There’s an essay I read many years ago, I think it must have been by Howard Nemerov, where he defines poetry as “getting something right in language”....
I want to say, first, that I approve of your sense of wonder. @"SophistiCat", I read a lot of what you post and generally find it both well-informed a...
Perhaps you are trying to follow too many discussions at once. And I’m still confused why you think the forum should require other members to write in...
I like that you always emphasize questioning, problematizing, etc. I've been thinking about an analogy to something people are sometimes inclined to s...
Interesting stuff, particularly Daniel Dor. I am in your debt. My sympathies tend to be with the communication-first side, but of course language as a...
I recall the thread, and I believe I deleted what appeared to me to be a later duplicate post of the OP. I remember looking a couple times to figure o...
That’s quite helpful. Thanks. I’m not sure this is fair, historically. The search for “deep structure” may fail, but is analagous to the search for “l...
Okay, but you’re answering a different question. As I understand you, you’re saying Chomsky’s — I don’t know — “underlying” philosophy or even metaphy...
Can you explain to me like I’m five why it’s important for philosophy that Tomasello is right and Chomsky is wrong? What’s riding on this for philosop...
I don’t have a pony in this race, but Tomasello looks like a guy worth learning about. It did occur to me that there may be another option: perhaps wh...
Right. The question was whether more general learning mechanisms could account for learning language as well. More or less as old-timey empiricists mi...
I’m almost certain there’s something similar with dogs. Did you hear about that little study? Somebody put a few dozen dogs into an MRI and had people...
It is curious not that the functions of a human brain are ‘localized’ to some degree, but that they are localized in the same places, which suggests e...
Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes: King Frederick of Prussia gathered his court scientists (i.e., philosophers) and asked them why a dead fish we...
I remember being under the impression that Sapir-Whorf had been straight-up refuted by the color research, and being disappointed to find it isn’t qui...
Mmmm. I think that’s a good answer, even though I’m not sure what you mean. I’ll say this much: I am weary of the answer to every question being “it’s...
Do you have any reservations about this vocabulary — that we classify something as valuable or assign it value? I just don’t think we experience the w...
I was thinking he gets to the former from the latter via the competence/performance distinction... Can I just ask, what’s going on here philosophicall...
Yeah Rogue Moon is a little like that. Not quite ordinary people, but quite definitely people, with their own personal issues, and the book’s mainly a...
In modern times, universals are always interpreted as conditionals. Just translate in your head like this: “All F’s are G” means “If anything is F, th...
Some of the novels amble along doing this and that, and then like 2/3 of the way through veer sharply into religious territory. Like he's really not a...
Both good. Scanner is really special. That and Radio Free Albemuth are the most autobiographical I guess. I loved Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. H...
Ubik is excellent. I'm probably in the minority wishing the last sentence wasn't there. I've read a lot, but not everything, and I love him not for th...
Ah, then we're not having the conversation I thought we were. I have some attraction to a very old-fashioned "moral sentiments" view, such as you'd fi...
I can think of circumstances, institutions, where this is probably true, maybe in the military or in public safety. But in general? I think people mai...
Isn’t there a difference between the man who, being completely selfish, doesn’t give a shit about the Jews being rounded up and does nothing to help t...
Timothy Snyder has an interesting book about the Holocaust, called Black Earth. He makes a particular point of explaining collaboration by pointing to...
But that's an argument, not phenomenology, right? It's also not an argument I find all that persuasive as it stands: I've always been struck by the Na...
I think I'm trying to say that we experience the ethical as absolute, as something beyond our opinions, not up to us, something in a way external.** T...
Ethics is something to do with behavior, and in particular something to do with our behavior towards one another, but there are many ways to describe ...
Yeah, okay. Here’s the thing: “... is God” just isn’t like any other predicate, and neither is “... exists”. If you’re hoping to deal with this situat...
Maybe google “false dichotomy” as that seems to be what the person who doesn’t want to choose is claiming to be a fallacy in the reasoning of the pers...
Is that how that works? We count how many evil acts you’ve committed? More is worser? So the argument goes like this: 1. It would be appallingly unfai...
Are you still talking about the same thing now? Aren’t the business overlords by and large just as ignorant of the workings of the technology on which...
And I would assume it is. If you show both, you show not just an answer (Rubric 15 in The Little Book of How to be Perfect — memorize by Wednesday), b...
I keep writing these posts that are somewhat complementary to yours — trying to add in whatever I feel you’ve left out that’s important — and I never ...
Eh. Almost the whole discussion has been pretty far from Gettier, but still valuable. "If a belief is false, then there's no way it can be justified,"...
I think I really fell in love with Wittgenstein in the Preface to PI, where he says, “I should not wish to have spared anyone the trouble of thinking....
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