It's an interesting moment. Quine had very strong nominalist leanings, did not want to allow sets into his ontology, but "To be is to be the value of ...
On my reading of the current situation in anglophone philosophy, which is admittedly limited, Ramsey cuts a wider swath than Wittgenstein. For what th...
I think that's what we all want, and maybe why the mid-century titans of analytic philosophy, Quine and Sellars, each claimed the mantle of pragmatism...
Gosh, in so many words? I dunno. I'm tempted just to say "everything." Once epistemology is naturalized, and ontology defined as identifying what enti...
Renoir or someone - I forget - once said to Mallarme, "Maybe I should try my hand at writing poetry. I have so many ideas!" To which Mallarme responde...
Ick. But I have sometimes thought there might be a role for philosophy if rigorous inquiry is possible for some domain that for some reason is not qui...
It doesn't help your case to implicitly compare yourself to perhaps the single most important figure in the development of modern science. Maybe aim y...
This thread might provide a better opportunity for discussing the subjective and objective than this vague thread. The interpretation of a work of art...
Assuming that's a thing people do. But knowledge and understanding are on a scale anyway, so it's tempting to say that you only need to know enough ab...
I'm broadly in agreement, of course, but there are still some interesting puzzles here. The non-renewable resources are finite (but may not be finite ...
I do think it's because they do often go together for the sorts of things we reason about. ("He might be on time, or he might not.") That's quite reas...
Yes, because I was — perhaps inadvisedly — using an example of a temporal event but trying not to prejudice the interpretation of the modality, so tal...
Gotcha. But those are positions not statements. I assume you don't only mean statements like "materialism is true"; that's a weird sentence anyway, an...
There was no "subtle switch." Not Necessarily Red is equivalent to Possibly Not Red. Not Necessarily Red is consistent with Necessarily Not Red, which...
Opportunity to quote Ryle's quip, on being elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, that a chair in metaphysics is like a chair in tropical disease...
Should probably add that ?P is consistent both with ?P and with ~?P. With marbles, that's to say that there being at least one red marble in the set i...
In the abstract, maybe? But practically there are two issues: first, it's not the total at a given moment that matters, but what's available, what's c...
No, it isn't. ?P ? ~?~P and ?P ? ~?~P. That's the standard, and it maps onto quantifiers in an obvious way. Dang. I'll try again. We have a set of mar...
Ah, okay, I see what went wrong now. My point was that we don't derive Possibly ~P from Possibly P, because for all we know Necessarily P. Here you ha...
But is there a limited pot of wealth? I buy my IBM mainframe on credit backed not even by how much fiat currency is attached to my name within the ban...
Yes, and I should add I think that matches our intuitions: if something isn't necessarily the case, then it's possibly not the case. The problem is ne...
Meaning what? What does "opposed to" mean? Does it mean distinguished from, or actually is the negative of? I take opposite to indicate the negative, ...
We could, if we liked, take impossibility as our primitive. Then we would have Impossible Possible = Not Impossible Necessary = Impossibly Not since t...
This is not a happy use of "opposes"; see below. Unless by "opposed to" you mean something different from "is the opposite of," or by "is the opposite...
While interesting, that's all about the max. Not what I was talking about, and really it's probably clearer too use a word like "value" instead of wea...
I'll address this, since it's clear enough. You are making what I would consider a scope error. The opposite of "The car is blue" is "It is not the ca...
Well, it's early days, and if these beetles survive it stands to reason that the individuals that did not try to impregnate beer bottles will be repre...
I see. That's rather a different claim than I was addressing. And judging by the quote next, your idea is that other organisms lack institutional fact...
Right, but dogs do ask to go outside, which is interesting because it means they are not purely responsive to their environment. It's not like the sig...
Hmmmm. We're neither of us economists or historians, so I'll not be answering that, but I'm going to ask you to question what someone else might be ab...
Simple example of how we do this, instead of all this concept juggling: (1) It is necessary that the book falls if and only if it is not possible that...
I think there's actually research showing that states with higher minimum wages do not have higher unemployment, but there may be confounding factors,...
Modal logics define necessary and possible as a pair of operators that apply to propositions; either can be taken as primitive and the other defined i...
Exactly my point, and I am more or less granting that such arrangements really are good and bad, respectively. No matter what we might wish to be the ...
No. Very, very no. Whoa! Do I get some sort of prize for bringing this about? I agree with all of this, at least in spirit, but you have to be careful...
Helpful video. I now "understand" the experiment @"Andrew M" was trying to explain to me over in the truth thread, and it — sadly or happily — connect...
Yes, this is the view I find incomprehensible because the whole point is that our big stable things supervene upon the small unstable things. It's not...
Absolutely. It's a large-ish minority, but even that 45% is actually too big, because about 20 million Americans are sole proprietors, self-employed a...
Because we believe in the uniformity of nature and the unity of science. Are there really different "laws of nature" at different scales? Really? That...
Well, there's an answer. (This thought experiment isn't important to me in itself, but if it were, I wondered how knowledge would work if the world we...
Well, see that's the thing. We might define the past relative to some time as all the times before that, just the times. But what about the events tha...
I mean, it's not possible. You're substituting another impossibility for the one I was entertaining: your question (if you were inclined to ask) would...
Unless I'm missing something no, because it's the first term plus the sum of a bunch of products, so you need a sigma not a pi. I know the Collatz con...
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