Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure we ever squarely faced Davidson's central claim. Take Lepore and Stone's example: That's a nice soup latrine. I think everyone would agre...

Here's some stuff about clouds: There's a definition grounded in science, so it's a little more precise than the everyday understanding of "cloud", an...

Interesting response from Ernest Lepore and Matthew Stone:

I am aware.

No, of course not.

This getting a little far afield, nevertheless... You can also describe the regress as needing first to understand the language in which the rules are...

Yeah that's a really curious point: debates about theory have a natural analog in our linguistic behavior, in part because using language seems always...

I've been pretty loose about this too. I think this is absolutely right, and it's a curious thing. The abstract model has three functions: 1. It is a ...

Question begging. Question begging. We can say that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice if Alice is thinking it's going to rain and Bob is thinkin...

From the pen of Joss Whedon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVcP-i1J8Kk

The role that "epithet" plays in the language: that's its lexical meaning. (See PI §43.) Not only is Davidson not rejecting lexical meaning, his whole...

Outstanding. Thanks for calling this to my attention. I thought I knew what was going on and it's so much worse.

Lovely. In what sense "convenient fiction" is a distortion, is exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks so much for the Aristotle lesson.

A lot of the milk into town and it was pretty crestfallen when you want or go on the road.

I don't have the paper in front of me (at work); you wanna do a search and tell me what Davidson says there about rules?

No thanks. Is this your reading of the paper? 1. Davidson's principles (1) - (3) are a good description of lexical meaning. 2. Davidson's argument sho...

One.

I only meant to suggest the lack of an institutional motivation; I wasn't trying to justify not being curious about what goes on in the world.

Not clear. They're not where I would've started, I guess, but as long as you take seriously what it means for a method of interpretation to be shared ...

The stuff of mine you responded to, that was supposed to be uncontroversial summary. In the rest of that post, and in the one before, and in the one t...

Another way to see Davidson's agreement in a passing theory is as a sort of parody of convention, as a parody of agreement, in fact, because one side ...

Suppose you decide to test tens of thousands of people with a simple test: see if any of them can do significantly and consistently better than chance...

I'm not offering to build a complete alternative theory. These are the options I see: (i) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with ...

Suppose the weak spot in the paper is not principle (3) but (2): The concept of "sharing" a method of interpretation, or a theory, operative in the pa...

No, it isn't. It is clear that if Alice is thinking it's going to rain, then we are entitled to say she's thinking something. What is not clear is how...

I told a typical story about the ambiguity of the word "Bob" as it appears in what I know about English: my theory has two entries and I rely on conte...

Tell me again what the argument is. Is it, for instance, that because a word might be used to say something different from what it is usually used to ...

Once you know where the paper's going, it makes sense. He's going to argue that we communicate by modifying the literal meanings of words as we go and...

Are you okay? Maybe take a little break from this place.

Except when you mistakenly ask for a socket and I know you meant to ask for a wrench (or should have meant to ask for a wrench), I know what object yo...

Whereas my sense is that neither minds nor brains think about things; persons do.

The question is just how much philosophical hay can be made out of saying, if you're thinking about something, then there's something that you're thin...

I don't entirely object to the discussion. I do object to it interrupting other discussions.

The very word I reached for on page 1 of this thread.

There have actually been two claims: 1. Some of us would be doing more good if we were doing something else; if you measure the effect of your actions...

I will absolutely be watching! Thanks for the tip. I assume you've seen Douglas Rushkoff's The Merchants of Cool -- if not, highly recommended.

Presumably this last sentence doesn't mean Davidson is going to deny the arbitrariness of the sign. Then what does it mean? And I think "what words me...

Supposing I grant that the theory you have in mind is more "relevant". What about Critical Theory: are you sure it's more than mere theory? I can be c...

That the analogy between "Sally kicks Steve" and "Sally thinks it's going to rain" ought to be examined more closely. It's reasonable to infer, from t...

Do you have any idea what the point of the example was? I'm accused of playing word games but you're pretending to think that generations of philosoph...

Yes.

I'm really not saying anything that simplistic. I think in the Chalmers survey from maybe a decade ago, David Hume won the sweepstakes as the favorite...

Well there was a fight between different camps that went on for a while. But if you read anything written after OLP's heyday, you'll see that everyone...

I only mentored him because he's the de facto "official" historian of the analytic tradition, and a glance at the historical work might give you a sen...

I think so. You find Searle clear and you must know that Searle's work is based originally on very careful patient work done by J. L. Austin, publishe...

You could glance at Scott Soames's historical work to get a sense of how broadly the term "analytic philosophy" is usually taken. There's little point...

And again: insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic phil...

(( phone double post ))

No, I'm confident they don't much care, certainly not for the last thirty or forty years, and I've been perfectly clear and repetitive about how I'm u...