OK. my thought is that the kind of meaning associated with language, made possible with language, is reflective, generalized meaning. The idea represe...
Fair enough, I haven't anywhere suggested that science is inaccessible, but rather that it accessible to varying degrees dependent upon expertise. The...
Of course, and I haven't said otherwise. A broad view is not necessarily a deep or nuanced one, though. If religion or the humanities are taken to be ...
Yes, but having "a good idea of the state of knowledge and consensus of opinion" in a discipline is not the same as having an expert opinion within th...
Yes, I seem to be disagreeing with you. Is that a problem? Do you want me to pretend to agree when I really don't? You engaged me in conversation here...
Those who haven't studied particular sciences sufficiently (and I would say that takes a great deal of study today due to the vast expansion of scient...
It seems to me that scientific realism is just an extention of so-called naive realism, which seems to be the default position that people hold before...
I'm not convinced that the turn away from traditional religion has all that much to do with science. I think it is driven more by prosperity and the n...
In what way do you think people "submit" to science: in other words, what is the nature of that submission? What would be an alternative to the so-cal...
I think the belief that some of the "higher" animals employ signaling to a considerable level of sophistication is common, but there remains a distinc...
Well, you referred to the sound as symbolic; so I thought you were arguing that meaning in some purported 'complete' sense (not understanding in the l...
My real objection was to your claim that the sound was a symbol, that symbolized the "treats". I was rejecting that claim, and the associated idea tha...
"Meaningful' is not monosemous, though. Significance is a kind of meaning, and symbolization is another kind, the former may be pre-linguistic, and th...
Presuming this is addressed to me; I'll say it again; you are losing a perfectly coherent distinction between sign and symbol; a distinction that cert...
It's very basic. For example, clouds may be a sign of rain, but they do not symbolize rain. There are countless examples like this in nature. Nothing ...
Here you are blurring the perfectly good distinction between sign and symbol. I would say the sound does not have meaning for the cat; meaning is prop...
I'm not clear what point you are attempting to make here. Symbols are taken by convention to stand for what they symbolize. I don't think the idea of ...
OK, but remember that I think the only possible intersubjective evidence for intentionality, human or otherwise, consists in its explanatory indispens...
Depends on what you mean by "represent" doesn't it? In one sense of the term only icons represent what they symbolize, insofar as they bear some visua...
Despite the "expected ordering" of your thoughts not "coming along", you've managed to present me with quite a bit to think about here; so I'll try to...
This is obviously true. I know that I can write out any prescribed combination of letters or words, prior to ever having written that prescribed combi...
As you say, I think what is intuitively obvious to us, the self evident axioms upon which all rational thought is based, is "indispensable to get any ...
No, I'm not all talk; I'm all out of talk, because I'm faced with someone who's already decided what they think and will never, it seems, cease coming...
I hadn't thought of it that way. If God is thought as infinite being then the situation would be as I said, but if God is thought as transcendent to b...
The interesting thing is that if people were valued and accorded different statuses according to their usefulness that would contradict the argument t...
It seems there could not be a reason why there must be something rather than nothing, because if there is nothing there can be no reasons. In other wo...
I think it does. 'Meaning', like many other words, is polysemous. As long as we can clarify what we mean to say, and where the areas of determinabilit...
Here you are thinking of the intentionality of utterances and the inferences we make about the intentions of speakers as another layer 'above' the 'li...
Yes I agree that letters do not have meaning which relates directly to the meaning of sentences as words do; I was just pointing out that they constit...
Letters are not meaningless; their meaningfulness consists in their relationships to sounds that can be made by the human voice and the diverse but ph...
But, the law is based on the principle, which is certainly held to be true, that we are all equal before God, don't you think? A high-functioning pers...
OK, have it your way, I don't really care what a wall of glass bricks that distorts everything I say thinks anyway...my energy for and interest in thi...
What made you think there would be people reading this thread who did not possess such rudimentary knowledge? Or was it just an opportunity to show of...
You seem to be operating under the erroneous opinion that I have said that all brute facts are necessary beings. I haven't said that, so you are argui...
Yes, words are related to one another in terms of their references to various objects, actions and so on. For example, the worlds 'gold', 'steel' and ...
You are confusing efficient causation, which has no inherent connections with reasons for actions, with other conceptions such as formal or final caus...
Disapproving of the ways of others will not help in the context of international relations where there are great differences between existing cultures...
What a person is and the "definition of the person" are not the same. A person may be defined in terms of what they are, but a person is not constitut...
Something cannot be its own sufficient reason simply because in that there is no possibility of any relationship whereby one thing is the cause of, or...
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