There is the old story of the blind men and the elephant: two parties who disagree are sometimes both right because they are describing different part...
There you go. It's more immediate and by using the indicative instead of the subjunctive, it sounds more like a statement of fact, more certain. In ge...
Think of it as a past tense counterfactual expressed in the historical present. No one is mixing up their tenses. It's colorful. It's also a way of av...
What you're talking about here is the underdetermination of theory by data, yes? Every dataset is a duck-rabbit. Goodman shows the same effect can be ...
Imperatives are also a natural choice for perfecting conditionals: if you're negotiating, and you say, "Throw in another hundred and you've got a deal...
I think the grammar is exactly as you and @"Sapientia" interpret it; it's the bit of context given here that makes the difference. No Americanism. "Ch...
This is really nice. Generalize it and reword the second sentence, and you've reinvented pragmatism! When I asked about statements about the future, I...
Yeah, that's an option. Conjunctions would be easy, I guess-- just two beliefs instead of three. And you could work up an approach that doesn't treat ...
I was thinking about this driving home from work last night. The standard example for perception is always something like this: I see the road sign, t...
Can we make anything out of the difference between, on the one hand, A being a reason for believing B, and, on the other, A merely ("merely"?) being c...
Not sure why you think this. Here's a diagram for what I said, which was \small P(J \lor X \mid D) ? P(J \mid D) : /uploads/files/ki/6u7a3cjeeqricb4x....
Is there a difference between these two questions: Do you know what this is? Do you know what this is called? (The latter refers to some language, not...
We don't have to do it this way. I didn't bother with conditional probabilities before, but it's the natural way to model Smith's belief. If \small J ...
One says, if x is a statement, then it is false. There is a longish tradition of so interpreting universal statements (Russell and Ramsey both for sli...
Is it irrelevant that the duck-rabbit has been heavily "abstracted"? That is, many, many details of ducks and rabbits are left out, aren't they? And w...
Suppose you're a curious youngster with internet access and you look up "Evolution" on the Wikipedia. Here are the first two paragraphs you'll read: W...
That Shakespeare could type is pure speculation, since he predated the typewriter by, I think, several years. How do you answer that, evolutionist scu...
I think the puzzles you keep running into, Mike, come from an image of the lone organism, a person, struggling heroically against their environment. N...
Sorry-- Individuals is the book. I just wasn't bothering to check. I have now, and Chapter 2 is the no-space thing and Chapter 3 has the three-bodies ...
Chapter 2? maybe of Strawson's Individuals, the no-space thought experiment. Book also includes the I-have-three-bodies thought experiment, which I wi...
Yes! It appears to be totally unmotivated, doesn't it? At the very least, it violates Grice's "Be relevant" maxim. It even seems to edge toward the lo...
So what about the disjunctive syllogism? If I assign to A a probability of r, and to B a probability of s, what probability should I assign to ~A & B?...
Here's an argument: Everyone in this room is happy. Steve is in this room. ? Steve is happy. That's a valid argument, whether or not either of the pre...
I don't think we're talking about substitution here exactly. No one thinks p v q is equivalent to p; it's inferred from p. And explicitly we're not in...
It's only sound if p is true. The conclusion of an inference merits no more or less credence than what you grant your premises. If you're uncertain ab...
Aren't you just conflating validity with soundness? I just don't understand the idea that inference is only possible from actual truths. What's a pers...
I don't think he does. The way Gettier sketches in the "strong evidence" Smith has is clearly just a gesture toward whatever we would generally count ...
We agree that whether B follows from A is purely a matter of logic, nothing to do with belief. I don't know why you think I'm arguing for extra logica...
Have not read. Hoffman talks about Maxwell's demon and Landauer. But my memory is that a lot of the discussion of RNA, DNA, ribosomes, etc. is just fo...
I also read Life's Ratchet on apo's recommendation and it's excellent. There is relatively little about information** in it, and nothing I recall abou...
@"Cabbage Farmer" describes Smith somewhere as having a defeasible warrant to assert that p, and that's all he needs. Think about how reductio works: ...
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