Srap Tasmaner

I love books, and I love not just learning from them but the chance to spend time in the company of an interesting mind. But when I look at SEP, I see...

Ick. 1. Be curious about the world. 2. Be curious about how you think about the world. 3. Learn about the world however you can (looking, asking peopl...

Not sure where to go from here, but I would add this: I think an individual is a community; I think much of our behavior, including our verbal and soc...

Oh that's quite good. I didn't even think of that.

There are a couple different ways we can approach the concept of concept here: there are empirical questions about when and how members of a given pop...

The other way to say that is "random variation". For all these cases, there are only statistical regularities. Whether something fits a set of criteri...

I see. So the idea is that D2 reacted in this way to tell Scruffy that he was getting worked up over nothing. Interesting. (And his nonchalance might ...

But I did so knowing there would be a perfectly cogent explanation for why the more flexible locution was preferable. I'll get back to you on the othe...

I kinda like the way he writes, torturous as it is. (There's at least one long audio-only lecture on YouTube, and it helps to hear his prosody. He ten...

I suspect it does not happen. And I suspect vervet monkeys never mistakenly make the wrong warning call, i.e. misspeak. (On a related note, I believe ...

I didn't say this before, but you could reasonably restrict the word "misunderstanding" to misinterpretation of intentional communicative behavior. If...

Right, so this is tricky for the thread. It's Scruffy who makes a communicative display and vocalization, which is correctly understood by D2, who bac...

I accused @"Isaac" of almost exactly this a long time ago, of more or less ignoring the truth-value of an individual's statements and treating them si...

Could you give an example?

Have you come across anything in your reading to suggest that other animals sometimes misunderstand each other?

It would probably help if you gave a worked example. Show us an exchange that you would characterize as people misunderstanding each other, and why yo...

Wrong. Right. "Americans" is an appositive, identifying "us." In a sense this means "Americans" and "us" are 'co-objects' of the verb, or you can you ...

Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to be...

I think this is right. There's an argument people make that because humans and bees perceive flowers differently, every human being lives in their own...

Perhaps true, but it's not like no one built houses or roads or engaged in agriculture until Bacon. Man had been changing the conditions of life for m...

Thanks. It's nice to get a report from the field. Interesting that you highlight the idea of introducing a bit more organization or discipline into pe...

I think there's something there. Much of scientific practice is analytic, in the sense that the aim is to find a way to isolate one factor from among ...

Yeah all that's fine. The debate is about the ontology of fiction, which I see as informed by fiction's very unusual pragmatics.

Thus passeth away the relevance of philosophy.

How did the word "ultimate" get in there? There are obviously infinite sequences and series that converge without ever reaching what they converge on....

This was, relatively speaking, an outsider to your field? I'd heard that "ethicist" is a profession now. Was their expertise helpful? Can you describe...

I thought about this idea of philosophy as critique, but why should practices be incapable of self-critique. After all, that's what we would require o...

I think for a lot of people encountering philosophy might be transformative, might spur a sort of reflection they had never engaged in before, but I d...

If it's not empirical, and it's not mathematics, it's irrelevant. Maybe that leaves room for something we could still call philosophy, I don't know.

That might be reinventing the wheel, if language is outside the individual in some sense, even if it's not outside all individuals in the aggregate, o...

I don't think that's what he meant. I think @"PhilosophyRunner" meant that often when people talk they assume that their words will be interpreted as ...

You said, "in AI", but this is supposed to apply to the psychology of animals as well, right? You talk about your model and I talk about my model, but...

? I know this is a thread about the war in Ukraine, but I was addressing the general question about how countries in the US sphere of influence develo...

Well no, but something like what's in the first sentence wouldn't surprise me honestly. The US has a lot of problems but a biggie is the legacy of cha...

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also...

Oh absolutely! Sexual selection is certainly real, generic drift, isolation, lots of factors I don't know about, all of which is why I always try to k...

(Btw, there's a game-theory based argument for truthfulness and trust in David Lewis's Convention, the details of which are not leaping to mind.) It's...

Just think about all the ways a made-up story is different. Who gave Holmes the name "Sherlock"? Was it his mother or Conan Doyle? Can a novelist get ...

Good for you! Why don't we agree to take this up again some other time, some other thread.

Cool.

But that's clearly wrong. No one in the Holmes stories believes Holmes, the bearer of the name 'Sherlock Holmes', to be a fictional character. (I'm pl...

No. The first step to understanding this is to understand that "Sherlock Holmes" is not even a name. We pretend it is, but it does not refer to anythi...

Right, "stream" and "creek" are different words that denote the same things, meaning -- at least in this case, maybe not in all cases -- they also hav...

We're on the same page here. Humans have always lived in cooperative groups, and language is a cooperative enterprise in furtherance of other sorts of...

I don't actually get the point here. Tinky Winky wearing a frilly tutu can arbitrarily be a queer symbol, or can be one by aligning with our hyper-loc...

Let's say, the conscious output of unconscious processes of inference (often performed by mental modules that are domain specific). Meant really as a ...

Yes. Obviously. But the logical form here is not that you deny it has some property. If it did, existing would make it a different thing. In essence, ...

You might be right. (I wanted to make sure you didn't think it was you, and that it was clear I wasn't saying it but mentioning it.) Yeah I noticed yo...

I get that. It's like Fodor's argument for the ineliminability of the 'special sciences'. (You can't just absorb meteorology into physics.) On the oth...

@"fdrake" One thing on my mind is that both the hypothetical explanatory accusations I was considering are functionalist: one points to sociological f...