Did I? Are you sure? There's no need to be insulting. I mean, it's tempting just to let that stand without commentary. Are you standing up for common ...
I guess I had that coming, but it puts me in an awkward position. I'm already on record, in this very thread, dismissing much of contemporary mainstre...
Well. Several things going on here. It's an interesting point, but how broadly it applies isn't clear. I'm desperately trying not to become an expert ...
I've posted this before but here it is again: There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here: That's...
A priest and a vicar, old friends, were having yet another argument about theology. Finally, the priest said, "Why do we argue like this?" "When you t...
I'm not one of the people making these analogies, but I don't see any harm in distinguishing "how to play chess" from "why to play chess" or even from...
Well, sure, and chess is notorious for this. But there is no game the rules of which can compel players to try to win. Chess competitions also produce...
FWIW, here first, which happens to be a post of mine you responded to, but I quoted it in the section responding to Banno, so understandable that you ...
Their treatment of quantifiers is straightforwardly functionalist and unobjectionable: they note that if you can derive phi(x)Fx from Fa, then phi() i...
Eh. It might be a crap example, and maybe there only are crap examples. What interested me was two things: (1) This shouldn't be the usual one side sa...
Here's an example of quantifier variance from the wild, from the spreadsheet open in front of me: you have a set of data points; you can (a) average t...
Chess is interesting because it involves decision making under uncertainty, and it is moderately surprising that its complexity is just great enough t...
Do you mean this? This is a catch-all for weird practical issues, a lot of which are covered, but shit happens. I assume the reference to draws concer...
Maybe, but it's not really "A is B" that's at issue here, but "Something is B". Now how exactly do we manage that? Attributing a predicate to an ident...
@"Banno" As it happens, this is what the thread should be about. It's a side effect of a particular version of charity: It's not far from here to onto...
Glad to hear you say that. I'm not innovating here, I think, just trying to connect the dots. I get that. I'm using "mathematics" pretty broadly. What...
Mathematics has this double role: it's the ideal we strive towards in our thinking, but it's what enables our thinking in the first place. Out brains ...
Is this a property it acquires naturally, along with its chemical composition, its mass, etc? Or do we deem each object to be an instantiation of One?...
Well, I brought up the issue, so I'm bound to say there's something to this. On the other hand, I'm hesitant to endorse what you say here because math...
But what does that mean? Is "different" a property an object can have? Yes, I'm being a little cagey, but you can do better than a shrug. (And that's ...
That's a tough sell, though. It was one of Frege's brilliant examples, that the logical form of "The king's carriage was pulled by black horses" is di...
Well yeah, Frege was a platonist. He was a pretty good logician, but he wasn't a god, and platonism is an inevitable and understandable mistake. :smil...
Hmmmm. You know that sounds a lot like one of those things people say because it's so obviously true, right up until it's proven false. (Heavier than ...
I mean, of course they implicate it, in the exact sense that they presuppose it -- but they don't have anything to say about it. Rather like the statu...
Me neither. I've already spilled a lot of virtual ink on the forum about quantifiers. But this i disagree with, so here we are. I don't think quantifi...
Why words, though? I'm not googling, but isn't there somewhat robust evidence that some non-linguistic animals (crows, isn't it?) and infra-linguistic...
I only meant, everything that matters for determining what sort of being you are. Your understanding of physics, geometry, numbers, your native langua...
Do we also consciously decide which ideals to hold, and how passionately? Ah, is this the issue for you? You're concerned that I'm downplaying if not ...
Yes, I think that's closer. I was thinking similarly of a sort of comportment, a style, a way of doing things. The usual model boils everything down t...
Yes, exactly. The idea is to constrain your own agency, even to the point of extinguishing it, if necessary. It's a point of interest that we often fi...
There's social contact stuff that comes readily to mind. Schelling's credible deterrent scenario is a surprise application of that. -- That was meant ...
Thomas Schelling gives the example of two drivers playing chicken, and one of them pulls his steering wheel off and holds it up so the other driver ca...
My father was a member of Plumbers & Pipe-fitters Local No. 5 for 35 years, though he spent most of that standing at a drafting table, cigarettes burn...
Absolutely, and one reason I squeezed in the word "variable" up there somewhere. I think much of the challenge of freedom for us comes from our cultur...
FWIW, I didn't mean anything metaphysical by the word "soul". I don't know whether Keats did. I think what interests me about the Keats is near here: ...
I think the first thing is to distinguish the sort of "purpose" you're talking about from any sort of goal, the sort that instrumental rationality is ...
Sure. One thing about The Matrix, like other stories about caves and evil demons and vats, is that people will be inclined to say that there are two k...
Well, we seem largely to agree on the general stuff, hurray for us, but I remain unimpressed. I can't even muster much curiosity about how the things ...
Your language model for LLMs is much larger than mine, but I'll chat a bit anyway... It was apparent to me you were talking to a salesman. What they w...
Rather the point, in a way, that you have to make an effort to understand the people you're talking to. Around here, that usually means trying to unde...
The missing premise is that belief names a substance, in the sense indicated here, which I suppose means something like "part of the natural world," a...
One way to get logic without compromising your naturalism is to push it away from basic brain function and toward social interaction. I don't think yo...
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