Srap Tasmaner

What about the person who just knows they have the winning ticket? Have you ever seen the game show "Deal or No Deal?" Fascinating exercise in probabi...

Wait -- does it? I think in this case, it's that the inference that would preserve justification is faulty. (You just can't go from "each individually...

Right, I had forgotten about this. My hot take is still that this is a muddle that arises from ambiguity over what constitutes a trial. The closure pr...

Hmmmm. 1. Is there a hidden premise here that some ticket will win? Because the way the big lotteries work here in the States, it's quite common for n...

No it isn't.

"Trust that ..." sounds pretty close to "expectation that ..." I think this is all to the good, Javra. Fits comfortably with my ridiculous chair that ...

What about just the premise? Is it possible (whatever you mean by "possible") for me to believe that your claim is reasonable but wrong?

I'm deeply sympathetic to this view, Banno. I'm not sure though that I'd want to say beliefs are not real, or that concepts aren't real. They're just ...

Just the usual. I think Gettier actually talks about "entailment" but it's not clear whether he means something special by that. We can come back to t...

He doesn't argue for this position; he asks us to accept it as a premise. You don't. The word "justified" is really not particularly important here --...

Hmmm. Here's another way to look at the issue. The word "reason" is ambiguous in an interesting way: we reason from our knowledge of effects to their ...

"She looks twenty," is indeed a reason to believe she's of the age of consent, but maybe not a very good reason.

It's a soundness/validity kind of thing. Reasons that actually support the conclusion, if imperfectly, are what we want, not just any old stuff. We di...

Honored to be on that list, but we both know I learned more from you than you did from me.

I hoist a flag that means "three-masted ship". You see the flag and write down "three-masted ship". Because i can convey the idea of a three-masted sh...

There's all this "grasping" in your approach, as if this explains things. Grasping is what you do to an object. I'm saying there's no immaterial objec...

If I ask you to draw a house, I'm asking you to draw a picture of a house. (Only Harold can draw an actual house.) If you draw a triangle, are you act...

Got it. I believe I am following you, and sometime tomorrow I will move on to thinking about it.

Why would I dismiss semantics? What does that even mean? I think it's safe to say you have misunderstood. Maybe this would we a good point for us to t...

Are you even reading my posts?

I think it does. I think the shadow means hawk to them in the same way it would mean hawk to us, and that the sense (!) in which the word "hawk" means...

https://youtu.be/rGA8z3ycKcE

I will speak unguardedly for a moment: Semantics seems to be the big mystery. How do we symbolize? How can something mean something? And there's a vie...

I wasn't just talking about communication. Animals of all sorts clearly respond to types of things. You don't flee a predator because it's Shere Kahn,...

Bees like certain types of flowers, not particular individual flowers. Vervet monkeys make a certain type of a call when they spot a certain type of p...

I think the first quote there makes it difficult for some of us to understand what approach is suggested by the second quote. You seem to rule out exa...

As a matter of logic, sure, but this is not really in the spirit of the enterprise, is it? We want to avoid claims that could only be falsified by obs...

"Some mammals lay eggs" might count as an observation rather than a theory. It would be an observation that falsifies the universal claim "No mammals ...

I'd now say what I was groping for was just a market rather than an auction, which in retrospect is obvious. I can see a case for all sorts of things,...

My old favorite: A man posts a vague and somewhat mysterious advertisement for a job opening. Three applicants show up for interviews: a mathematician...

Thanks for the reference to color constancy. Don't know if I had ever seen this stuff before and it is way cool.

Then you know this one: What were the redneck's last words?

It's relative, not absolute purpose. For a phenotypic variation to be differentially replicated,* it must provide some survival or reproductive advant...

Here's another way to characterize the competition among theories that makes more sense in some ways: Competing theories offer for sale comparable pro...

I got halfway through it. It's ignorant horse hockey.

Ockham's razor is about competition among theories. One form such competition might take is an auction, and it occurred to me that philosophers do som...

It was meant as a gesture toward what a theory of concepts might look like. Suppose instead of some ideal abstract triangle, you had instead a rule ab...

Those phenomena, and those cognitive capacities-- it's all about information. It was fun, Wayfarer! Let's do this again sometime.

? The way an object absorbs or reflects light is determined by its structure and composition, no mind needed. When that tree falls in that forest, a w...

But there is a structure-preserving map from the actors on set to the digitally encoded signal that is transmitted to my TV. That signal carries infor...

Lots of other thoughts about my little model, so here's one more. How is payment made? By committing to uphold what you bid. Suppose "having explained...

That is just about the nicest thing you could say to me.

I think I understand what your overall position is, and the specific claim you're advancing in this specific thread, and I know in a vague way they go...

No.

So was your answer that once hominins are language users, from then on information is not physical for them? Was it physical before? Or did they just ...

Yeah, sorry. Should've been clearer.

Sorry. Trying to address you and Wayfarer simultaneously, and that's bound to be confusing! Instead of responding directly to your last post about com...

That question wasn't for you.

I hope you don't think I was claiming there's no difference between animal signaling and human language. The question is whether language has a monopo...

You are of course free to bid 0, but there's a chance your bid will not be taken seriously.