Boris Johnson: Brexit would not affect Irish border (29 February 2016) As I've said before, I think the prospect of a hard border is a reason to simpl...
History would suggest that instrumentalism would be the more reasonable approach. Or are you saying that we have good reasons to believe that we've fi...
I don't think it right to saying that there's empirical evidence for scientific realism. Realism and instrumentalism are two different ways to interpr...
That's certainly the materialist's position. But the idealist disagrees with this. They are probably going to be instrumentalists rather than scientif...
What properties must a thing have to be "like" a burger? The idealist will likely say that these properties are experiential in nature, i.e. to have a...
My happiness exists. My tiredness exists. The smörgåsbord of shapes and colours and tastes and smells that are my experience of eating an orange exist...
If idealism is true and an orange is just part of one's experience then eating is also just part of one's experience. You can talk normally and descri...
You seem to be doing it again where you’re interpreting the act of eating under a materialist ontology, and so I assume accusing idealism of entailing...
The orange is part of the experience, just as a dent is part of the car door. Your mistake, again, is in trying to understand idealism from the perspe...
There’s a painting of a man eating an orange. What is the nature of the orange? It’s paint. But the painting isn’t a painting of a man eating paint; i...
It may make sense but many idealists will claim it to be false. There isn't an orange and then also its experience, just as there isn't fear and then ...
What's the ontology of unexpressed meaning? At least in the case of potatoes and oranges we can say that they exist as physical objects even when not ...
Yes. They were words when they meant something to the people who used them, but now that they don't mean anything to anyone they're just random scribb...
Let's say I use a one-time pad to encrypt the word "Michael" as "Fpgyamy". If I don't remember this then I won't understand the word "Fpgyamy" when I ...
Perhaps there could be a language that works as a one-time-pad encryption of English (or any other language)? Would require a perfect memory but in pr...
There's a slight ambiguity here. There's a difference between a rule that only Nietzsche understands and a rule that only Nietzsche can understand. Th...
Which has nothing to do with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Wittgenstein argues that there cannot be a language that only one person can un...
The issue is that these "private" rules aren't private in the sense that Wittgenstein meant by the word. A private language for Wittgenstein is a lang...
When did Nietzsche describe his morality as being “private” (as Wittgenstein meant by the term)? As I understand him he just talked about the Übermens...
I’m no lawyer but given that he explained it like this... ... I doubt any reasonable court is going to accept the claim that it’s a national emergency...
Your argument hasn't shown that it does because it asserts that moral statements are prescriptive which the moral subjectivist denies. If you want to ...
What I think is irrelevant. What matters is whether or not your argument about the internal consistency of moral subjectivism is valid, or at least co...
Or you could continue on to the next sentence which reads "We suggest as a convenient usage, however, that a theory be called subjectivist if and only...
Perhaps, but it doesn't follow from your premise as I've pointed out. The apparent implicit premise – that "goodness" is concerned with imperatives – ...
It's the thesis that moral statements are made true by objective features of the world. In non-moral matters we would have the objectively true statem...
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