Janus

Yes, I made pretty much the same objections to it in the other thread. I agree it makes no sense to say that a proposition about something unknown is ...

As I said they can be shared in type if not in token; and also that they can be shared does not entail that they will be. A congenitally blind person ...

I didn't say sensations are not shared, though. I said the opposite; that they are common, in kind if not in token, and that people need to have exper...

If the government declares something to be mandatory tout court it doesn't follow that they will be legally responsible to pay compensation in the unl...

I think we can know that we are talking about the same feelings, or kinds of feelings, but we cannot know that the feelings will be exactly the same f...

The words we have been considering: 'pain', and the example I used last 'loneliness' are both nouns. There are many other nouns like those that denote...

As you know I have acknowledged that difference, but I think we differ when it comes to what each of us believe follows from that difference. I agree ...

Sure, but I don't see how it would be reasonable to claim that anyone is being abused and taken advantage of in the current covid situation.

We disagree right here. The public health advice being acted on now does not contravene the "largely settled" "laws about issues of public health". Al...

I don't agree that any decisions should be made without considering others, without considering the community as a whole, because we all are dependent...

It's because I can refer to single instances of pain "This headache is killing me" that I can refer to pain in general. I don't see a cogent differenc...

It depends on what you mean by 'refer'. If referring is understood by analogy to pointing, then pain-talk doesn't refer because others cannot see what...

I haven't argued against that conclusion, though. My argument has only been that when it comes to language that talks about sensations, our paradigm c...

I know this is from quite a while ago; The Trump thread appeared on the first page and I wondered why people would still be posting on it. When I open...

Allergy to the vaccines I guess. I don't think conscientious objection will cut it. If someone who has a phobia about injecting anything at all into t...

Where we may disagree here is that choices are never just for the self.

Maybe he's one of those who are able to use echolocation to "see" what is around them.

:up: Pure rationality is nothing more than consistency of thought; it cannot tell us what to think. What to think is motivated by what we care about, ...

To be fair to @"Baker", she has been vaccinated.

Sure, but unless you have experienced something like it, you would not have any substantive idea of what I'm talking about. Say you have never visuali...

I do agree that poetry as an institution or cultural phenomenon is public. So, perhaps I should have said that the feelings elicited by a poem may be ...

It may well be that the reader's response is quite unrelated to what the poet felt or had in mind. It is the words themselves and their range of possi...

From what I have heard there are already people getting exemption certificates from doctors and a market in fake vaccine certificates.

You might be able to find a way to make that consistent, I suppose, but would it follow that it is correct or maximally adequate to human experience a...

The poet does not have any say in the responses of the reader. Given that language has conventional associations there may indeed be limits to the ran...

I would say 'express' or 'evoke' rather than explicate. My point is just that the feelings elicited by a poem are ultimately private, like sensation. ...

It's not clear to me what distinction you are making between observation and verification. In the context of science and the everyday there are countl...

I agree that if the precise meaning of some imaginative construction could not be explained to others it would be senseless,in a sense. It would nonet...

I agree with you that there are things we do not know, and things we cannot know. I think I've indicated that amply in my exchanges with @"Olivier5". ...

To say it is all public is as pedantic as to say it is all private. To put it another way, it is just your preferred interpretation of the situation; ...

I don't agree with this because pandemics which threaten to overwhelm medical resources are rare and extraordinary. And even if only in terms of the f...

I don't see what the supposition that there are truths we could not possibly know even in principle (a supposition I don't make) has to do with my cri...

:up: Good move!

It seems the issues with nitrogenous and phosphoric fertilizers, which are indispensable to feeding nearly half of the world's present population are ...

You're a better man than me if you could handle that many! I agree with you about the wastage in the US. I believe we Australians per capita are sligh...

Should have been 12%, now amended. That said, one article I read claimed that only about 200,000.000 could be supported using organic farming methods....

Yes, I imagined that was probably true.

As I understand it the planet cannot sustain both important habitats, soils, fisheries and aquifers and a human population of more than about 12% of t...

This is a rather pathetic set of assumptions and attitude. It's one thing to be lazy and not to care; it's another to be proudly parading that attitud...

Jesus, talk about retrograde! :roll:

No worries, thanks Srap, I think it's total crap too, so we agree on that.

Oh, so the bacteria are already working on the problem and we don't need to do a thing? Sounds good!

Right so we fill the oceans with plastic eating bacteria? It might work, but it might also produce unintended negative consequences. Have you heard of...

:up: It is not a pedantic matter of "either/ or"; meanings are both public and private. We all have multitudes of associations with words that are uni...

This is too black and white for my taste. The alternatives are not only that any meaning is either mine alone or is shared by everyone (i.e. is public...

You have outlined the conundrum very well. This is exactly how I see the situation. If we stopped Big Agra and food aid to the countries that need it ...

Depletion of aquifers, depletion of fisheries and plastic pollution of oceans and destruction of soils by "Big Agra" are also existential threats. Des...

I said earlier I looked at that article and was not able to get it (my brain freezes when confronted with predicate calculus; I like to do my thinking...

No worries. :smile:

:100: Yep, I've witnessed the very same human phenomenon in building and landscaping. "Divide and conquer". Solidarity of the people seems to be a dis...