Janus

Something like that... :)

Yes, I think you can rightly said to be using a word if you know that the word has a conventional use, which your use refers to, even if you don't kno...

Yes, that's a good point. The word doesn't convey any immediate extra information, but it is the key to getting extra information.

Perhaps my response above addresses this to some extent. I would say it is only the one part of the sentence ('Schnarrglop's') that is meaningless.

I don't think so, because I can't see the connection between what you said and what i said. I'll try to explain what I said again more clearly. In the...

I'm not saying it would be a return to a specific past state, but a return to a state of health if you like. Think of having the flu. After you get ov...

Understandably >:O

But I didn't make that statement, I said It's not a logical conclusion, but a statement that emerges from examining our use of logic and what seem to ...

Apologies. I clicked the wrong 'reply' tab. It's been corrected.

In a case like this you know something; you know the use of all the other words except for "Schnarrglop's". By telling someone you have Schnarrglop's ...

You're shifting the goalposts now. That would not simply be "playing around" with the chair, but using it in accordance with practical possibilities t...

Answered the stoopid questions and scored 'skepticism'. I'm not an 'ist' at all, but I guess it had to be something. It's flawed all the way down.

Why can it not be said that we cannot imagine any way, and that no way has ever been shown, and that it certainly seems to be impossible in principle,...

Laplace's Demon was already slain by the "Three Body Problem". It is slain even in a completely deterministic world.

Perhaps you're right if Cage is indeed wanting to make a kind of meta-comment about music as conceptual art wants to about art, and postmodernity want...

Sure, but isn't that precisely hearkening back to the time before addiction in order to see how one came to take the wrong path? Isn't a return to hea...

It seems you're trying to distort what I said by not taking the full context into account. I said you can "use" something "uselessly"; that is in the ...

I would not classify either Cage's or Ive's music as "conceptual" in the sense I was talking about. Cage, for example I take to have been exploring ra...

I can't see how someone fighting addiction can do it without hearkening back to the time before they were addicted. how else could they know the state...

I get what you are saying; and I think there is essentially no difference between conceptual art and "just talking about a concept" except in the mode...

The difference is that the message, the "value" in conceptual art is conceptualizable; it may be put into some form of proposition: "it's a comment on...

You may be right. But that would make no sense because words must refer to things (in various ways), and sentences must be about things, events, feeli...

You seem to be thinking of the unfolding or evolution of the spirit in a kind of Hegelian sense. I certainly think there''s some truth in that idea, b...

I think it's much more the case that you are running two senses of "use" together and failing to make the distinction between 'use' in the (practicall...

You said it yourself; if there is no use (words become useless) there is no meaning (words become meaningless). You seem to be equivocating on the wor...

A bit tortuous, perhaps? You got it right though: "the spiritual is mediated in many ways, but is not exhaustively determined by those many ways". The...

Thanks :)

Yeah, sarcasm's OK in the right context, I guess, although it's not my preferred form of critique or humour. :)

I don't want to argue with this except to say that I understand the word 'fact' to be equivocal. It is variously used to mean both 'true proposition' ...

I think what you say here is pretty weak. What River said is not "creepy" at all, just the (apparently) honest statement of someone who doesn't want t...

Yes, 'counterfactual' just means contrary to actuality and/ or truth. I don't see what Michael seems to think needs accounting for regarding counterfa...

We can think about things, and that probably doesn't require language; thinking about things just is meaning. The meanings of words and sentences refl...

I agree that it's a spiritual drive, in the sense that you mean it; as you already noted, I think I was just thrown off the scent by the word "drive"....

Not "doing so", but wanting to do so. If we were able to we would, but we are not; so why should we want what we can't possibly have? That said, I thi...

I would be loathe to psychologize art as a "drive". There is certainly "something else" that makes art art ,and non-art non-art, apart from mere conve...

You might know that to be true of yourself and perhaps those you are acquainted with, but how could you know it to be true of all of us?

I can't make any sense of this. I was talking about the meaning of the word "chair", not about the meaning of different sentences it is used in.

I think form of life, which may have manifestations in daily activity, depend on modes of being. Probably it's not right to say they are the same thin...

'Chair' can be used in a sentence where it doesn't "point at anything", for example: "What makes a chair a chair?". The use here is very different tha...

I don't know what the answer is; perhaps the very nature of art itself precludes the possibility of a definitive answer. I think the value of the ques...

I think Duchamp was both a boon and a blight; he made people step back and think about what constitutes art, but then he has been followed by many med...

The word 'chair' is used to refer to some particular chair or chairs or to a generalized imagined instance. So, it would seem that its meaning does de...

Did you? It seems to be a bullshit post-modern thing about knowing your sources, because, you know, there's no such thing as originality or unknowing,...

I don't think so. The actual is what makes the difference between being true, and merely being thought to be true. As I see it. truth both speaks and ...

I'm not sure what you have in mind by "methodological approach"; I see it more as a matter of commitment. The assumption of an "elemental" real that p...

>:O How could I possibly answer those questions when I know only an infinitesimal fraction of all the women, philosophers and men on Earth? This is in...

That's a difficult question for me. I'm guessing that you would be referring to propositional knowledge here. There is the well-known tale (from Chrys...

Sure, but I can't see the reason for your disagreement, since I already acknowledged what you say here. Having said that I also want to acknowledge th...

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. For sure, we cannot get into the head of a cat in order to experience the meaning we might think a tree ha...

There may well be a "vast body of (unscientific) material" about climate change on the web in the form of unschooled opinions on both sides, but I don...