Srap Tasmaner

Suppose I built a house and God created this universe. Tell me exactly what those two acts have in common.

0! = 1, and most mathematicians most of the time would say 00 = 1. This is not a profitable avenue for you to stroll down.

I could agree with that. As I read the history, and I'm not quite an expert, one of the things that happens in the LW and immediately post-LW era is t...

Well, Wittgenstein gave up on the idea of logical analysis but not everybody did, and I think the jury is still out. Logic and linguistics march on.

I can't help feeling it's an empirical question, and that bothers me. I'd rather be clearer on what connection there is between language and concept. ...

I don't think I disagree with anything here-- maybe-- but I think you mustn't take the further step of saying you can't perceive the length of an obje...

No no, of course not, but animals do stuff that looks like cognition, so I feel a little uncomfortable with theories (like Whorf-Sapir) that tie even ...

"Imbue." Here's the link for benighted souls that don't get the reference.

Okay, I'll bet you could devise an experiment that would show that dogs can pick out the longest of a set of levers, or the shortest, or whatever. I d...

I get that. And you could manage by training people to use the stick in a certain way and that's that. But it's far from uncommon to use definitions i...

That has an undeniable ring of plausibility to it, but I wonder whether it's an empirical claim or a logical one. For comparison, I think the war over...

Agreed. That's why it's not helpful for him to say, there's one thing that's neither a meter long or not a meter long. It is one meter long, not becau...

You have to keep in mind we're taking about a time when 1 meter was defined as the length of this stick. (Answered before your edit. Yeah that's how w...

The "one" is there even when LW talks about it. Its length is defined as 1 meter, but it could have been defined as anything. 2 meters. 1.003 meters. ...

Because my version defines its length as an actual value, not just where we get "meter".

I read and loved The Realistic Spirit many years ago. (Still have my copy somewhere-- you're welcome to it if you don't have one.)

So that's what I said at first. Since nothing here rules out doing a definition by cases, I wonder if there isn't some advantage to one approach or th...

@"Fafner", what does LW have to say about the standard meter being 1 meter long by definition? I don't remember and my copy's in another room.

Now that you mention it...

"Truth by Convention" is pretty early though, so maybe the behaviorism isn't fully formed yet. Been a while since I read it.

Maybe, and that would be pretty interesting because people hate the sort of methodological behaviourism of LW but Quine is quite definitely an unabash...

Sure, but that makes his fierce commitment to classical logic likewise a little uncomfortable for him.

Yeah but that claim haunted him the rest of his career, and in later works he gets closer and closer to saying you just never revise the laws of thoug...

Actually I changed my mind while I was cutting the grass. You were absolutely right. It occurred to me that we could just define the length of the sta...

Yeah it's something else now. But if the standard's something else, the thing in Paris is just a stick. (A really nice stick.)

Hrmmm. I have asserted that the standard meter is nether. My diabolism is showing.

No, for it to be true you would have to have an effective procedure for determining it to be true (as in mathematics) or some idea what would count as...

He's being cute. Obviously measuring the standard doesn't make sense. But people can still form the sentence, "The standard meter is one meter in leng...

There's ideas and there's ideas. When you use the phrase "my grandmother," I can understand you without experiencing the memories you do when you say ...

You had better, or your analogy doesn't get off the ground. I'll try again: Option 1: Here's a house. Designed. Must've been a person. The universe it...

It's a curious thing. People not intimately familiar with Wittgenstein almost always interpret the slogan "meaning is use" as an endorsement of Humpty...

My question really is whether you think someone's motivation determines the truth of what they say. Mathematicians enjoy mathematics, and of course th...

Do you actually believe this, or were you just having a go at @"Sapientia"?

Btw, I'm almost certain Hume had a related argument that the order you perceive in the universe could be the order only of the little bit you have kno...

I think, as I tried to show in my little dialogue, and in the post before that, the argument from design undercuts itself. Remember, conscious agency ...

Okay, that is not what I expected. Well done?

Yeah, by "you're making stuff up," I didn't mean that you hadn't actually said this, but that what you say here again you're just making up. This has ...

Your concern is that, under a certain doctrine, all there is to using language is emitting appropriate sounds at appropriate times, mechanically, as i...

Dude, you're just making stuff up now.

I'll try to get to your critique of "meaning is use" sometimes tomorrow when I have time, but in the meantime, you should note that linguists already ...

Q: Why do we not find tidy rooms in nature? A: A tidy room is the work of a conscious agent, acting with purpose and intelligence. Q: So we see two di...

(5) Why are there three physical dimensions rather then some other number? (6) Why is there an arrow of time?

Here are some other questions you might consider: (1) What is a law of nature? (2) Why are the laws of nature the way they are, and not some other way...

Btw, you forgot to tell me what conscious agency was responsible for the behavior of the bean machine.

But where there's law, there must be a law-giver.

Let's say, because we're doing philosophy, that I believe you are responsible for tidying up the living room because I see you doing it. That would be...

Is the evidence for the existence of a conscious agent that created the universe anything like the evidence on which we base other beliefs?

Sure, I can see that, and what @"andrewk" says above is helpful. Only now we've traded talk of an ordering agency of some kind for talk of order (know...

There could still be a question of whether that projection is reasonable, we could develop standards, etc. (Phil Dick once said that true paranoia is ...