You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Michael

Comments

And I'm asking you to defend P1 (which in the original is P9). What reasoning or evidence shows that X and Y implies Z? Then the argument is: One ough...
January 05, 2016 at 16:12
No it's not. P1: X P2: Y C1: Z It's not modus ponens. The premise "If X and Y then Z" can't be defended as a valid syllogism.
January 05, 2016 at 15:49
As I said before, this doesn't work: One ought prevent X X is preventable iff Y is possible Therefore one ought do Y. The conclusion doesn't follow. P...
January 05, 2016 at 15:20
It's in the form "if X and Y then Z". I'm questioning this material implication. If the material implication fails then the premise fails, and if the ...
January 05, 2016 at 09:11
I'm looking at P9. "If it is wrong to allow gratuitous suffering caused by food production practices, and gratuitous suffering caused by food producti...
January 04, 2016 at 21:41
So by this you mean "those men who are called bachelors are called bachelors if and only if they are unmarried men"? Then consider: "that suffering wh...
January 04, 2016 at 21:28
If gratuitous suffering is preventable by definition then the premise "gratuitous suffering caused by food production practices is preventable if and ...
January 04, 2016 at 20:49
This is confusing. Are you defining "gratuitous suffering" as "morally impermissible suffering" or as "known and preventable (at a reasonable cost) su...
January 04, 2016 at 20:04
That's not the way the burden of proof works. If you use a premise to make an argument then you must defend that premise; it is not the burden of the ...
January 04, 2016 at 18:59
And I question your claim that what would cause gratuitous suffering in humans would cause gratuitous suffering in non-human animals. A human doesn't ...
January 04, 2016 at 16:35
What does cruelty have to do with it? The issue was that it caused gratuitous suffering. So you'd need to show that animals suffered gratuitously by b...
January 03, 2016 at 21:14
But I wasn't addressing the logical validity of the argument. I was addressing your exchange with @"shmik" on the ambiguity of the argument, specifica...
January 03, 2016 at 18:38
Shouldn't that read "gratuitous suffering caused by food production practices is prevented if and only if a vegan diet is adopted"? Furthermore, this ...
January 03, 2016 at 16:07
The issue is that if one Y refuses to donate then this relieves the others of their obligation to donate because their donations alone cannot save X, ...
January 03, 2016 at 12:26
15/06. I hope I haven't confused Hanover.
January 02, 2016 at 14:30
Only in Belize, Federated States of Micronesia, Mongolia, and the United States. Almost everywhere else it's dd/mm/yyyy. See here.
January 02, 2016 at 14:23
I'm not here to defend instrumentalism or model-dependent realism. I'm just explaining internal realism to you as you asked about it.
December 30, 2015 at 22:35
Right, so as I said before you're adopting scientific realism. But the internal realist wouldn't adopt scientific realism. They'd adopt something like...
December 30, 2015 at 22:11
It's a statement that describes (and predicts) empirical phenomena.
December 30, 2015 at 17:54
e = mc2 is a formula which describes and predicts observed phenomena. I don't see how that's anything other than an 'empirical statement'. My mistake....
December 30, 2015 at 15:45
Why did you have to qualify with "from my perspective"? It suggests that things can be true from another perspective or from no perspective at all. Bu...
December 30, 2015 at 10:06
Yes, you're right. This is what I meant: All Ys ought to save X. X can be saved iff all Ys donate. Therefore all Ys ought to donate. If all of these 1...
December 30, 2015 at 09:37
That doesn't work. In the example two pilots are present; it's just that one refuses to fly. Is the other obligated to fly alone (despite it being a f...
December 30, 2015 at 01:13
The moderator icon should be able to differ from the site icon. And as an extension to this, perhaps each user group should be able to have its own cu...
December 29, 2015 at 21:54
Yes, I meant iff rather than if.
December 29, 2015 at 21:48
Of course it's valid. Perhaps this variation will make it clearer: I am obligated to donate if my donation will help towards saving X. If you don't al...
December 29, 2015 at 17:43
No, because if one person doesn't donate then the others donating won't save X, and donating was only obligatory on the premise that it would save X. ...
December 29, 2015 at 17:06
I'm not sure. Consider: X ought be saved iff X can be saved. X can be saved iff all Ys donate. Therefore all Ys ought to donate. But if one Y doesn't ...
December 29, 2015 at 15:19
So you're a scientific realist. But that's not the only approach to science. There's instrumentalism and the aforementioned and related model-dependen...
December 29, 2015 at 09:07
Perhaps to avoid any possible problems regarding other minds and shared experiences that might arise under phenomenalism and to provide an explanation...
December 28, 2015 at 23:28
He says there isn't such machinery. Yes. Not really. It's a rejection of the metaphysical realist's claim that "the categories and structures of the e...
December 28, 2015 at 23:04
Depends on the variety. The phenomenalist wouldn't but the internal realist would, for example.
December 28, 2015 at 22:36
But to do that he has to show than an ideal theory can't be false. So how does he do that?
December 28, 2015 at 22:18
And the argument begs the question. If "A depends on B" can only be true if A is like B then "an ideal theory depends on a mind-independent world" can...
December 28, 2015 at 22:11
Then you've begged the question and presupposed that the world of appearance is something like the mind-independent world.
December 28, 2015 at 22:08
You said that we can't know what noumena is and that we can't say that A depends on B if we don't know what B is. Therefore, from your own premises, w...
December 28, 2015 at 22:06
In which case you can't make an argument that phenomena depend on noumena.
December 28, 2015 at 22:04
That doesn't follow. That A depends on B is not that an understanding of A gives us an understanding of B. The appearance of Dr Manhattan I see on my ...
December 28, 2015 at 22:00
Then replace "brain" with "". It could be that whatever is in the vat is nothing like the brain as we understand it and that whatever this thing is in...
December 28, 2015 at 21:49
This doesn't follow. That an ideal theory is dependent on a mind-independent world is not necessarily that an ideal theory accurately describes it. If...
December 28, 2015 at 20:27
As I said, you're free to use "reality" that way. But the anti-realist is free to use it another way because the realist doesn't have exclusive rights...
December 28, 2015 at 20:20
"Realism" and "real" mean different things. The realist is free to tell us what "realism" means but not what "real " means. You might as well say that...
December 28, 2015 at 20:10
The realist doesn't have ownership over the word "real". "Reality" isn't realist terminology. It's English terminology.
December 28, 2015 at 20:07
Well, yes. That's the disagreement; over what it means for a tree to be real. But let's go back to the first thing I quoted of you and replace the wor...
December 28, 2015 at 20:00
If the realist wants "real" to mean "mind-independent" then he can. But that doesn't require the anti-realist to adopt this terminology. The anti-real...
December 28, 2015 at 19:57
"Real" doesn't mean "mind-independent". My dreams are real dreams but they're not mind-independent dreams. If the real world is what appears and if th...
December 28, 2015 at 19:46
Because they are real. Yes. The anti-realist says that the real world is what appears, not something else. The disagreement is over the separation of ...
December 28, 2015 at 19:20
But the anti-realist doesn't say that dream trees or imagined trees are real trees. The anti-realist says that the trees we see when awake are real, b...
December 28, 2015 at 19:12
They're saying that the world as it appears to us is the real world. They're denying that there's something else to the real world (e.g. mind-independ...
December 28, 2015 at 19:10
No they're not. They're denying the realist's account of what it means to be real. Anti-realism is not un-realism. The argument is over the mind-indep...
December 28, 2015 at 19:02