Srap Tasmaner

I agree this has to be done carefully, and I tried to cover some of the obvious issues. It looks like some of the "not the right way" issues just get ...

Well there's a formal out, if you want to take it, and then there are new questions. The formal out is that in modern logic (Frege's logic, which he d...

I only mean that modern logic of the sort we typically use these days in philosophy is Frege's logic: there are objects — so ontology — and functions,...

There is one other little hitch though: a line, for example, not only can or may contain all the points in a plane colinear with it (that is, with any...

Sure. So a line. On the one hand, there's a sort of procedure, which is repeatable, by which you can keep extending a line; there may be more than one...

Yes, I think that's right. The gist of the color constancy effect is that your brain prepares an interpretation of your visual environment and part of...

Pleroma?

We agree he doesn't exist. But you want to still be able truly to predicate "is a hobbit" of him; I don't. Honestly, I could meet you halfway, and all...

Right, that part is brilliant. Not only is there a double existence, but the perceptions an object occasions exactly resemble it, and of course vice v...

I hate to forestall this thread's death, but I am curious about this. I looked back at the OP yet again, the centerpiece of which is this question: Yo...

I'm still going back through the section on and off, but we end up with three 'theories', right? There's (1) the instinctive view that we directly see...

It's a nice thought, but demonstrably false. Here's another video (a bit tech-bro, but that's what you get) about illusions related to color constancy...

I'll tell you what I think is the obvious thing to say here: the problem with the farmer's belief that there's a cow in the field is that it was not c...

You're absolutely partly right. Of course, he does not deny that there are objects, because he claims that we cannot. I'm happy with the word 'prejudi...

You mean, since Mordor is not a real place, the class of people who've been there is empty.

I'll go you one better. Marianne Moore published two versions — I think 'published', maybe she only contemplated doing this — of a poem called 'Poetry...

Hobbits, then, form a subclass of the class of fictional creatures, right? So Boromir could well have argued, at the council of Elrond, that Frodo cou...

I only said that some empirical questions are hard to answer. It took a long time and a lot of money to observe the Higgs, and for a long time it was ...

I'd love to. Fiction is interesting because pretending is really interesting. No idea why it should change how I think about logic though. ?

Who knows? There are arguments, there's evidence, and some empirical questions are hard to answer. I think fiction is a pretty subtle thing, and there...

I have absolutely no idea why you think so. Of course the class of unicorns is empty. For all x, x is not a unicorn. There are no hobbits. The class o...

Nope. We pretend there is such a person and that he is a hobbit. There isn't, and he isn't. I was offering an example of a real horse named Sheldon di...

Sure it is. Says so right on the tin. You mean like my example in which Sheldon is a horse? Sheldon's being a member of the class <horse> means Sheldo...

Another way to put what I'm saying: makes no difference to your mind what the source of the perception is. All, as Hume says, are 'on equal footing'. ...

The key exemplar of course is evolution by natural selection, a relatively simple mechanism which yields 'endless forms most beautiful'. It is not imp...

I do think in some ways the question is, how complex? The ongoing debate in linguistics is between those who think some specialized faculty is necessa...

This is the point I've been trying to make that Hume recognizes the need for laws that govern the relations between perceptions, as Newton gave laws g...

Except it's not a world of objects but of perceptions; objects are mere prejudice. Empiricism slides into idealism.

Indeed. It's why I was thinking we'd need to graph out the arguments, because they are sometimes presented in terms that other arguments will undermin...

(1) P ? Q "If the object of a knowing is an appearance, then the knowing is filtered." (2) R ? ~Q "If the object of a knowing is an action, then the k...

Why 'having no contrary'? Or do you only mean in the 'pants' sense, deriving it's meaning from the contrary? I mean, it's true that we're never going ...

Here's another way: there can be, I think Hume thinks, nothing in the perception itself that would tip off the mind as to its origin or nature. Thus w...

But Hume explicitly doesn't care. Same page is where he says all these mental phenomena (perceptions, feelings, ideas, what have you) are 'on the same...

I mean, they're different in quantity, not quality. They're both cardinal numbers, just of different sizes. Now there are transfinite ordinals, but yo...

Except (a) you want specifically to talk about mathematical infinities, and there's prior art there you might as well become familiar with; and (b) th...

I warned you this would be trouble. The usual way of using these words in mathematics is pretty straightforward. 'Countable' means there is a one-to-o...

There is an issue around the individuation of perceptions. There's that passage where Hume claims perceptions are exactly what they appear to consciou...

Once you have a line, whether any other point in the plane is on it or not can be determined; it becomes an absolute yes/no question. Within a plane, ...

Hmmm. I was hoping you'd say you were okay with this example so we could compare it to another that you feel differently about. Does it help at all to...

Is there any property in taxicab geometry analogous to curvature? Maybe the average distance of the intersections at which you turn from the impossibl...

So for your question about the determinateness of mathematical infinities, you would say here that a line is I guess 'determinate enough' that we can ...

Ah, I see, you meant countable as a unit, as a line. Sure.

Just don't say that. It has a specific meaning in mathematics, and the length of a line is not countable in that sense. Doesn't matter to whatever you...

Uh huh

Do we? I think it is true that, broadly, we take beliefs, our individual beliefs and the beliefs of others, as indicative of how things are, but we kn...

Not what I intended at all. I was, I thought, following Hume's usage in using the word 'perception' to cover both impressions and ideas; so a percepti...

Of course you can disagree with Hume; but can you make a case against his view? For instance, Hume's view as I'm presenting it (not sure I'm getting h...

Yeah, except for going back to Part II Section VI for the existence stuff. Some of what? Two points: 1. Something else conspicuous by its absence is t...

I understood the issue in the OP to be the logic of the quote, whether it's Kant or not. Everyone else seemed to assume it was Kant, so I did too. May...

That may be, but in the quote given, there's no as-ing of the object of cognition. I did longer versions of this where I included it as a premise: 'If...