Srap Tasmaner

I know what the notation means. I don't understand what these probabilities represent. Are you sure they're even defined?

The betting matters, and be honest: you were happy enough to use wagering arguments when it suited you. (What's more the examples don't show what you ...

Yeah, that's right. When you win, you get your stake back and the odds represent your profit. So 2-1 against heads gives you back the $1 and pays you ...

I don't understand at all what you mean by P(Monday|Heads) and P(Monday|Tails).

Nearly. This is why I said I couldn't understand how you were setting the odds. Doing it this way is paying off 2-1 on both heads and tails, which is ...

I understand how it works, now that I finally got a moment to do the wagering argument. By betting tails, I get to double what I risk only when my pro...

Missed this. Yes. That was exactly my argument: if you offer even money, I am guaranteed a profit.

You should be paying out $2 on heads, for a wager of $1. That's what 2-1 (against) means. On the favorite, you only pay $0.50, because the odds are 1-...

I don't understand this. What you're doing there is giving even money on heads and 2-1 for on tails. You can't do that. My policy is to wager $1 on ta...

Frege's view is that "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" have different senses but refer to the same object. Since he splits meaning into two "components", it...

On this issue of whether there's new information: it's true that all she gets is that she's been awakened. She knows no other new facts, but she knows...

Not exactly. If you're calculating wagers and payoffs, you'd need to add up all the gains and losses for the odds to make sense.

Gotcha. I'm at work so I'll read later. Maybe much later since I'm enjoying fighting through this "on my own". Another good thread.

One more quick note. The point was that being asked doesn't have to be a simple fact/non-fact, but can have a probability, and we're told that the pro...

Don't know what you mean. The multiple person argument is really interesting and might persuade me. (One thing that occurred to me is that if there's ...

Variation 2 Suppose I toss a fair coin; if it comes up heads, I ask you if it was heads or tails; if it comes up tails, I don't. When asked, you shoul...

Here's a variant that is structurally similar: No sleeping theatrics. Examiner tosses a fair coin, and then tosses another. If the first toss was tail...

Finally got some time to come back to this and I think you can use conditional probabilities. I have Beauty treating Monday-Tuesday as another 50-50 c...

Presented in a way that suggests we should look for a conditional, but that won't work. I could see that, but I'm still mulling it over. Everything el...

Yeah that's pretty clean. I realized right after I posted that the question is almost literally what is the probability we got heads given that you ha...

So there's a conflict between guessing which interview this is -- and you weight by the number of possible interviews -- and guessing which day this i...

I wouldn't have even thought of "... refers to ..." as being an identity relation. It's clearly not. A symbol is not the thing it symbolizes. I don't ...

Okay, I think I understand what you're saying now. Frege analyzes "Hesperus is Phosphorus" as asserting the identity of the objects picked out by the ...

Yeah, that's a good point. I had forgotten about the proper class stuff and was reaching for "class" as the generic term. (I guess here we have to use...

I disagree. The Russell set is manifestly pathological. That it is, I could know even without knowing its role in the history of philosophy, but the c...

I can't find anything in your post I'd agree with. Certainly not the "amused pity" or the treatment of Russell's argument as an artifact.

That's all dead on. Sometimes when he and I sit on the front porch, I teach him a little philosophy. With "the go ahead run" I was imagining the case ...

More weirdness with definite descriptions. A run in baseball is only "the go-ahead run" if the game is tied before the run scores. If the game's not t...

Agree completely that the use of "another" implies some stuff I was ignoring, much of which you described nicely. There are so many ways to do this. S...

Don't be a hater. This was a great paper until Murdoch bought it.

I was going to pass this by because you're kinda right, but there's more to say here, coming off my last post. Say you want to approach the natural la...

Yes.

I'm still not clear what you're saying. Everyone agrees these assertions achieve the same purpose: (1) Hesperus and Phosphorus are the same object. (2...

Go for it. It looks really nice. If you have questions, this is reasonable place to ask first. If the answers you get here aren't helpful, you can hea...

I don't understand what you're saying. (1) "Hesperus" = "Phosphorus" (2) Hesperus = Phosphorus (1) is just false, and (2) is the claim that "Hesperus"...

From where I sit, these threads have raised the level of discussion on the forum. Specific problems are way more interesting than a battle of isms. Ap...

Ah, no, I definitely wasn't saying that the recherche nature of things like the Liar or the Russell set is some kind of evidence they should be shrugg...

"Truth and Probability" changed my life, but I'm no Ramsey scholar. What did you have in mind? What should I reread? Here's the idea: science is part ...

1. Cooperation is baked into language -- that much you should have learned from Wittgenstein. Vervet monkeys don't do their "predator" calls if there'...

The Russell set is not what anybody had in mind when they first had the idea of sorting the world into classes. The Liar is not what anybody had in mi...

Let's talk about the Barber. Suppose we have a town with three men: a barber (B), a philosopher (P) who doesn't shave himself, and a mathematician (M)...

Let's call this the Skeptical Argument. (See what I did there?) The Skeptical Argument appears to demonstrate that agreement in definitions is impossi...

Agreed, except that the existence of such a set is a presupposition, and it is that presupposition that must be denied. (In this way it's analogous to...

What's curious is that if you consider these two commands (a) Shave all and only those who do not shave themselves; and (b) Form a set by selecting as...

It just means this is a task the barber cannot carry out. It is an invalid way of specifying a task.

For the record, the barber can't exist, the Russell set we (most of us) don't allow to exist, but the word "heterological" does certainly exist and ca...

Took a class from him in college. I remember once, hanging around his office talking, I mentioned I had just started reading Deleuze's book on Foucaul...

Maybe restricted quantification is not ad hoc at all though. Maybe "Some Gs are F" is a better paradigm than "Some xs are F".

The axiom schema of specification blocks Russell. Would I be right in thinking that one reason to be cool with that approach (the truth learned) is th...

Are you talking about consciously thinking about the rule? When you first learned how to play chess, you had to do that for a while, but no one who's ...