Janus

I think the principle of falsifiability has long been held to be, at least in some quarters, unsustainable. It's a logical problem insofar as to falsi...

Sorry Posty, but I can't see what "metaphysical necessity and determinism" has to do with it, and I am still no clearer as to how this relates to Popp...

OK, but that still leaves the question as to how they could be anything at all apart from their relations.

That makes sense: for every positive state of affairs there is its negative counterpart. In the positive sense my identity consist in my being myself,...

But then the question seems to remain as to whether objects (or things) are something over and above their relations.

I can think of a couple of ways that something that is one way could be otherwise; one to do with actuality and the other to do with logical possibili...

So, objects are not reducible to, but transcendent of, their relations?

Not by "objects" and their relations then?

I'm not too sure what that could mean. My understanding of falsification is not that something is first true and then becomes false, for example.

So for him were objects not constituted by "atomic facts"? I'm not really that familiar with Wittgenstein, so please excuse my ignorance.

Of course this insight may be found already implicit in Hume and explicit in Peirce. I'm not familiar with the 'Principle of Bivalence' so I can't see...

Are you asking how they could have missed the Popperian insight that scientific theories are never verified, but are merely held to be true until and ...

The world is not a mere collection of things, but also consists in their relations to, and interactions with, one another. Those relations and interac...

I think the distinction between our experience, phenomenologically considered, and "artificial games" is a valid one, although questioning the validit...

In what way does referring to events that are either fictional and therefore don't happen, or hypothetical and therefore may or may not happen, or hav...

Again, yes what you have said is piddling (strange your habit of commenting on your own work), and nothing to do with your claim that imagined events ...

Whenever anyone predicts anything about what the future is going to be like they are imagining states of affairs which may or may not come to be. When...

Yes, as you said you are "piddling"...piddling is indeed the word, and I will waste no further time with your sophistical pedantry and self-aggrandize...

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So what? The purpose of the conditional "actual" is to make that distinction. There are imagined events and there are actual events; they both involve...

Yes, and future events will happen, possible events might happen and imagined events are imagined as happening. So what? You don't appear to be unders...

Why must something happen in order to count as an event? If events rely on happening in order to qualify as events, then are past events no longer eve...

So, the imaginary events described in a work of fiction are not events in your view? What would you rather call them; and what would be the advantage ...

So what? This neither contradicts nor even relates to anything I have said, as usual... :roll:

That they are concatenations of real or imaginary events, processes, things or relations.

Hypotheticals are not necessarily imaginary states of affairs; they may turn out to be actual. The utility of the distinction between actual and imagi...

Hypotheticals are clearly not, or at least may be not, actual states of affairs; they are imagined states of affairs. You do seem to be piddling...in ...

Imaginary or possible states of affairs are counterfactual. Hillary Clinton could have been the president, for example.

There seem to be two senses of 'fact'. Statements are referred to as 'facts'; this is the sense in which the encyclopedia is understood to be a compen...

Nonsense; people often refer to imagined scenarios (states of affairs).

Can you explain how finer distinctions could lead to greater confusion (apart from what might be considered to be temporary confusions occasioned by t...

Sigh all you like...but, if you're going to quote what I wrote at least quote the whole of the passage.

Sure, but finer distinctions lead to greater clarity.

I agree with this. I also think that philosophy does not require theology or mysticism; but should take both into account, in the phenomenological sen...

Well, yes of course, there is obviously always the experience of others. I think this is really Heidegger's point: he saw "being-in-the-world' as the ...

So what? An illusion of an external world is not an external world; that much is obvious.

Sure, but that just pushes the problem of whether there is a human (or whatever reflective percipient) independent external world back one step.

I'm not clear on why you would say that. It seems that if people claim to see or believe in an external world, that qualifies as there being an illusi...

If you honestly believe you can deductively prove the mind independent existence of an external world, then I'll leave you to your illusions.

This is question-begging nonsense. I could have an hallucination of something I have never seen before, for example. You are assuming that the world, ...

I agree and I say as much in the quote directly above.

No, I would say that objects have qualities or characteristics which are different from and similar to other objects. So it is the qualities or the ch...

I would say that number consists in difference and similarity; which can be both perceived and conceived; the former being concrete and the latter abs...

Yes, I think the semantic debate is a red herring.

I agree that mathematical objects are not dependent on any individual mind; but it does not follow from that that they are real independently of their...

I think the key point here is that saying a number is what it is regardless of what anyone thinks about it is not the same as saying that a number is ...

Mathematical proofs are justified by their consistency or lack of contradiction. They cannot be justified by anything outside of math as far as I can ...

I still don't get what it could mean to say that they have a reality independent of their instantiations. What if nothing at all existed, would they s...

Why wouldn't the ability to do mathematics be an evolved ability, underpinned of course by the evolution of animals we are descended from, and the abi...

And you would count that as "conceptual"? Maybe 'proto-conceptual'; I would have no argument with that. In any case there must still be a distinction ...