Srap Tasmaner

1. You can assert the equivalence in truth-value of "P" and "P is true," but if you want to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions, then you can...

Here's one thing that's curious: "true" takes that-clauses like the propositional attitudes, modal operators, all that intensional stuff. But "true" r...

I think the question, still, is whether truth is a semantic notion.

This is the part I was looking at. It looks like you're defining truth as satisfaction: "cats fly" is true in that world iff there is something in tha...

I'll know more soon, as I expect you will too. We'll talk again in a month.

We're talking about semantics, so S1 is distinguished from S2 by some proposition P being true in S1 and false in S2, something like that. What make P...

I don't understand why you assume there would be a general answer to that. The concretists give something that counts as a general answer, but only by...

Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction goes like this: we all agree that what makes a statement true is in part a matter of what the wor...

Here's a different example of flying to consider. In Toy Story, Buzz claims that he can fly, and Woody claims that Buzz cannot. When Buzz performs an ...

I don't see how that can be right. If you're an abstractionist, you think the concretists have explained away actuality with a semantic trick: "actual...

I just don't know enough really, but my sense from skimming through SEP was that the answer might be immanent to the actual world. That is, concretist...

You have to learn the basics. The logic you're using is tenseless. "¬p?p" says tenselessly "If nothing exists, then something exists." It is true if s...

I think the point of the question -- which I'm not competent to answer, so I haven't -- is that "actual" is an indexical to concretists like Lewis, bu...

I would say one difference between my hypothesis and yours is that mine is motivated. I don't have a definition of "motivated" handy, but at least the...

Suppose you did an experiment in which people answered questions about the colors they see. You'll probably find there are differences among your subj...

Just thinking out loud. We entertained the possibility that there was a general pattern of forced theory refinement, and that there's a kind of refine...

I'm wondering now if every theory can be forced into an ad hoc refinement.

And I'm wrong to say it's always the amount. A piece of the true cross counts no matter how small.

Actually that last bit -- it's still a bag of flour -- is curious because it's literally true but cancels the implicature that it's a full bag of flou...

But my suspicion is that this is just not true, that it's always the amount of flour we're interested in and the bag is just the obvious way of referr...

I had this same thought because our example is a statue and one of the most famous statues of all time is missing her arms. (Great song by Television....

I suppose there's sorites on the one hand, and the ship of Theseus on the other; you can ask if you still have a heap after taking away a grain, and i...

The sorites arises when you try to treat a mass noun collection as an object in its own right. You can say that makes it a vaguely defined object or y...

I'm thinking that for a given theory, some ways of refining or extending it will be natural and some will be ad hoc. So naturalness is also theory-rel...

I guess there's a difference between talking about the bronze a statue is made of and the particular collection of bronze bits it's made of. The first...

Actually I think that would be a measure of how the theory refinement is done, not that it has been refined.

I guess I'm just still unclear what we're supposed to have learned about "meaning."

So we're abolishing any distinction between natural and ad hoc sortals.

I'm not getting this. If I refer to some stuff by referring to its current configuration as an object, I'm still referring to the stuff. I guess we're...

Why isn't set membership enough?

Yes, I think that's the sort of thing I'm saying. We could say that dummyness is theory-relative, and that Travis's argument is that there is no final...

So the point is that I have to define my set by reference to the statue? Must I have an independent way of referring to it? What about before it was a...

I think the sense of identity here is more or less just set membership though: all the bits of stuff that the statue was made of are still here. With ...

Yet again it is a question of interest and purpose. Are we sure there will turn out to be sortals that are never dummy sortals? (I'm reminded of the e...

It's not perfectly clear that what you call here the "lump of bronze" that constitutes the statue is an object at all. It feels more like a mereologic...

If you find logic interesting, you should really take some time and study it.

* He's been talking about property.

Understanding a sentence in which a novel use of a word is made is just a special case of understanding a sentence in which use is made of a word you ...

Was the rewrite intended to be more snippy or less? Wittgenstein is here by implication, but his name appears not in the thread title, and the thread ...

You're talking about the conventional meaning of a word, how a word is generally used within a speech community, how a word is most often used within ...

? You should take another shot at that paragraph.

I had begun to wonder if you were just talking about words and dictionary-meanings. Bleh.

That makes perfect sense to me. Equivalence is variable. So the idea would be that this is how you know you only have the tail of an entailment-poset ...

No I absolutely don't. I'm just trying to follow your thinking here, badly it seems. I'll take one last shot at it. Maybe if you could give me an exam...

Suppose you do attempt to teach John Cakese. Let's suppose also that none of the words of Cakese exist yet; you intend to make them up as you go, and ...

Let's call it "Cakese". You said I could call it what I like, and I've decided. As it turns out, you never meant to imply that Cakese actually exists....

The only ground for the supposed meaning of your supposed use of language that you indicated was more language, that is, the translations you provided...

Supposing, just for the sake of argument, you have a provided a criterion for what could or should count as a use of language, what would lead me to t...

I'm sorry, are you saying I have to grant this, in the present case? Or are you saying that if this were an instance of language use, this is what I w...

I'm a little puzzled by this. If I speak to you in a language you do not know, it would make sense for you to say, "That's meaningless to me." "Meanin...