Janus

Well, why not aim for the best explanation one can think of? Do you deny there are better and worse explanations? Abduction, at least in the context o...

Abduction? Nothing more nor less than creating explanatory hypotheses. I'm not seeing the difficulty you are apparently having with the idea.

Science doesn't progress solely via abduction, but it certainly could not progress at all, or even get off the ground, without it.

I didn't mean to suggest you were defending Kant. Perhaps I should have been more careful with the wording. I think Kant did introduce a new standpoin...

You mean that we are not born blank slates is not something we can know via our experience of ourselves? Can we not know via observations, both our ow...

I'm afraid this makes no sense to me. I don't see how any cognition can be "absolutely independent of all experience". Can it be explained?

We don't know anything of objects or phenomena in general a priori—in terms of what commonalities we can know about all objects without actually consu...

There are not innumerable possible plausible explanations. It is not abduction that might inform as to which explanation is most plausible but inducti...

Don't we experience the phenomena as being other than ourselves? Why bring noumena into it?

I don't think it's fair to say that the hypotheses that are chosen are merely a matter of one's preferences—to repeat, they should be consistent with ...

There is no certain way to ascertain which is "best". That's why I said "seems best'. The only way to ascertain whether a hypothesis is a good one is ...

I don't think you understand what 'abduction' means in the context of science. It is the use of the imagination to come up with what seems to be the m...

Not at all. Abduction is the use of the creative imagination in formulating testable hypotheses that might best explain the observed facts. An abducti...

That seems a rather strange, if not perverse, response from someone who thinks we should be guided by the science as to what to do about human-induced...

All the evidence we have points to the conclusion that the future will be broadly like the past. Hume was, in my view, merely pointing out that this i...

Don't we also experience a world of things other than ourselves? Perhaps you mean something different—that we don't experience being other things?

To be free of the primary "cares" of the world involves renunciation, and not many are capable of, or want to do, that. Even with renunciation there i...

To be persuaded is no guarantee of the soundness of what has done the persuading. I just don't see how the truths or falsities that constitute a purpo...

Careful—you're starting to sound like @"Wayfarer". That the stability is meaningful is not the same as to say that it exists. The conflation of meanin...

:up: :lol:

I'll be convinced of that when you can point to a non-physical activity. I say all activities involve energy, and I count energy as being physical. I'...

The ticket machine cannot state that it has accepted or rejected values. The ability to state what is on one's mind would seem to be a minimum require...

Yea, the problem of ideology and dogmatism, political or religious—the inevitable polemic—us and them. Even if you offer a rational critique of an ide...

A salient question. My take is that we are better off without the idea of overarching values, because that leaves us with the freedom to create our ow...

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that everyone identifies themselves as a philosopher. Is anyone who identifies themselves as a philosopher a philosopher? Li...

I don't know, I guess it depends on interpretation. I think everyone is a philosopher in some sense insofar as they have accepted or rejected some set...

You can always start a thread dealing with a subject that interests you.

JTB declares that we possess knowledge when our justified beliefs are true. The problem, as I pointed out earlier, is that if we don't know whether th...

I was just saying that mutations might be counted as proximate or efficient causes of evolution, if evolution is change in organisms and mutations cau...

I see doing mathematics as a physical activity, involving pencil and paper, computer, or neural activity. Perhaps we are speaking at cross-purposes. I...

Mutations perhaps? The final cause was traditionally considered to be the telos or purpose of a thing. That would involve how it fits into the overall...

Yep, I guess it could be.

There are efficient causes and then there are overall conditions. Perhaps the overall conditions for the evolution of humans would not have obtained i...

That's an interesting question. If everything we cognize is counted as "physical", then would not metaphysics, thought of being what is beyond the sco...

I think absolute certainty is as impossible as radical doubt. You simply cannot doubt everything—some things need to be taken for granted in order to ...

:lol: They're not real sunglasses and it's not a real sun in Matrixland.

Cheers, that's a fair question—and I hope I can answer it to your satisfaction. I take it that possession of knowledge obtains when there can be no do...

When I think X or feel a sensation, there can be no doubt about it. So, I see no need for justification. Justification is only for beliefs, not for th...

You don't have to find the same things I do uninteresting. In fact I didn't say those merely logic possibilities are uninteresting anyway, so you are ...

That's one of those vacuous merely logical possibilities that are best ignored, because even in the unlikely event that it were true (which we could n...

We don't know if physics is law-governed and universally valid. It's universal validity is merely an assumption and the laws may have evolved as habit...

Firstly it is science that posits the existence of dark matter and energy on the basis of observations. So, they are considered to be a part of the Un...

The divergence merely reflects that fact that the experimental results are counter-intuitive, which leaves it open for physicists themselves, who are ...

No, it's true by definition that if he has seven plus five beers he has twelve beers, and to know that seven plus five equals twelve it's either throu...

If I am conscious of entertaining some thought or other, then I cannot be wrong about that awareness. So, I can say that I know I am thinking X, when ...

Of course he wouldn't deny the role of language?he presents his ideas in language after all. But he didn't acknowledge or emphasize that language enab...

I don't think it shows that arithmetic is not distilled from perception at all. Of course to have arithmetic, as a systems procedures and rules and yo...

I'd say that is a claim, not an argument. (Wasn't it Niels Bohr who said that, and why should we not see your use of it as an appeal to authority?) Ca...

I think you are affording Kant less ambiguity than his actual writings display. In the SEP article Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics is this: "The cent...

This is a strawman simply because we have no more reliable, or even any other reliable, guide, to "how the universe truly is" than science. If you are...