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Srap Tasmaner

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That's a fair point. In responding I conflated two different acts of categorizing. I ended up talking about counting acts of categorizing, which wasn'...
September 15, 2017 at 23:17
Yes. Should have made it clearer that inference preserving truth is something like a precedent for what we expect inference to do with justification. ...
September 15, 2017 at 22:10
I think there's a misunderstanding here. I wasn't claiming that, to take your example, people can simply be pegged to a spot on some approval scale. I...
September 15, 2017 at 21:30
I'm not crazy about this one. (But agree with everything else.) I'd rather say something more like what Gettier says: whatever justification the premi...
September 15, 2017 at 20:23
Should also have explicitly said there's not a single genome to find its way around the valley. You get whatever you get when some part of the populat...
September 15, 2017 at 19:45
Heh. I've garbled the science by the way I'm using the word "gene" but I think what I was trying to say is okay. Trying to unrust.
September 15, 2017 at 16:52
I'm not sure this is the right way to look at it, although I'm far from being an expert. There isn't a one-to-one map between an organism's features a...
September 15, 2017 at 16:19
But doesn't classifying or categorizing things presuppose the possibility of counting them? The qualitative and quantitative are different, yes, but y...
September 15, 2017 at 15:51
That's really not a bad starting point in my opinion. The first three billion years of life on Earth is single-cell organisms. The last billion is mul...
September 15, 2017 at 15:31
@"creativesoul" has nothing to say about justification, as he will tell you himself. His issue is something about the psychology of logic, I think.
September 14, 2017 at 22:17
Right, that's part of Gettier's setup. The only belief he attributes the Smith is the belief that p v q; he seems purposefully to avoid attributing p,...
September 14, 2017 at 22:05
Well, insofar as the phrase "survival of the fittest" has any use, it's just this: you don't get to reproduce if you don't survive. Evolution is about...
September 14, 2017 at 20:12
Except for the part where I didn't.
September 14, 2017 at 17:38
Got it. Thanks. (I was confused because I hadn't seen the earlier reply.) So how does creative evolution handle a case like this?
September 14, 2017 at 15:21
This part is right and interesting. It's entropy. There are more possible ways for your car not to work than for it to work. Not obvious that this app...
September 14, 2017 at 00:30
I'm not sure. Think I rushed it. Better might be: 4. If Big Pharma did not fund them, biologists would not tell people they are only chemicals. 5. Big...
September 13, 2017 at 05:02
So your argument is: 1. If biologists did not tell them so, people would not believe they are only chemicals. 2. If people did not believe they were o...
September 13, 2017 at 04:40
And what would that be?
September 13, 2017 at 04:06
What's the difference between a premise and an inference rule?
September 13, 2017 at 03:14
Let S be the set of all statements. Let z be the string "If x ? S, then x is false." Assume z ? S. If z is true, then z is false. If z is false, then ...
September 13, 2017 at 01:48
Jerry Fodor made a very similar claim about biologists en masse giving up the idea of adaptation. The LRB, which published a precis of his book about ...
September 12, 2017 at 22:12
Well you know I don't agree there.
September 12, 2017 at 04:33
Same pattern as in Case II: Smith has strong evidence for the conjunctive proposition (d), but Gettier never says that he accepts it, only that he der...
September 12, 2017 at 04:31
It's ambiguous. "S is justified in believing that P" could mean: (1) If S were to believe that P, his belief that P would be justified, or (2) S belie...
September 12, 2017 at 03:43
No he really doesn't and I suspect it was deliberate.
September 12, 2017 at 03:28
From the Lycan paper I linked: The idea here is that Henry's belief is too lucky -- if he had happened to form the same belief looking at one of the o...
September 12, 2017 at 03:27
Those are from the first 5 pages: These are from the last five pages: You can't seriously suggest that you haven't been arguing that Smith believed P?...
September 12, 2017 at 03:18
Good one.
September 12, 2017 at 02:46
Yes to the first, no to the second. For instance, there's the dog-sheep: You see in a field what looks to be a sheep and form the belief, based on dir...
September 12, 2017 at 02:45
The upshot for our discussion here: Everywhere I said all Smith's troubles flow from his having a false belief that Jones owns a Ford, I was wrong. Ev...
September 12, 2017 at 02:42
No. Many involve something like faulty definite descriptions along the lines of Case I, and many involve more than a passing resemblance to the argume...
September 12, 2017 at 02:39
Do you mean besides all of the cases inspired by Gettier?
September 12, 2017 at 02:35
Should probably change that to: 6a. If the evidence for (h) is strong enough, it justifies Smith's belief that (h) 6b. Smith's evidence for (h) is str...
September 12, 2017 at 02:27
I think I'd read somewhere before that there are doubts about how Gettier's original cases are constructed, but I hadn't though much about it, as we h...
September 12, 2017 at 02:21
Let's talk about something else for a moment. Notice anything odd here: Where does Gettier say that Smith believes that Jones owns a Ford?
September 12, 2017 at 01:45
So Smith believes that the proposition "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true because Jones owns a Ford, and he does not believe ...
September 12, 2017 at 01:28
Does Smith believe that the proposition "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true?
September 12, 2017 at 01:14
Does Smith believe that the proposition "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true?
September 12, 2017 at 01:09
But he does not believe that the proposition "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true?
September 12, 2017 at 01:07
So Smith does not believe that the proposition "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true?
September 12, 2017 at 01:04
So Smith does believe that "Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true?
September 12, 2017 at 01:01
But he does not believe that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona, and he does not believe that "Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is ...
September 12, 2017 at 00:56
But he does not believe that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona?
September 12, 2017 at 00:52
But he does not believe that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona?
September 12, 2017 at 00:49
Does Smith believe that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona?
September 12, 2017 at 00:48
So he does believe "Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true?
September 12, 2017 at 00:42
But he does not believe that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona?
September 12, 2017 at 00:40
So does Smith believe that "Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona" is true? EDIT: left off "is true".
September 12, 2017 at 00:37