on the interp...

Cool. I'm glad you see the distinction. What's important is (a) not to assume that what carries the authority of common usage is true, and (b) not to ...

That would be true if I said "all and only," which I didn't. If A caused B, whatever that amounts to and whatever you take as A and B, then B has the ...

You could use this as a definition, something like: We define a "greater cause" to be a cause which possesses all the properties that its correlated e...

This is my starting point: Words (like anything else) have associations for you based on your life history and can be quite complex. Some of these ass...

You seem to be under the impression that I denied words can be used to refer. As I said before, I don't know how you got that impression, but I hold n...

Yes, of course. It wasn't clear to me what you were saying, so I wanted to focus on one thing at a time, make sure we're talking about the same thing,...

Let's look at a specific example. Suppose I tell you, "I have to be at work by 2:30 today." Maybe as I say this, there are various images in my mind--...

I guess we part company here then. Best of luck to you.

It's almost like in the absence of sensory input or (what usually passes for) conscious thought, you end up eavesdropping on (other parts/systems of) ...

Premise 1 is a claim about language use among I don't know what community of speakers, which doesn't seem like it would suit what seems to be a metaph...

In a sense, that's saying there's just nothing for philosophy to do here, and that's fine. But maybe there is some stuff to get into here. Our non-dre...

I guess if I had to pick something, I'd say, "All of the premises and inferences."

No we don't.

People find meaning and value in all sorts of experiences, whatever their source. You don't have to see what @"apokrisis" said as contradicting your v...

If "the idea in someone's head that triggered the use of the word is what the word means," how can this be shared? Maybe you mean something different ...

What do you learn when you learn the meaning of a word? Is it the idea that is in your head? Is it the idea that is in someone else's head?

I can give you another example of this sort of thing. After the Abu Ghraib videos came out, there was controversy, liberals were appalled, but then a ...

Here's a story from the Washington Post that includes the original video and the "social media response." (Of course I americanized "bruv" into "bro."...

Remember "You ain't no Muslim, bro"? That was powerful. I really thought there was a chance then that the conversation would change.

So you enjoy it. What you're running into here is a question of taste. People are often really invested in their tastes. (I think Alain de Botton has ...

https://youtu.be/zqNTltOGh5c

Thanks guys! Despite some limitations, should be good enough for our proposes.

Restating your position was the whole point. It wasn't my definition, not even tentatively. I don't think you intended what you said as a definition o...

No, that's just ellipsis, and the rest of the sentence is understood from the wider context of the relationship between these people, their housekeepi...

That last bit was where I was headed. Would have been clearer if I had said "a special set, let's call it U." That's what @"noAxioms" seemed to want t...

Maybe if you told us what would count as a "substantive ontological sense," then we could understand what you mean by this: I'd guess a lot of us migh...

Seen 'em. I do love Eternal Sunshine. Will definitely see more Tarkovsky. Thanks!

Hey look! You did it. You could define U as "all the stuff I see, and all the rest that is implied by it." Would love be a member of U? Would our univ...

So you want set and set membership to be the starting point, and to define existence in terms of those. Something exists if it is a member of some spe...

I was mainly expecting indifference, misinterpretation, maybe a little ridicule. ;) Compositionality and the context principle are two of the absolute...

Just finally watched Interstellar because of this post. WOW!

srsly?

Maybe we can pick this up again another time.

Got it. Not what I was thinking then.