Srap Tasmaner

I'm so glad you came back to this, because that's an excellent point. (And, for what it's worth, close to my own thinking about the utility of simplif...

I always think of wisdom as keeping things in proportion, weighting all the relevant considerations correctly. That means reacting appropriately to wh...

Burns's Theorem. But if you zoom out and take a community as your system, instead of an individual, you would hope to see an increase in adaptability ...

Which would itself be an example of rigidity, right? This style of thinking, I mean, not just the mechanical approach itself, but *sticking to it* whe...

This is all very interesting, thanks. There's an issue I don't think has been raised yet: "system" often carries a connotation of rigidity, though we ...

Here's an analogous case for you. This is an English-language forum (almost but not quite entirely), but more than a few members are not native speake...

I see.

@"J" One other thing we might say is that the reason you know some of your work needn't concern itself with the effects of what you're observing and t...

Hmmm. My first thought was to wonder whether this is true, but on second thought the weirdness of this is that the LHS of the turnstile is empty. From...

I think mostly science can and must say that their own practice is subject to natural law, but what you can deny is that it is theoretically relevant....

To make this more than a slogan, you'd need some sort of theory (hermeneutics would be an example), and I think what that theory would try to account ...

So the moral of the story is: don't ask questions you don't already know how to answer, or don't just already have the answer to. Exciting stuff.

I mean, sure, it's an aesthetic value, of course. And of course it can be a goal, alongside others, or sometimes the goal, in specific cases ? we're n...

There's also the Sellars line from PSIM: where the verb is "understand" not "know".

There is a more definite take on all this available, but I can't name anyone who holds this position. (@"J", @"Moliere", @"Count Timothy von Icarus", ...

I have no idea why you think that. @"Moliere" and I were talking about the norms of analytic philosophy, and I don't think either one of us ever menti...

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue. Here we are again, where the question is: Is making things clear, to whatever d...

I think by and large I don't see clarity itself as a goal, as I believe you do. I don't know whether Williamson is closer to my view or yours. If you ...

Thinking about how various "analytic philosophy" is, I should also say that my last few posts might be very wrong-headed. Maybe it is a loose set of n...

I get that, and maybe there's no harm in noting that there are these norms, and maybe they're in a special subcategory but maybe not, and you get the ...

For the record I'm enough of an analytic that I do.

Yes and no. An analytic philosopher can talk *about* values, the roles they play in discourse, all that sort of thing, but by and large is determined ...

I think there's room to distinguish function from utility (or interest or value or aesthetic or ...). A bridge (I'm just going to make this up) is a s...

I'll try too: We decide to build a bridge because we believe it would make our lives better, and the sense of "better" there is colorably an aesthetic...

Because it isn't? I'm genuinely puzzled why you'd stretch the word "aesthetics" to cover, well, everything. Now if you wanted to talk about value or u...

I don't think any other discipline has asked for philosophy's help or wants it. That's not to say that some kind of interdisciplinary business isn't p...

Why do I feel like I just walked into the Meno? Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or c...

I really don't. That's right in SEP's wheelhouse though. I think of it primarily as a "review of recent literature" for grad students.

The emoji indicates that you know the answer is "everyone", right? In the context of the paper, where the principal example is semantics, we could not...

I would at least say, perhaps incorrectly, that I think I get where he's coming from, and I do have considerable sympathy with the view expressed, but...

Yeah that's fair. My memory of the paper is probably colored a bit by knowing which side Williamson is on.

Here's a quick example (from Wittgenstein) of everything, I hope. Is the standard meter rod (or whatever it's called) itself 1 meter long? The questio...

Sometimes a grandmaster discussing a game will say something like this: "I looked at sacrificing the pawn, but I didn't see anything concrete." "Concr...

Intuitionistic logic is a whole thing, which we probably don't want to get into here, and to which I would not count as a reliable guide. It's part of...

One way to read the paper is that Williamson proposes an alternative to "my theory versus your theory", namely results, success, new knowledge. Proof ...

My memory is that that's how this whole things started: Dummett pointed out that some philosophers seemed to be playing a game that they did not reali...

Given Williamson's critique of (the lack of) anti-realist semantics, another title for the paper might have been "Put Up or Shut Up." I think Williams...

Not entirely "pointless" perhaps, but Williamson is holding up the realism/anti-realism debate as an example of a philosophical debate that wasn't goo...

But when an argument settles a disagreement, one side agrees that the other was right. The disagreement isn't dissolved, but remedied. I think there's...

I'm just puzzled about where the word "argument" comes into it for you, and in what sense is an argument is Suppose we do Is the point of an argument ...

Why would I need to convince you of something you agree with me about? Why would you or I bother with arguments at all?

@"Moliere" Here's another element of taste ? doesn't apply to everyone. Some people have a decided preference for the new. Sometimes this is argued fo...

Next you'll tell us there are 10 kinds of people ...

Goodhart's Law. I'll have to reread if this thread continues, but my memory is that within a page it's clear what he means is the theories are more fu...

This is all very level-headed, Tim. Thanks. I'll note that the point of Williamson's paper was very much less throwing stones at another tribe, way ov...

I'll try this (and see what I think tomorrow). In fields that have a perspicuous notation available (mathematics, chemistry, music, etc), the moments ...

He does, you're right, but I think this sentence is pie in the sky. Who's the "we" tallying the results and scoring the competition?

We're not just in agreement, then, we are brothers! Look, I know Williamson takes a lot for granted, has a sort of philosophical ideology. My long pos...

I think it's clearly a pretty good idea for positions that are pretty close. For ways of seeing and ways of setting up problems that begin very far ap...

I'll just say that I am very interested in the role of ideals in our thinking, in our communication, in our lives. I tend to see them as things we con...