Srap Tasmaner

Should have said something about how Davidson treats intention in his definition of "first meaning", but we can come back to that.

I appreciate your comments but of course we are not discussing Plato, only the theory bearing his name that reifies meanings, ideas, numbers, proposit...

The cessation of pain is, you're claiming, a particular experience different from not being in pain, like your Erfworld example. Another real life exa...

I understand one part of it now: he brings up Grice only to dismiss him. The first paragraph referred to is about ambiguity, and the order of the clau...

Hmmm. I had a quick read and a half, and will reread tomorrow. We have options here. (A) Is Davidson's argument valid? Is he right that his principles...

No shit. No one on this forum wants a lecture from you about how they should be spending their time instead; no one wants you to intrude in their thre...

Here's something I posted years ago: There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here: That's Tarski w...

I'll pitch in after I get a chance to re-read the paper, but it might be a few more days.

Then you are not my target audience! Right, this is the part of your position I've ignored: abstract entities have only dependent, not independent exi...

The contradiction is in claiming that there can be any such barber. There cannot. Just because you can string words together grammatically doesn't mea...

Let S be the set of all men who don't shave themselves. P is a member of S. To be a member of R, you have to shave all the members of S. Since P is a ...

I used to find the "third realm" argument (for instance, Frege's version) persuasive, but now I can't imagine why.

I've been neglecting the motivating role of quantifiers, so a quick note. If Alice took her umbrella, we have to say Alice did something, right? The o...

So glad you've chimed in, @"Andrew M"! Your approach (which you would say is broadly Aristotelian?) seems very sound: there is only one sense of "abst...

There are several points here that confuse me: 1. "Alice is grabbing her umbrella" is also an abstraction, right? We are leaving out whatever else is ...

Perhaps you're trying to answer the wrong question. Which pair of questions do you think it more likely the science will find more tractable? A1: What...

Why do you think that? --- My last post has a slip: the bit about "ideas are things like bricks ..." is clearly not what should be there, because we d...

That would be the Platonist you're thinking of, not me. I should have thought that was perfectly clear. Because of the grammatical similarity between ...

"Alice is thinking Descartes's cogito"? I don't think that's English. For your other examples, yes! After I tacked on the what-clause thing, it occurr...

Sure, but what goes in place of "something" in "Alice is kicking something"? It's a noun phrase of some kind: (a) A proper name: "Alice is kicking Ste...

Read that as many times as you have to to see what's wrong here. Thanks for the conversation and the reading recommendations. Cheers!

The point of focusing on how we count was to point out how much of our conceptual apparatus (and not only that but other practices as well) must alrea...

I'm sorry, are you saying there is something wrong with people giving vocal expression to their feelings, mood, and all the rest? It's sociopathic. ((...

Yeah. Many years ago I more or less gave up philosophy because of the rise of cognitive science -- I just didn't see anything much left for us to do. ...

Ha! I have a little tinnitus, which now that we're talking about it, I am experiencing again! (Tinnitus is famously mysterious this way.) There's a po...

This is just the kind of thing I had in mind. Insofar as I have been pushing your position to look more like empiricism than you want, it's because I ...

Yeah, I think there is overwhelming evidence that something like this must happen. I see what's on a chessboard dramatically differently from the way ...

A wise man ... (Yes, I always read your inline notes.) You did a very nice job lining up simple material conditionals to necessity and sufficiency. Yo...

Rather than reply point-by-point -- it may surprise you, but I'm not certain we're as far apart as it might appear, plus I'm not wedded to my position...

For repackaging I have in mind very familiar things we do in deciding how to carve up what we observe. If I show you a picture of a bunch of people an...

Except of course that we do. The question is what sort of hay philosophy can make of talk of our inner experiences. So in §243 we find this: Does Witt...

Here's a thumbnail sketch of an alternative approach you might find interesting. Sellars called it a kind of functionalism. The basic idea looks sound...

Jolly. Sellars's thing is that the postulated entities explain correlations often already known. Which, yeah, of course.

C'mon, you know I was baiting you. Not that I don't believe what I said! Still at work, but while you're waiting for me you could go ahead and explain...

I doubt this line of thinking is worth the effort, since some of the precursors are lost to time. Suppose some ancient philosopher said, "It is in the...

I'm starting to get the hang of it, but holy cow... The key there is that there are equations and the equations describe a force not like anything els...

Knowledge can't be built only on private experience. But of course there is private experience and of course it is a key contributor to our knowing th...

I think this is largely right, but there are different kinds of details to fill in: roughly, (a) where our conceptual framework comes from, and (b) ho...

Well, you get to pick your poison. Abstraction from what? If the datum is raw, unconceptualized, it's going to be useless for knowledge that's suppose...

The question is how you are to give knowledge a foundation you acknowledge is non-epistemic.

I think you could have saved yourself some typing if you read the whole post before responding. I'm going to save myself some typing by saying that th...

Here's my reconstruction of the argument in the OP: (1) We are committed to the truth of some judgments we cannot prove are true. (2) We have limited ...

I didn't read the OP that closely, but I would have assumed the idea is that foundations need not be infallible, rather than a requirement of fallibil...

What's riding on the word "foundational" here?

I think a layperson's reaction to Descartes is often something like, he is pretending not to know. But pretending can be given some force. Suppose you...

I always suspected that was your doing.

Also: Grice's maxims.

That's interesting. When someone says, for example, "You should have known how many were left," what they mean is probably, more or less, you should h...

Compare my door example to the discovery of Neptune: one involves postulating a person at the moment not visible to you because he is occluded by a so...