Srap Tasmaner

Then your beef is with really simplistic sociobiology, right? Humans respond to the Beatles as they do because 200,000 years ago... Eh. Everyone knows...

My understanding as well. It's been my impression that there is a long-running debate about what exactly is selected in natural selection, a healthy d...

Are you talking about change within our species, rather than its emergence?

I'm reserving judgment. "Gene-juggling" doesn't look all that good to me -- but I've not finished reading it. It's early, for all involved. For instan...

The appeal of edges and corners is that some of the directions you might go in are not available, so your search space is reduced -- or, rather, is re...

She looks terribly interesting, so thanks.

There's a lot going on between most decisions and the consequences of those decisions. I think we all shoot ourselves in the foot, but some of us are ...

No. But "result" is a weasel-word, isn't it? Being born is a necessary condition of being alive; being alive is a necessary condition of suffering; th...

Okay. In one sense, that's just obvious, and in another it's ridiculous. If I don't deliberately crush my hand with a 2-pound sledgehammer, then my ha...

Then why bring it up? Is someone claiming that the pain and distress of being born is justified because the fetus chose to be born?

My argument was precisely that I can happily say "Joe is thinking the same thing as Allison" if Joe is thinking it's going to rain and so is Allison, ...

Did I freely choose to be born?

I took the "common sense" understanding of whether some particular suffering is justified to be the difference between "I brought this on myself (it's...

But why should I not feel responsible for this poor decision just because it's a certainty that some of the decisions I make in my life will be poor o...

Understanding an utterance in a language you know is not a voluntary action. You don't get the meaning through a conscious and laborious process somet...

Or pieces we don't yet know how to connect, that have no affordance in the work in progress. You can set those aside until their place is revealed, or...

I think rather that how a language is learned, and that it may be learned, is the source of the habit of taking people at their word, but itself is no...

I only want to say that you don't need a reason to take someone at their word. This is some kind of default, and all the theorists I mentioned, Davids...

You don't see anything systematic in English phonology, morphology or syntax? Also: might want to rethink your concept of "habit". Putting on your sli...

Because a referring expression doesn't always refer. Displacement is a core feature of language, but if you have the tools to create an expression tha...

The connection between storm clouds and rain is not mental.

Not by me. I only said we need to be careful, because there are problems in this domain distinguishing algorithm from implementation. But clearly a wh...

Something in this neighborhood happens, however we characterize it. There are differences among Davidson's account (charity) and Grice's (cooperation)...

Another example, slightly different, is the "falling beams story" from The Maltese Falcon: Sam Spade tells the story of a time he was hired to find a ...

Always loved that bit! (And his many appearances on QI.)

For each of the believers in the two stories, there seems to have been a prior state in which there was an inferential structure: The pictures on a tv...

Let's suppose you're right, and there are Properties and concrete particulars are instances of them. There is Wrenchhood, and there is the concrete pa...

You might find this article interesting.

No, I mean is there a procedure to maximize agreement -- as an abstract goal, sure, whatever -- but is it conceivable that an interpreter has at his d...

Here's another attempt. If we're going to do truth conditional semantics, we recognize we're talking about reasoning. Davidson's principle of charity,...

And related. Basically all the approaches inspired by Carnap and Tarski. I don't know if there is any experimental evidence at all for the whole model...

That's possible. In a little while I might not endorse what I just wrote. I'm uncomfortable with this whole approach to semantics, so I keep finding n...

I'm saying Davidson chooses, as is his right under the Treaty of Abstraction, to ignore the processes that solve the problem of defective utterance, w...

@"Banno" I don't think I've ever really directly tackled how an interpreter should handle an utterance like (1) Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this...

I was being picturesque.

is picturesque. Why are you pestering this thread when there's a perfectly good Platonist to argue with in another thread? Why should I have to deal w...

No. If I don't take predicates as Properties that have independent existence, I don't have to take vacuous predicates as Properties that themselves ha...

Exactly. Anyway, proved my point. You called reference a fantasy; implication of choosing a word like that is usually that this should influence what ...

What's the intended force of this though? Are you distinguishing reference from something we do with language that is not a fantasy? If you are, what'...

There is no evidence this is something I can manage. I read much less than I'd like, but in practice what that really means is that I read and don't r...

If this translation system works so well, I can just as well translate your Platonish into something else, like regular English. From the beginning I'...

Or you could say, as LW might in different words, that it's the context in which you state that leads people to treat your statement as an assertion; ...

Yeah. It's already obvious that kids are generalizing. ("I breaked it." Or Google the wug experiment if you don't know it.) Chomsky's idea was that if...

I dunno. The way we all encountered that sentence, not just in the context of philosophical discussion, but even set off specially by itself as an exa...

Just to gesture back at the context of this paper again... Chomsky somewhere said his entire life's work is organized around two problems: 1. Plato's ...

I'm just thinking we need to be careful here, and that phrase might have been conflating three different things. There's no reason to avoid talking in...

That looks like an infelicitous phrase to me. Algorithm is very high-level, perhaps as high as you can get before purpose. Below there's implementatio...

That occurred to me, but there's also the "assigning a new role to 'epitaph'" at the end of the passage. (Just for jollies, I emailed Lepore yesterday...

It's just shoptalk. "Theory of meaning for a language" is just Davidson-speak for a semantics for that language. Not expected to be something you're a...