Srap Tasmaner

You don't respect someone's dignity by deciding for them whether their life, and whatever they find of value in it, is worth the suffering they endure...

If philosophy provides a theory of science, and then tries to, I don't know, 'measure up' to that theory, then philosophy is trying to meet a standard...

Maybe, but not excluding normativity. It's a reminder, but a reminder from one member of our speech community to another. If description alone is not ...

The rules of a game are not a description of the game.

This morning it occurs to me that the first great 'triumph' of the logical form approach was something called, oddly enough, the "theory of descriptio...

Apposite quotes, thanks. §100 is one of the ones I was remembering. Is there connective tissue between §23 and §100 to suggest that the Doctrine of No...

I understand the impulse. For a while I read Wittgenstein as a man desperately trying to invent game theory. Same really for Paul Grice. But the game-...

Language-games were still in their infancy in the Blue Book. I want to say that the interesting thing about a language-game is that the sense an utter...

By that, do you mean not all language usage is referential, or that no language usage is referential?

Yes. (I want to note, in passing, that taking "things" quite narrowly, as sentences, this is obviously and shockingly true; I suppose we could do rese...

Is studying the history of philosophy the same thing as philosophical thinking? If we start from the position, as I do, that there are two distinguish...

The part of that post I feel bad about is its reliance on the word "great", as in "great minds", "great works". I think West has a way to gloss that, ...

No. Leaving aside "underlying" --- because I don't know exactly what it's doing there --- this is like arguing that the only way to get from your hous...

From the Cornel West piece that @"jamalrob" linked: You offered @"T Clark" one of the standards for being a professional academic philosopher, but the...

If I am to act in such a way that you will be affected by my actions, it is moral for me to consider how you will feel about my actions. I may not cho...

You're still asking the wrong question -- as bolded -- at least as we're trying this out. Early Wittgenstein had a doctrine -- I think, am I rememberi...

That is exactly the sort of question I think might be wrongheaded, and it's the sort of question a lot of us have felt ourselves wanting to ask after ...

Than what theory? Either there is no theory to be "less valuable" or Wittgenstein is wrong about what he was doing. Which is it?

@"InPitzotl" pointed out the intimate connection between space and vision. Something else worth considering is the relation between other sensible qua...

Somebody has to decide. You could say I must have children because they'll be glad I did; I could say you must not because they won't be. Is one of us...

There is a natural way to read "language-games" as an enlarging of Frege's context principle, and along with that you might see "grammar" as enlarging...

I can do that, a bit. There is at least this: you can read philosophy, even systematic philosophy, not with the intention of "getting the answers", bu...

Saussure liked to describe it that way too. All of linguistics since Saussure likes to describe it that way. And Shakespeare: You can go back to the C...

There.

Well, no. Of course not. The issue is optimization vs satisficing.

I was describing my guess at MU's view, so you agree with him rather than me.

Better a question that can't be answered than an answer that can't be questioned. (I think that was Feynman.)

I habitually write in the voices of other people without making it obvious I'm doing so. Need to work on that. (Though I can't imagine giving up these...

There are mantras of the programming community we might learn from: 1. There are only two kinds of programs: those so simple they obviously have no mi...

Agreed! I find I sometimes have to point this out to people who point to the replication crisis as more evidence that science is bullshit. It's more e...

I was describing MU's views, based on dim memory of similar disputes before. And as it turns out: There's a surprising strain of psychologism in MU's ...

Here's an example that horrified me, a few months ago I think it was. The US Census Bureau had finally released some results, late. There had been a l...

I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that. That guy is full of shit. He seems determined to be the new Sheldrake.

It's not even that. I think there's a Radiolab episode about it... ADDED: Well, I mean, yes it is quite specifically "an average of many bodies", but ...

I just don't understand what your point is in saying this. Do you think you're describing pain by saying that it's a sensation that hurts? It hurts be...

So you don't need to describe pain because we already have the word "pain"?

Well you're demanding a physical description right? How does it go when you avail yourself of the non-physical? Should be easy as pie now, shouldn't i...

You said that before. Do you mean something besides "pain is painful"?

I think this is exactly what he believes. We each have our own type system, each have different meanings for the words we share.

Does anyone think they can describe "what it's like to see a red patch" or "what it's like to be in pain" in non-physical terms?

That sounds to me like you're saying it's painful to be in pain. Were you hoping to say something more than that?

But even if we grant that, is it an argument against some sort of naturalism or physicalism? Is there no difference between the brains of people who h...

Maybe not. It's clearly trying to, and a lot of people have taken it as having done so. If we were to talk about Mary's room "as psychologists", the f...

We can distinguish readily, at the person level, between 'knowledge that' and 'knowledge how': We could say something similar, distinguishing 'knowled...

Still thinking about this... We can talk about the scent that a flower "gives off" as a sort of separate thing; we do, of course, say that we smell fl...

Perhaps you have noticed yourself trying to win an argument. That's not in itself evil; it's not even a bar to discovering truth. But if your principa...

That was more or less the starting point for this discussion, not with a claim that we know it for a fact in the case before us, but that we assume it...

I don't think of the moral sentiments as just a matter of the individual's reaction --- it's more like language: each of us speaks an idiolect, sure, ...

Here's another way to think about my story's reliance on our instinct for self-preservation. Do people who find themselves to be alive feel wronged by...

Small point of interest: since antinatalism is sort of the Hippocratic Oath on stilts, I looked it up: alongside the original injunction to "do no har...