Srap Tasmaner

Fair enough. What I'm wondering though is in what sense your typing was a use of language.

What language would that be?

If by this you mean, can we imagine a theory in which the distinction you are contemplating is deployed to pick out different entities, I suppose that...

Strawson writes about the problem of what makes a particular body my body in Individuals and has this crazy thought experiment -- which someone should...

"¬p?p" has an obvious countermodel when p is false, which happily you assumed in (1).

I appreciate your response because what I have is not so much an idea at this point as the 'aura' of an idea that has not quite yet arrived! I have cl...

Having dragged in convention, I'll do another: I think it's worth noting that the word "representation" has barely appeared in this thread at all. We ...

Sorry, man, there's no way I'm going to discuss whether "Nothing comes from nothing" is true. Best of luck to you, Sam.

I keep thinking, as I suggested in the other thread, that what we want here is sets of propositions ordered by entailment, but it looks like that woul...

I expressed no opinion on the apples and don't intend to. It's just logic: "I can eat something" is not equivalent to and does not entail "I can eat a...

In fact, it seems most natural to say that a fact, such as Caesar having been murdered in 44 BC, should buy you not just a single proposition, but a c...

A proposition such as "Caesar died" might be true not because it has a truth-maker of its own, but because it is entailed by a proposition such as "Ca...

It occurs to me that since Lewis is avowedly Humean, he might have chosen the word "custom" instead of "convention". He chose the latter to see if the...

Let's assume we have achieved the Right Understanding of what Wittgenstein Really Meant. What I want is an account of how language is possible and how...

"It is possible for something to come from nothing" is not the same as "It is possible for anything to come from nothing."

Since I'm the one who brought convention into this, I should clarify that I'm talking about Lewis's approach in Convention where the conventions are s...

I completely agree.

That undersells convention, and what motivates convention, rather dramatically. We're not talking about which fork goes to the right of which, but the...

It's so not a necessary consequence. I thought you knew how to use quantifiers.

One more thought on convention: if the worry is that people will think saying x is just following convention, that it's like playing a word game, that...

Absolutely agree, and you're right that even using the word "convention" can send people in the wrong direction. (It's not a word I would have used mu...

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. If you thought I was offering an interpretation of Wittgenstein, then I could see you thinking I had botc...

Agreed. The sort of example Grice uses (and the above is just Grice lite) is my saying, "The truck is out front," because I believe the truck is out f...

Are you thinking of the context or occasion of utterance, the language-game being played, that sort of thing? I don't think I would have a problem wit...

Words are what we use to effect our intentions, that much is clear. What do we say about the meanings of words though? It doesn't seem right to say th...

The real problem is supposed to come a few steps later, because you can show that all true propositions are actually known. That result is quite conge...

Substitute rabbits for apples and you can have the Fibonacci sequence. What could you prove with that?

Something way back in my memory tells me what you're talking about here as B is what Aristotle called substance, that of which properties are predicat...

I think psychologism is prima facie implausible as an account of how we talk about mathematics, for one thing. Now the psychologismist, if they weren'...

I'm still working on it. (I've been reading Dummett off & on for a while now, so I've acquired some sympathy for his program, and this is an interesti...

I tried explaining it to my son, and of course his reaction was that if you know p then nobody knows p is just false. When I explained how the conjunc...

Absolutely keep going. Don't be in too much of a hurry to get answers. Clarifying an issue is beyond valuation.

I'm for formalizing everything that can be. Maybe it's just a matter of temperament. The place of informal reasoning in philosophy is -- Emperor? King...

You know that's not going to work, don't you? Can Luna2 be the idea of Luna2? That way, infinite regress lies...

I'm not sure how well I can express this, but I think the problem is K itself. (I'd like to take a closer look at Dummett's response though.) I think ...

Sure. I just remind myself every time I say something like that that Montague was a helluva lot smarter than I am and he thought it was bollocks. I'm ...

Cool. It goes on the list.

We say things like this, I say things like this, but don't forget Richard Montague, who swore up and down there's no principled distinction between fo...

No, I read him as saying, at least for the word "good", that you don't need a new meaning for each new use of good, so it's easy to specify the meanin...

How do you intelligibly talk about genetic material without allowing that there are molecules carrying information?

You have the bigger picture in mind and I just have the quote you posted. In the quote he explains the applicability of "good" to any noun phrase as n...

Well I just tried to use that way, but I didn't get away with it. As for paraphrase, that's an interesting thing. But I was talking about a step befor...

Yeah that has to be right. Sometimes "proposition" gets used to mean something like: the sentence under consideration, disambiguated, indexicals elimi...

Now I'm confused because Fodor explicitly says in the passage you quoted that the meaning of "good" is fixed and its varying applicability is explaine...

I just made almost exactly the same suggestion (as Fodor does) elsewhere, but about assertion & truth rather than goodness. I'm not sure such an appro...

It just seems most natural to me to describe such cases as beliefs changing; what you described would be reasons for those new beliefs. As an aside, b...

Do we have to define computation as symbol manipulation? There are clearly phenomena in nature that are driven by information transfer rather than jus...

Thanks!

Never read him, but he sounds like a pretty smart guy.

I spoke hastily and conflated a couple things, but it might actually help. We really don't want to say that that there's the inference, and the assert...