Sure. I might have been confused by a math problem yesterday and again by the same problem today; but my feelings of confusion are presumed to be two,...
Things you work for, that you earn, are more valuable to you. Your dad was right about that. Gifts are things you don't earn, and maybe that's why so ...
Maybe I can make it simpler. I'm looking at my car right now. It is the same car, the same unique instance of a type, that I was looking at yesterday....
It's junk. I'll rephrase a bit to show how I understand it: The Thing = some specific external source of a particular sort of judgment (1) If you rely...
My point was only that we seem to assume all of our inner experiences are numerically distinct, unique instances of types, and that the words we use t...
I find it hard not to look at philosophy as whatever inquiry isn't science. Historically, philosophy as an ongoing pursuit keeps spinning off whatever...
When people talk about medium sized dry goods, it's usually clear enough whether they're talking about two tokens being of the same type, or a single ...
In my example, the challenge is "try it and see", which still strikes me as an epistemically healthy attitude. Does saying that make me a realist? Wha...
One version of the puzzle has another ship being built out of the original bits, the ones that have been replaced, so that you now have two, and the q...
I actually stumbled into the same thing here: That's direction of fit, but it occurred to me in a slightly different form, our ability to intentionall...
There's actually a proxy for The One Thing to hand: the unceasing flow of sensory data. And sure enough, people who start there, who in some sense con...
Reality obviously restricts what we can do. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. But talk is cheap, no question, and people can say anything they like. The...
And what of truth? If realism is worth talking about, it's the idea that some of the things we say about some of the things in the world are true in v...
I think there is a concern remaining, even for so minimal a realism as this, that we are not justified in assuming that there are many things to class...
Here's another question. If you are a hobo, you might find a decrepit old barn and use it, temporarily, as a house. If you are a wealthy couple on Thi...
Even in ancient Athens, we might abstract over temples, markets, homes, and so on, to come up with something we call a "building". For all I know, the...
I don't know much of anything about the history of architecture, but I suspect there were no "buildings" in ancient Athens, perhaps not even before th...
One thing I'm sure we agree about is that it's helpful in any number of ways to recognize that you can classify objects in different ways. (I don't kn...
I'm obviously on-board with this to some degree, but I'm not sure that what we clumsily call the "belief" that there are "external objects" is up to u...
I'm not arguing for incommensurability; I'm just saying that between data and questions of fact there's theory. How many planets are in our solar syst...
One day you might have to say what you think Davidson means by that. I'd also like to hear something about what you think our use of language does exa...
But you have to link up distrust with "as few people as possible" in some specific way. Is it because the vaccine might actually be poison and you wan...
But apples are not the raw perceptual data they cause us to have. And I don't see the point in preferring a locution like "whatever causes the raw per...
This seems to be the tree @"Isaac" is barking up too. I would find that a strange sort of realism. "I believe in somethings" -- but absolutely nothing...
Here's what I think just happened -- look back through this little sub-thread and see if you agree. You are making at least two claims: one is the "on...
I like this very much. Whether one could somehow, someday develop an artificial system that could deal with such a case, who knows. I lean toward your...
Good to know. I was confused and asked as clearly as I could. As you wish. I believe you have accused me of bad faith in every exchange we've had, but...
Dividing 5 by 60. I meant, why do you have to choose whether to sympathize with those who lost loved ones to the virus and those who lost something --...
I agree this is a serious concern. In the early days, public health officials had to make decisions before they knew how it was transmitted (remember ...
Oh I don't know. The same reasoning underlies the decision of many people not to vote. (What difference could my one vote make?) Usually a plurality o...
Anecdotal aside. The desertion argument is not just some academic theory. I have had a few customers argue, to my face, that since everyone else is we...
There's something of what you say here in the way social norms work -- the usual, driving on the right (or the left) side of the road because everyone...
There's the point about "what an average is". In the town where I live, there's a railroad trestle over a road that has a 9' clearance, and now and th...
I take it "is it inevitable" here means something like "Do we really have to? Couldn't we just not do this and be fine?" Which suggests human fretting...
We don't have to fall for this, treating "intention" as a super-concept like "belief". The only reason to say a beaver made the dam "intentionally" wo...
Yes. No. Since I offered one of those, I'll bite: I think there's a difference between, say, a mountain pass carved out by a glacier and an anthill or...
I think it's the pressure of science. We know that what we see is model spun up by our brains, and we've attempted to press-gang the word "belief" int...
David Lewis agrees. But I have to say, I'm beginning to feel a bit hamstrung by this: On the one hand, we who live in open societies tend to be pretty...
No, I'm saying that once you've drawn it doesn't matter if you were more likely to draw what you did or less likely. If the less likely outcome is wha...
It's a simple point. Suppose I have an urn with 75 red marbles in it and 25 blue marbles. You bet me $5 that without looking you can reach in the urn ...
Honestly, I can't help you man. I think Fitch's paradox is crap, but TGW (of dear departed memory) thought it was a straight-up refutation of verifica...
Prediction is interesting and there's a lot one could say about it. But the question for us, is how does betting engender facts in the world? I say th...
Wanted to acknowledge that I have not yet responded to this: That's a nice hard case, but I wanted to lay out my view more fully before tackling it. I...
Of course, but all of that is before you place your bets. In a broad sense, you are competing as a handicapper against other handicappers to make the ...
I want to revisit quickly one of the examples I gave earlier, because there's something odd about it: First of all, we can compare this to the Lakers-...
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