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Srap Tasmaner

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Tell the guy looking at his hands not to worry, since you've relaxed the requirement for actually having hands in order to engage in hand-waving.
May 20, 2018 at 15:06
In: Belief  — view comment
Have not read Ramachandran, but cognitive science is enough in the air it's not hard to have a sense of these sorts of things. I'm just never sure wha...
May 20, 2018 at 15:03
In: Belief  — view comment
Here's another version. When it catches a "need an explanation" signal, your brain thinks, "I could show you the machine code for what actually happen...
May 20, 2018 at 02:48
In: Belief  — view comment
Okay, but the vibe I'm getting here is that this "explanation" is essentially fictive, that the right word for all this sort of stuff is "rationalizat...
May 20, 2018 at 02:30
In: Belief  — view comment
What happened to the connection between "I want to find my keys" and "I want to look for them in the kitchen"?
May 20, 2018 at 01:48
In: Belief  — view comment
Yeah I get that. And my point was that this sort of post hoc fails if I don't act on my preference. You'd have to say my acquiring the preference is w...
May 20, 2018 at 01:12
In: Belief  — view comment
There's surely a difference of some kind. We can say there's A's and there's B's, or we can say there's two kinds of A's. I don't suppose it matters u...
May 20, 2018 at 00:46
In: Belief  — view comment
But that can't be right, because of the knife-wielding psycho in the kitchen. I can form a preference to look there even if it's overridden by my pref...
May 20, 2018 at 00:07
In: Belief  — view comment
I still feel pretty good about the preference version, because I get to say "If you don't want to look for your keys in the kitchen, either you don't ...
May 19, 2018 at 23:39
So it would be weird if I felt a deep sense of kinship with this man ... Anywho, this sort of gamesmanship is practically built into the multiple choi...
May 19, 2018 at 22:39
My values are halves of the 1 in 3, and 1 in 4 totals, duh. The only reason to look at it by cases as I was -- and I should have done the other two --...
May 19, 2018 at 20:52
Dude, I didn't even think of that! Not sure if I did the simulation right, and I'm at work now. :-( (I had right answer being chosen from {b, c} and t...
May 19, 2018 at 19:57
Why don't multiple choice questions ever have repeated answers? If you were taking a math test and got to a question that had a repeated answer, you'd...
May 19, 2018 at 19:05
May 19, 2018 at 02:24
Bonus thought about constraints: there's prescription and proscription. Foucault talked about this with different styles of morality: you can have the...
May 17, 2018 at 08:13
But -- if there are always frames, it's not that fact alone you'd be relying on to avoid being misled. "Hey wait a minute! This picture has a frame, t...
May 16, 2018 at 18:05
Yeah, that's good. That's "sense" in the sense of "rational", or I guess more broadly something like "understanding", the "sense" that's in "common se...
May 16, 2018 at 17:52
It's like Burt Dreben's remark that great philosophers don't argue. (They just lay out their framework and you see how useful it is or isn't by using ...
May 16, 2018 at 17:42
A couple thoughts. 1. Willy Sutton's answer doesn't just shift the sense of the priest's question from one domain to the other, or from taking one kin...
May 16, 2018 at 16:41
<SophistiCat already asked my question>
May 16, 2018 at 15:07
Well, "mechanism" is a somewhat inelegant term -- I just mean the specific way something gets done. In the game theory approach, there's choice and ag...
May 16, 2018 at 00:25
Quick thoughts (since I should really be working): This sort of "linguistic accent" flattens any hierarchy we might opt for, and blocks outright the k...
May 15, 2018 at 20:47
That's curious because my instinct here was to say that the PSR, whatever its status, is not just a fact. Maybe as a first approximation you could say...
May 15, 2018 at 18:28
I think we largely agree, I just want the specifics, so that leaves a lot of work to do. For example, I don't want to lean on a word like "context" wi...
May 15, 2018 at 14:30
For "balance", an example of what looks like a genuine (1)-style report: those people on "Deal or No Deal" who just know the million dollars is in the...
May 15, 2018 at 01:32
One thing we haven't talked about is how we intend what we say to influence the attitudes of others. Suppose I am, as always on this forum, looking fo...
May 15, 2018 at 00:33
I was surprised neither of us had at first and was eager to admit it!
May 14, 2018 at 22:06
More like that. Grice is our great theorist of conversation and how it relates to logic. (His work would also be the model for Lewis's scorekeeping, e...
May 14, 2018 at 21:25
This is good, and I'm kicking myself for not sticking with your fashion designer metaphor, because it raises the issue of "fashion" in the other sense...
May 14, 2018 at 17:44
Hmmm. That argument has a funny ring to it in talking about Hume, since many people feel there's another god Hume was interested in arguing against, o...
May 14, 2018 at 16:10
Outstanding post. Also a good, serious piece of philosophy. Regarding option (2), the subjective test, I'll quote Frank Ramsey for the umpteenth time:...
May 14, 2018 at 15:49
The difference in meaning between "I" and "it" was not at issue; the question was whether "certain" means something different in "I am certain" than i...
May 14, 2018 at 02:14
You've shown there's a grammatical difference, in the same way there's a grammatical difference between Socrates is wise Wisdom is instantiated by Soc...
May 14, 2018 at 01:22
I think @"Thorongil"'s claim is wrong in a simpler way, or confused about probability in a way that needs a different kind of response. If I roll a fa...
May 14, 2018 at 01:18
The question in the title is a good one, but something seems to go wrong in the way you analyze it. (For instance, since you reverse Popper's test, "M...
May 13, 2018 at 23:53
I sympathize. (And I'm glad you're back, given your background in mathematics.) I too have decried what I think of as selecting a philosophical positi...
May 13, 2018 at 20:37
I admire your tenacity, but there's still an apples-and-oranges problem here. There's a well-known video of Feynman trying to explain how magnets work...
May 13, 2018 at 19:33
As a matter of English usage, you might be right, but even if you are, it's only for the nouns: the adjective that goes with both "certainty" and "cer...
May 13, 2018 at 15:32
When did you observe this? How did you observe this? The usual argument here is that we presume nature to be uniform, but we cannot possibly prove tha...
May 13, 2018 at 03:40
(1) The Earth is flat. (2) I'm certain the Earth is flat. (3) He's certain the Earth is flat. (4) You, he, and I are certain the Earth is flat. (5) Ev...
May 13, 2018 at 02:22
When billiard ball A strikes billiard ball B, must (some of) A's kinetic energy be transferred to B?
May 13, 2018 at 00:58
Wisdom is not forgetting that there are other ways to look at things, knowing some of those ways, and being able to rank them. Wisdom often has this f...
May 09, 2018 at 01:04
In: Belief  — view comment
Here's a different version. Suppose I want to have my keys. Then we might say (A) Given that Pat wants his keys, if he believes they are in the kitche...
May 08, 2018 at 01:17
In: Belief  — view comment
Suppose I'm looking for my keys in the kitchen. If asked why I'm doing that, I might say that I think I left them there. Someone else asked why I'm do...
May 07, 2018 at 22:58
Eh. The single most famous paper in the modern era of analytic philosophy, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," is a full-out assault on the idea of "the propo...
May 06, 2018 at 03:19
In: Belief  — view comment
Ceteris paribus? It's "in principle" after all. You could head for something like: given a set of beliefs, belief P is the belief which, if added to t...
May 06, 2018 at 02:08
In: Belief  — view comment
As you and recently @"Janus" have noted, in a propositional account of belief one argues not that belief must be expressed in fact, but that it must b...
May 06, 2018 at 01:35
They're closely related, of course. One old test to show that A presupposes B is if both A and ~A entail B. (Present king of France and all that.) Tha...
May 04, 2018 at 21:15
Is there any reason to think that a plant in need of water might refuse it?
May 04, 2018 at 20:37
I want to start by saying I love the description of yours I quoted above: I think that really captures something nicely: I picture the difference betw...
May 04, 2018 at 03:57