Srap Tasmaner

We have at least a couple different threads here now. I'm tempted to respond directly to your proposed model here (especially because some of it is cl...

Well that's the thing. Some of what you say in your post has the feel of the "rites" (clever choice, that) underwriting knowledge production -- a bit ...

Tarski's star student, Richard Montague, denied there was any difference between formalized languages and natural languages, and considered linguistic...

My usual rambling reply. Apologies. I think that's pretty clear, and why I included "in a normal state of mind" as part of the canonical situation. No...

I won't belabor this -- in part because I have so little else to say about it now (!) though I've already been saying something related over here, whi...

Gosh, my bad. I'll try to do better.

So there's no one Heidegger, but there's one Dreyfus's Heidegger, to be dumped. There's no one Wittgenstein, but there's one Hacker's Wittgenstein, to...

We like to imagine animal signals as, in essence, caused by the occurrence of particular features within the animal's environment. The vervet monkey "...

Yes, absolutely. Someone who always thinks it's 3 o'clock will be right twice a day, but we couldn't say that they know it. On the other hand, here's ...

I'll say this much: I think being a man is being a person who likely thinks about or has thought about what it means to be a man aspirationally, what ...

What I was thinking was roughly this: it's easy enough to see how you would define being honest as aiming at truth, so truth has priority. But words a...

And it is a continuing mystery that you haven't read Grice. For what it's worth, I think it would be a mistake to ignore @"Metaphysician Undercover"'s...

What I find odd here is the suggestion that relationships ought to be mediated by, in essence, science. You count anything not theorized as "arbitrary...

That's fair. I didn't address it because I have no idea what a trans woman, say, means when she says, "I am a woman." Literally don't know what that m...

Well yeah. I was pointing out that this issue is not unique to sex and gender. It applies to practically everything. Which isn't helpful, except to no...

There are even today people in the world who do not believe you can, whether you go to temple or not, whether you've ever even seen one. We do not wan...

This is descriptive of something -- Ryle (and of course Wittgenstein) says similar things -- about how we judge another's understanding and ability. A...

And I again think of the shy schoolboy: I'm inclined to say that he knows the right answer, even if his lack of confidence in himself leads him to dou...

How does it do that? Meaning the conditional is true whether the antecedent is true or not. So how do you think the truth of this conditional shows th...

Is it? It does not look true. What is the connection you're positing between the existence of aliens and my ignorance of that fact? An equivalent Engl...

And mixes modalities. I don't want to go through all this again.

And yet you resist the world's favorite choice for such a situation: "I do not know whether aliens exist," because you have an agenda. The word "might...

This de dicto / de re sort of problem applies to facts as well as beliefs, which is similar to what you and @"Andrew M" were discussing. Drawing balls...

Obviously. The usual sort of probabilistic analysis is well-known, and you can say, with enough hand waving, that there's a definition of "reasonable"...

Suppose reason and experience suggest to me that it is almost certain that some of what I believe is in fact false, but that I am not in a position to...

Seriously?

It's something like ~(P & ~P). It's really that simple.

And I think you should have raised an eyebrow at "cannot". That would pretty much force us to start sorting worlds by our epistemic condition and then...

3. There are possible worlds in which we are brains in vats, and we do not (or, perhaps, "cannot") know that this world is not one of those. See how t...

I doubt either of us has been perfectly consistent about this, but I can explain what I'm thinking. When we say "P is true," for instance, I am taking...

Is anyone besides Michael checking my math? I am barely qualified to be explaining this stuff and feel like I'm on the verge of making a hash of it. W...

Only the law of of noncontradiction. It's a matter of, let's say, "logical" necessity. What is true cannot be false, even if it might have been false....

Because you have been very clear that you mean Jane's belief, which is true in the actual world, might be false in the actual world, and that's not an...

No, it doesn't "mean the same thing," but it might or might not be different from how I think it is implies that I do not know whether it is how I thi...

They can both be true, yes, but you have to be careful. If Jane's belief is true in ?, which it is by stipulation, it cannot be false in ?. If it can ...

Right. This is 1. P 2. (anything at all, true or false) ? P But, it is now "misleading" because if Jane's belief is true, its being false is no longer...

A favorite joke of mine from M*A*S*H: Colonel Flagg joins the poker game in the swamp and sits down next to Klinger. Flagg: Hey, up close you're a guy...

To clarify, the context I was referring to was saying that something I know to be false "might be true," as in the example about my legal name.

The converse would be that "I am wrong" entails "It is possible that I am wrong", which of course is true. Actuality entails possibility. Possibility ...

And no, it isn't, and it isn't.

My legal name might be "Srap Tasmaner" but it isn't. That's logically the same form as the conclusion to your argument 2, and it's fine, so long as we...

But see this is not an argument. If Jane's belief that P may be false in the actual world, that only says it is not necessary that P and P's truth-val...

Here, I'll address this one directly, for all the good it will do. Absolutely. (b) is a misuse of "possible" in this context, because of the "actually...

Bob has a belief, called "Bob's belief", that it's Thursday. Bob's belief is right if and only if it's Thursday. Bob's belief is wrong if and only if ...

You would think, right? I did. But @"Michael" has been very clear that this is not what he means. This says, perfectly clearly, that p holds in the ac...

The principal issue, so far as I can tell, has nothing to do with omniscience, nothing to do with knowledge, nothing to do with fallibilism, and nothi...

No one raises an eyebrow on hearing "I think there are three left, but I could be wrong," or "I'm pretty sure there are three left, but I could be wro...

This entire thread has been devoted to confusing "I have knowledge of something that need not be the case" with "I have knowledge of something that ma...

The ambiguity here is crippling. Let's say there need not be aliens, but there are. That they exist is a contingent fact, not necessary, and we can kn...

(2) breaks down into cases, right? (2a) I'm not wrong, and aliens do exist here. (2b) I am wrong, and aliens do not exist here. Are both of those case...