Yeah, I usually give that quote as "Steinbeck, apparently in a very Hemingway mood". Okay, so I googled it. It was Steinbeck, my quote is off a little...
SX's quote immediately stuck me as being another tune from the same macho hymnal: we real men are making history and you pansies just study and analyz...
Reminds me of what Steinbeck said about critics, that they're like eunuchs gathered around the marriage bed to watch a whole man perform the act of cr...
And there's also what I think is Alvin Plantinga's argument: 1. If God exists, he exists necessarily. 2. If God is possible, then there is some possib...
At some point we should probably shift to talking about reward as well as risk. There are obvious social payoffs to asserting what everyone else asser...
That's not really how gambling works. Yes, it could be, and you may have reason to think consensus or authority are right in the case at hand. My poin...
Pretty sure I didn't say certainty is "inherent within assertion"; I said it could function as a reason for you not to fear being held accountable for...
I'd start here: if you believe that Jerry is under the box, you believe something about Jerry (and the box and so on), not something about the sentenc...
To me, the issue is how we are to talk about beliefs, our own and those of others. I see nothing wrong with the usual folk psychology that attributes ...
I think "yes," although I'd also want to gloss "content" as "semantic value"-- the content that counts for truth, reasoning, etc. If you and I watch a...
"It's raining" is also not synonymous with "I'm certain it's raining." Your certainty that it is raining is a fact about you; rain currently falling o...
I really don't know. How do you use the distinction? We're not talking about introspection here. Propositional reports are also propositional attribut...
I want to have another look at this. The sentence "It is raining" does not imply, for any given person, that they believe that it is raining, but ther...
Yes. Yes, it's an action. Actions are not truth-apt. Or you could take that as proof that the content is not something in my mind or yours. Can we bot...
"Understanding" covers a lot of territory. I can understand that it is wrong to cause someone pain without understanding the physiology of pain. But h...
Hmmmm. I haven't followed your argument about this, so I'm at a disadvantage here, and I apologize for that. But my instinct is that I'm okay with thi...
I was -- let's call it "simplifying." What I'd prefer to say there is something like this: If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my...
In my world, we'd call this "stipulative definition." Generally, a speaker can stipulate whatever they like; whether the audience follows the speaker ...
Not my thing so I don't know how it's supposed to work. I suppose you end up some variety of pragmatist. Whatever works better, however you define tha...
We've been doing this off & on for a while. You can go down this road, but it's longer and harder than some people think. You have to give up truth an...
You've given yourself a way to refer to the content of an assertoric utterance -- what's asserted is a belief -- but you've left yourself no way to re...
It's clearer if you leave out "is true": If I assert that lighthouses are lovely, what I assert is that lighthouses are lovely, and it can be inferred...
This thread already keeps merging in my mind with the "Social Constructs" thread, where SX and I are about to talk about stipulative definitions, whic...
I don't know. I can say this: I see normativity all over the place. I think logic is normative. I recently claimed elsewhere that there is a normative...
I guess you could say that when someone misuses a word and you correct them, that puts you in the position of teacher, but whence derives your authori...
But you've left out other people again. Teaching the use of a word is in many ways like teaching a skill: "Here's how you ..." But speaking a language...
So now we're right back where we started from. To say that a rule is prescriptive is, in the first place, an incomplete description of why I follow it...
A couple quick thoughts while I ponder this... There's some slippage between whether we're talking about how we do, could, or should use the word "con...
No point. You're on a logic kick, and I think it's cool that the sort of syllogisms you're messing with have recently been featured in a TV show (an e...
I think before answering, I'd better ask what you imagine these standards to be. Elsewhere, you have argued at length that truth is just certainty, th...
Syllogisms from Orphan Black (you have to answer true or false): Some bags are pockets, no pocket is a pouch. Conclusion: All bags are not pouches. So...
Here's another take: when the kids have to pick up, they pretty much always have to distinguish between stuff they want to keep and stuff to throw awa...
It is the in the nature of conventions that it barely matters how it got started. Members of a population face recurrent coordination problems. If the...
Sure. The point you're missing here is that you're also taught "WE all drive on the right side of the road," you're taught that other people will do t...
Yeah. What's more, you expect them to. If you expected everyone to drive on the left, driving on the right would be the wrong thing to do in whatever ...
It's not inherently right to drive on the right or the left side of the road. In the USA we drive on the right and expect everyone else to drive on th...
Suppose I tell my kids to pick up all the stuff on the floor. Within that directive, there is no distinction made, or made use of, between paper, penc...
I see a little of each side. On the one hand, there is overwhelming evidence that institutions are less trusted now than they were several generations...
You're a traditional, mainstream liberal. Be proud! Someone once described liberals as conservatives who can't resist tinkering. Another way to look a...
Yeah, that's the whole point of conventions. I prefer to conform on the condition that everyone else conforms. There's no particular benefit to me dri...
Nailed it. You just have to get used to how quantifiers and negatives go together. "All" is the same as "There isn't one that isn't" and "There is" is...
But the problem is precisely here: the people who all say "2+2=4" have access to its meaning, if you like, and they all do say it because they all oug...
Yeah, that's interesting. I think I was imagining something like crystals constantly forming and falling away, or a crystal that constantly morphs int...
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