Janus

You left out the verifati.

Not in the sense I mean. By information I mean 'definitive and demonstrable' in some sense. So observation of the natural world gives us information. ...

Is it informative or thought-provoking?

I haven't thought about those specifics. Off the top of my head I'd say that Jack's belief is about a clock and it's condition of working, which begs ...

Yes it's pretty much what I had said.

What I had said that you responded to was this: If you think religious texts can be informative, give us an example. And of course the fact that peopl...

An explanation will do, I'll take care of the "understanding" part.

Give me an example of some information that comes exclusively from a religious text. (And by 'information' I'm not talking about being informed about ...

Which religion and which gods are you talking about? Should they all be taken literally?

The connection between theology and philosophy was, for a while in the West, overbearing until the assumption of the literal truth of Christianity was...

On that total agreement from me.

Cheers, Tom.

I think it's fair to say that religious tropes may enliven dimensions of feeling that the garden, the bush and the gallery may not. And, of course, vi...

I already have: "The content of the belief (if you want to characterize it as a definite belief, rather than a mere passing assumption) would be "That...

But they are the sorts of things one might be moved by. Also they might be understood in an allegorical, metaphorical or poetical sense, if one has th...

There is no SEP entry on materialism as such because there are so many "materialisms", as the OP asserts. What you are railing against is elimininativ...

Right, "philosophical religion", which I think is verging on being a non sequitur. On the other hand if religion is understood to be a kind of poetry,...

Again you introduce the ambiguity. For Jack, he does not believe of a broken clock that it is working, because that would be an absurdity. There is no...

Even if such a project were completeable it would still be the case that science cannot describe lived experience. No one really can, beyond offering ...

The content of the belief (if you want to characterize it as a definite belief, rather than a mere passing assumption) would be "That clock is working...

To say that thinking is dependent on neural activity is not to say that thinking doesn't exist, or that it is immaterial (in both senses of the world)...

It's very simple; the belief is simply that the clock is working. If he was asked whether he thinks 'the clock is working' is true, he might say 'yes'...

If someone believes that folk in Darwin can sometimes buy shoes then there must be a mental state (or probably better, process) correlated with that b...

I did. To repeat: to say that X believed a stopped clock was working is ambiguous; it could mean that X believed the clock was both stopped and workin...

AS I said this is prone to equivocation. The incoherent interpretation would be equivalent to they believe that "a spherical object is flat" is true. ...

Yes, H.sapiens possesses language; a relatively larger brain, unique tongue and lip structures, sinus cavities and opposable thumbs. All good for gras...

I don't agree that codependent people do that at all; I think they manifest inordinate concern with themselves; others are not seen as important in th...

:cool:

We can say of those people not "that they believe that a spherical object is flat", but 'that they believe of a spherical object that it is flat'. The...

Common mistake: it's 'in medias res'.

It was once believed the Earth was flat. It was not believed that the spherical Earth is flat, because for those people the Earth was not spherical. T...

I think religious experience can definitely be transformative. The only evidence we could ever have for someone's "enlightenment" would be behavior th...

:ok:

How about 'transformative'?

OK, if that's all you were claiming then I cannot but agree; perfect anything is an ideal, not a reality.

I think this is wrong on account of treating matter as "raw" particles, understood as utterly devoid of meaning, which ignores the fact that beings wh...

Maybe some naive realists assume that, but sensible realists find the imaginable possibility that the Universe exists independently of humans more pla...

"They believe that laws only apply to them if they agree to them". :roll:

:up:

I think you're just playing with words CS.

As I said he just assumed in that moment, in passing, that the clock had not stopped. So, I don't think it is really accurate to say that he believed ...

And a very sensible observation it is, I think.

I am denying that it makes sense to say that Jack believed a stopped clock was working, because there is a fatal ambiguity in that way of describing t...

You beat me to it! Of course Jack didn't know the clock was stopped. So he didn't believe a stopped clock was working, he believed a clock was working...

I thought it would be something along those lines; which makes sense.

To talk in terms of intension (I think this is the proper spelling) just is to talk in terms of being about or of something. For me terminology is not...

OK, I missed that; did he understand it?

This is the comment I was referring to: I later made the comment below, which I would be interested to hear your response to:

The T-sentence is simply the minimal formulation of the correspondence notion of truth. "P" is the statement or proposition, 'iff' means 'if and only ...

Yep, I guess you have to have something to argue about, and if creativity fails...(willful?) misunderstanding may be resorted to,