Srap Tasmaner

Here's another way to put the issue with your bacon and walnuts example: what you're trying to model, or should be, is learning, and I'm deeply skepti...

I've been listening to Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman a whole lot lately, so I'll say this: I don't take Jim all that seriously as a thinker, but now a...

Humorously.

I have no expertise in biochemistry, but I would assume what we're talking about is a chemical we ingest or smell binding to a chemical within our bod...

Of course. I'm just not sure the original perceptual event should be characterized as a thing we could file away and then check new things against. Ma...

The important thing would be the habitual response of consuming or not consuming. But to get there, you claim we store particular qualia as memories. ...

But the argument is precisely over how properly to theorize our experience, isn't it? Unfortunately that means there are facts we all agree on, in som...

In everyday contexts, sure. The question is whether you should build a philosophical position on how the languages you and I know happen to handle the...

Grammar, in the schoolbook sense, is not a sure guide to ontology. Think of Quine's puzzle about "seeking" and friends: if I'm looking for a spy, that...

Like the way I memorize a phone number? Memory is a whole 'nother complicated mess. How much do you need to oversimplify it?

This has nothing to do with coffee or with coffee tastes or with mental events, nothing like that; this is all about how to deal with words like "some...

But nobody is denying that I can't have coffee preferences without there being coffees. We're just denying that preferring how one coffee tastes to ho...

? But is it empirical, logical, grammatical, theoretical, what?

What kind of claim is that? Is there anything that could convince you that it's false?

But is this what we do? Is it even what we should do? Penzias and Wilson switch on the machine, expecting not to be receiving a signal. But they are. ...

This might be the right point to confront something @"Isaac" is always reminding us about: the stories we tell about our beliefs are post-hoc. They ar...

I think the idea of falsification as a way of narrowing the range of what could be true is really appealing, it's just not the whole story. One of the...

What I want to say is, I hope not! If objects are discriminated in my modeling of the world based on visual information, that aspect of object formati...

Adding them doesn't help because they can't be properly specified. Roughly I took@"Banno"'s point to be that, since you are putting an essentially und...

I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. The way we interface with and int...

But now you're talking about ceteris paribus clauses and that's a whole 'nother minefield, as Nelson Goodman showed.

But maybe that just is consciousness, not immediately, not straight from the senses, but the continual updating of your model of a world of objects. T...

Do you think the taste of the tea is an experience that stands on its own? By "on its own", I mean not in distinction from all the other taste experie...

Except it's still not clear that this is what your method does. Where's the "false" in your "falsifying"?

Okay, yes, and that's satisficing, which means you have a clear goal, a way of deciding whether it's been met, very often a scheme for reducing candid...

Okay, I think I see what you have in mind. But I still don't see how it works. The new observation entitles you to eliminate something, thus whittling...

Maybe I missed it, but it's still not clear how this whittling down is done. I get the impulse: if any one of {A,B,C,D,E} explains {x,y,z} and we can ...

I think avoiding Hempel is supposed to be one of the strengths of falsificationism, since you claim not to be interested in supporting evidence at all...

Why didn't you do Hempel? Every non-black non-raven counts as "evidence" that ravens are black. Logic is swell but it's not the swiss-army-chainsaw it...

This is just lovely. What an excellent post. Yawn.

Is that a metaphysical question?

That's the one, my bad. If it got reviewed at all I guess that's something. Mainstream folks also seem to think it's worthwhile attacking Sheldrake bu...

It would be interesting, as a matter of history, to see how this plays out in Plato, where the standards of justification are in play as various justi...

No I'm not. Human beings are made of the same stuff as other animals and the medium-sized dry goods in our environment; we are the sort of animals we ...

This is dead on. @"Wayfarer" posted a link to a collection of perhaps quite serious academic work on psi phenomena (William James would be thrilled!)....

That's the low-hanging fruit, but I think the real motivator, in terms of cultural history, is Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Darwin. It's Freud in parti...

If my purpose is to answer such a question, but that's not why I learned it, so far as I know, and it might come in handy doing a Crossword too. What ...

So much depends on the details though. Of course memories are connected to each other, and of course we draw on factual memories operationally. I susp...

Then they're memories. Do you remember what point you're trying to make?

We already distinguish between knowing-how and knowing-that in everyday language. Some languages even use unrelated words there. And I'm betting the n...

People tend to have memories they can't access at will, but something like a smell can trigger them. Early childhood memories are like that. (Complete...

Could you have memories that you cannot in fact access or verbalize? The answer to that is clearly yes. In principle? Dodgy. I thought of "giving the ...

Techne. Was just reading Dewey yesterday making a related point about Plato and artisan knowledge (which he casts as proto-scientific). It does seem l...

This is cool. Stats people talk about "how much of A is explained by B" but you're absolutely right that the closest we come in everyday language is s...

That's actually all I was trying to ask, just wasn't sure what else to say knowing-that would be knowing-how to do, but maybe there's no general form....

And the knight must land on a different colored square, but of course neither of these points are in the rules; they are both inferences from the rule...

We are very much on the same page. ((Lately I've been reading Dewey and Herb Simon, both people with one foot in philosophy and one in psychology. I m...

You and I went around and around about this once before, but I think I have a better sense of your overall approach now and mine has shifted toward yo...

This all feels right to uneducated me, but to be really convincing I think we should also have an account of introspection -- along the lines of, cand...

Right, and I think that if qualia are to serve as the updating of the old sense data theory they are supposed to be, then the assignment of the quale ...