Srap Tasmaner

The above are mostly intended to be representative quotes. I think the trouble in this discussion comes from trying to fit the square peg of purpose i...

What trickery is this?! Okay, but there's a natural follow-up to what I wrote, which is to tell a story something like this: there is progress in rati...

Some quotes I use as maxims: That one I got from Orson Welles, explaining Touch of Evil , and he said he got it from Renoir.

Suppose I now said that in the next paragraph I'm going to present an argument against your position and in favor of mine. You could choose not to rea...

That's what I meant. The started reasons for the ban, combined with intransigence, I find satisfactory. @"Baden"'s initial comment was a little distur...

I for one would be happier if someone said it definitely wasn't his viewpoints, all of which i disagreed with.

Just going off the the idea that "should" here is normative, that you should conclude such-and-such in the same sense that you should respect your eld...

I'm not sure your example is the same though. Yours I hear as a subjunctive, acknowledging gravity as an hypothesis. I took my "should" as normative: ...

I thought that likely, as a matter of fact, this being a phone, and me hating writing on it, but the flag button doesn't show up at all until it's pos...

Cool. But how could it get flagged without ever being posted? It was immediate.

I think this is exactly what we do all the time, except without the "equally" bit. It's highly likely the ground you walk on will support your weight,...

Saw what you did there.

Is teaching my daughter how to use a hammer indoctrinating her?

That's a nice summary. Chance and necessity make a nice pair of terms in which to explain everything, but I would imagine you could tell a similar sto...

The United States Congress. Edit: possibly also the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This pattern I like very much, and I'm totally on board there. But since we're talking metaphysics, do you have any qualms about the word "fact" here?...

That makes nice sense. Yesterday's chance is today's necessity. I understood your project to be pushing back or outward to ever greater generality, to...

My thought here was that the usefulness of a map is showing you what roads happen actually to exist connecting features you're interested in that also...

This is just a metaphor, so whatever, but there are other kinds of maps. And that might be simplest for the kind of map you're talking about. But your...

Now, see, that sounds largely reasonable, in the way that pragmatism always does, if a little empty. What I'm struggling to get across is the oddity o...

And that's just not enough to start talking about what "works". Here's the last part of the quote I started with: Work to do what? Are we talking abou...

Nope. In each of my examples, the agent tasked with a specific goal chose instead to pursue a different goal, and in each case the initial goal could ...

Here's another: A wedding planner tells one of the staff to put a certain flower arrangement on the dining table, and the ice sculpture on another tab...

I posted it twice: And thus the gist of my argument was: And the answer is "no", no matter what else we say about the situation. *** My point was that...

Bonus example: I tell Sid to put his tools away; half an hour later I find little sister Hannah putting the tools away (no doubt because Sid threatene...

Nope. Full stop. I said nothing about norms, and gave no broader justification for the father's view. I thought of all that, because duh, but none of ...

One question I'd like to raise regards this sense of effectiveness. Effectiveness is task-relative, to start with; there's no such thing as generic ef...

Linguistic evolution appears to be at least partially Lamarckian, and that's interesting. I doubt that it is entirely so, but who knows.

Ick. I deliberately said nothing about adaptation. Adaptation comes into biological evolution because there is an expectation that individuals better ...

We're there? Sweet. Btw, I live in the bible belt and a friend of mine who's a linguistics PhD has had encounters with people who accept linguistic bu...

It does seem more natural to say that my idiolect today is a descendant of, to start with, my idiolect, say, twenty years ago. At what point did I lea...

Except that it's obviously mainly natural selection. And you can see other stuff like drift when a population is geographically isolated, etc. There a...

There's a structural isomorphism between the two processes, biological and linguistic evolution, so it's more than an analogy. Look at how Latin (or c...

There are multiple phenomena you can look at: changes in pronunciation, in meaning, in whatever the word is for degree of "elevatedness", etc. All of ...

Well that's a question, right? Your OP was based in part on the idea that this is something we do, that we're wired to do, to structure our experience...

So start there. One way of thinking about a person's interaction with the rest of the world, is to note that the rest of world resists and surprises. ...

I think you'll also want to be able to distinguish between your dog telling you she wants to go out and your dog telling you to kill the president.

For an easy example, languages actually, literally evolve. No metaphor. Studies in the Way of Words.

Maybe so, but it's a structure I'm fond of, and it gets close to my intuition of classifying as taking a shortcut. You see that this rock is similar t...

I'm on board. I think this could be a really fruitful idea to explore. Couple points: 1. Sometimes you can find that a metaphor or an analogy works be...

I keep circling around what I think of as a thoroughly naturalist and nominalist approach something like this: the difference between, say, a particul...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction

Should have addressed that. The full version is: "If you don't know that's red, either you don't speak English or there's something wrong with you."

That's the lines I was thinking along, but it's hard to say "When you talk about concepts you're also talking about how we use words" (details to be f...

I just can't get on board with the Whorf-Sapir thing. I know there's still controversy, but I like to think of it as refuted for color perception. I t...

Hmmm. You seem to be working your way up to "The apple is red to speakers of English," which is not only not an unreasonable thing to say, but just th...

Can you take another run at this? This says that to explain the relationship between tokens we will generally have recourse to something that does not...

I don't know... Even if you think of the paradigm of perception as being a relation between a perceiver and an object, something like P(S,0), afterima...

Can I believe that the content of the experience, its qualia as the kids say, is ineffable, but the fact of whether the experience took place at all i...

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is key text for a lot of modern chitchat on the topic.