Janus

Most of what you have said here is unintelligible to me, but in any case you're wrong here Willow, even just on the grounds that your argument is base...

I think you are equivocating between what would be the case, as it is conceived, under rigid determinism and what would seem to us due to our limited ...

Pierre, sorry about the delay responding. As it seems to me you have given an account, in your post 175, which differentiates between two different co...

I don't understand what you mean by saying that determinism is a position that asserts that subsequent states are "defined by" prior states. As I unde...

I agree that the idea of universal determinism (which is logically equivalent to TWOD's "predeterminism", although he doesn't seem to see that) is fla...

The way you describe "pre-determinism" and "determinism" they are the same. You are confusing yourself over the ideas of actuality and possibility, it...

Determinism would seem to negate the possibility, not of knowing anything, but of having any justifiable confidence in the rationality of judgements. ...

Since you posted this in the 'other place' also, where I responded to it, I am reproducing that response here as well. StreetlightX wrote: Anyway, one...

I am interested in these kinds of questions, and I want to get back to the Haugeland paper, and hopefully be able to make some comments about it, but ...

OK, thanks Pierre, that clears it up somewhat. I have had extensive arguments with Michael about this very point in past threads. The one I can rememb...

I asked you this: Michael responded with this: which I take to show that he does not believe that "dinosaurs roam the earth" was true at the time that...

OK, so, that dinosaurs were walking the earth, although true now, was not true at the time. But now that we have judged it to be true that they were w...

I knew that is what you would say, that you would pick the second option. I was interested to hear what Pierre would say.

If dinosaurs were roaming the earth (to use Michael's example), does it follow that "dinosaurs roam the earth" was true, or merely that "dinosaurs roa...

This is wrong; the meaning of 'X' is determined by how we use 'X', but what it means to be X is not. What it means to be X is what allows you to ident...

There is no actual point in our present language that you are making then.

You can't use present language and pretend you are using a hypothetical future language; if you could do that then everything would be up for grabs.

That you can coherently and consistently make a claim in the present language that is true now, because it would allegedly be true in some hypothetica...

My experience with Michael tells me you are wasting your time; he will never admit he is wrong (which he is).

I was suggesting that understanding maths consists in more than merely knowing how to manipulate symbols; that it also consists in knowing why the sym...

Wouldn't a deeper understanding of maths involve knowing why symbols are manipulated the way they are on the basis of the kind of understanding of the...

Hey no problem csalisbury I never thought you were being a dick. We all get testy at times...and understandably so since life's no fucking picnic! ;)

That's all fine csalisbury, I am very familiar with all the common arguments as to why the very idea of 'unexperienced objects' constitutes a problem....

I can see where it might seem confusing. What I take issue with is that if I was one that if I accepted the notion that unexperienced objects in gener...

If you want to claim that some counter- intuitive standpoint is the more plausible and cannot offer any good reason to support your contention then no...

:)

I agree. I said consciousness does, not awareness. I mean it's a matter of terminology; I prefer to reserve the term 'consciousness' for reflective aw...

So should I take this to indicate that you do believe what I have said I find unbelievable, and that you cannot provide any good reasons why I should ...

I think we are talking about different things. I certainly agree that experiences of love, and of profound intimations of God, eternity, beauty and so...

What kinds of rational assertions about art or love would you see as being appropriate? My point is not that love or art are unreasonable or irrationa...

For me it is simply not believable that fossils for example or even ancient artefacts ( and my point has been there is no different *problem* with the...

No, I agree that many of the greatest things in life are not explicable by reason, and are not amenable to axiomatisation, either; but when it comes t...

But is his argument that the arche fossil poses a different problem than the merely distant or even simply unseen object not based on the notion of an...

But is there some point, the advent of givenness say, where the 'distance as time ' ceases to be problematic? Of course we could never know when that ...

For me it cashes out as the in-itself being nothing for us; and that is what "in itself" precisely means. Of course in the trivial sense that it is be...

Actually it's probably because of my cumbersome expression that you read the need for the 'not'. Basically the sentence says "I remember thinking that...

I don't disagree with you here, Willow. To the degree that we do consciously experience our acts though, they must surely to that degree be intelligib...

I think that's true, Cavacava, narratives, faiths or argument should be consistent and coherent within the ambit created by their premises. Any argume...

We don't experience our individual will at all, it is merely a post hoc idea, I would say; but we do experience our individual acts (insofar as we con...

Schopenhauer's idea that time begins with givenness just doesn't work with current cosmology and paleontology. This is one aspect of the problem Meill...

There is a sense in which the legitimacy of the being of gay and disabled people has historically been denied; as though their forms of life are not t...

Thanks for your reply csalisbury. I did read After Finitude, but it was at least five years ago. However I still remember thinking that his notion tha...

No doubt we do think the in itself in counterfactual terms of 'what we would experience'; but I think this is mischaracterized as any kind of illegiti...

In a thread on PF someone recently asserted that the onus is on the realist to explain what it means to for something to exist independently of words ...

Yes, it is rather a misleading notion isn't it?

Oddly you are here making a claim about the invariance of human nature and habit. Nature's invariance could be explained by positing that it operates ...

What form could such a deductive argument take? Any deductive argument is only as certain as it's premises, which when it comes to non- tautological a...

You're misunderstanding that I am claiming that there could be deductive certainty in the matter. There obviously cannot. But given that we have alway...

Hi Pierre, I didn't think I was making an inductive argument, but rather a pragmatic argument to the effect that we have no good reason to doubt that ...

I disagree, it is perfectly reasonable, since all known human experience is of a world overwhelmingly invariant, to expect the future to be along more...