It is a point of interest how much you can do with a preference for order and predictability — any order, however arbitrary. Sellars has that just-so ...
I don't think so. It remains true that negatives do not have *real* square roots, and that's the same as saying that if your domain is discourse is re...
This is a terrible idea. Chess is illuminating because it presents questions that may be decidable in principle but are not, for humans, in practice. ...
I will read. Shouldn't have neglected her. In the meantime, and acknowledging that I may be putting my foot in it, this is a slightly bizarre way to t...
<offtopic> I'll consider adding "useful for us to believe" to the OP I want to write about "context dependent" and "purpose relative." Maybe I'll save...
Okay, I think I get how you're thinking now. Your idea is that we start with the phenomenon of resemblance, explain that in terms of predication, then...
So you intend to keep "is red", for instance, so that we get to say A resembles B because they are both red. That just makes the resemblance relation ...
Then forming your collection by using that predicate presumes you have access to a whole machinery of predicates, membership, and classes. I thought w...
I do not believe Ukrainians are fighting for an abstraction like this, do you? Even to say "self determination" instead is just shorthand for saying t...
That was my point. You're supposed to be grounding the use of predicates, aren't you? Or was your intention all along to ground some kinds of predicat...
It doesn't matter much in practice, but of course we *don't* have the axiom of comprehension because of frickin' Russell and his damned paradox. Did y...
Right? I believe he said he just doesn't picture the drawing before doing it, but that working on a drawing is otherwise straightforward. Still... Is ...
That part is just fact, I understand, as there are people who have no visual imagination. I heard an interview with one such person who works as a pro...
You mean something no one else has? I don't know. The odds are against it, of course. But it's more fun, for me anyway. And it means that when I reach...
Over in the thread about causation, I found myself talking about approximations, and noting that we begin with noisy data and idealize it as a mathema...
I suppose I should add, I wasn't just presenting empiricism in disguise; I was really just trying to see how I could come up with properties "from scr...
I used to have a pet theory, also somewhere between logical and psychological, that generality is not a matter of classification but a type of procedu...
Okay, right, that's why I bristled at saying something like "taking a causal stance" toward the world is something we do because it is useful. The wor...
It's sort of the way empiricists like Hume talk. (@"Manuel" reads the early moderns a lot, so he could point out what a travesty of empiricism this is...
Oh Nicaragua! I remember when you were cool... So you're saying Putin has more at stake than other major powers have had when failing to conquer littl...
In this scientific age, it seems like the obvious way to take "useful" here is to say it's an approximation, and it's cheap. It's interesting that we ...
Right. And I assume we're talking about this logically, not psychologically. An account of, I guess, properties, rather than how we come to learn them...
So the question is (1) whether resemblance, or similarity in some respect, or something like that, gets us everything we want from universals, and (2)...
But I think you're saying less than you think you are. Usefulness admits of comparison: a thimble is useful for emptying a swimming pool, but not as u...
Probably true, at least in the sense that Putin would like to straight up annex the entire country, which is to say, restore it to its rightful status...
Is this usefulness just brute fact, or can we hope to explain why this grammar is useful? If Anscombe addresses that, you can just point at her again....
I'm not quite following. Is the idea to drop the idea of instantiation? But what are you going to do with universals if not instantiate them? If that ...
I just can't get around the idea that in most, but not all, cases we use the words we do because they're the right ones. I don't think a linguistics t...
So now we're back to @"Isaac"'s teapot and the missing screw. In that discussion, the question was only about successfully referring to a particular t...
Just that classical logic can't deal with propositions of the form "It is possible that you pick a red marble," but can happily deal with propositions...
That's close. The idea is just to show how what is a possible or a necessary result of you picking from a set can be cashed out in terms of what *is* ...
Let's look at another example, so we have a comparison. (There are features of the first example that may be confusing.) Consider playground balls, th...
One predicate is distinct from another if they don't have identical extensions, even if they overlap (as various cases of possibility and necessity do...
Sorry, this just looks like gibberish to me. That's not how technology evolves, not how engineering works, this whole image you have of some cabal of ...
Yes, good point. I think this is where we started. Let's suppose there is a way of using the earth's resources that is largely sustainable — perhaps o...
Because if you thought of yourself as, or felt yourself to be, a depersonalized part of a great machine, then your position would make sense. It's sti...
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No, no I'm not. Neither are you, though evidently you think you are. I am a human being, not a network device, and I'm not part of the internet, but a...
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