apokrisis

But you added here the constraint of a particular language. And there is no warrant for it's addition - given you agree about the evidence from anthro...

Well, the argument is that metaphysical reasoning says it is one thing or the other. Either the stability the material parts is fundamental, or instea...

Not if you just assert that the apple is red to speakers with a shared neurology. No need to take things to the Whorfian extreme on colour perception.

Yep, commonsense would tell you that the world is composed of substantial parts. It is a very natural starting supposition - especially for humans who...

The funny thing about the "atomic" is that it is not the ultimately simple. It in fact represents the complexity of a dichotomy. The atomic is both ma...

What about chaos? All those parts flying about in determinate and lawful fashion, yet amounting to nothing strongly orderly on the whole. If "the sum ...

Representationalism has fallen out of favour in cognitive psychology, and replaced by an ecological or embodied view, for that reason. If the mind is ...

Probably just simpler to say science believes there is ontically one world, but epistemically any number of models of it. So instrumentalism and plura...

That seems question begging about how you would define "real" here. How does it not wind up sounding idealist or subjective - that is, anti-realist? A...

All the SciAm stuff looks like blog posts that talk around the subject. The papers are minor journal efforts again talking around the subject rather t...

I agree this is crank as science. Or can you point to the observable consequences that could falsify his story? If it adds nothing as a metaphysics, t...

Nice. The square is a manifestation of a symmetry-breaking. It is an abstract object in the sense of existing as a limit state. If we are going to til...

LOL. I'm sitting here thinking that I've just wasted most of my morning when I really do have real work to finish today.

I am a meaning holist. So on the face of it, Sellars' move seems objectionably nominalist. It treats even wholes as always particular. But then it als...

Yep MU. That is why physics now talks of excitations in condensates. It is more tricky. We can't escaped the necessity of some kind of duality - the u...

It would be a contradiction if both are treated as direct realist claims - the reality is either that the world has to be coloured entities, or that i...

Redefine? When did you bother to define them?

But now the definition of language comes into play. If neural signals are syntactic, then do neurons speak a language to each other? And if computers ...

Cute. But you are right. We would have to wade through the thickets of Chomskyian universal grammar to get to a proper answer on that. It definitely a...

But is belief prior to syntactic structure? Is meaning prior to syntactic structure? Forget language for the moment. I already accept that semiosis - ...

Again, you are back to a search for a "concrete foundation" as a matter of inveterate mental habit. It's getting comical now. :wink: Why would it matt...

Not exactly the right metaphor. Well that is precisely the ontology I've just criticised. You imagine a void, a blank, a generalised nothingness, and ...

I think so much wrongness flows from this view that meaning pre-exists as "content". You have the image in mind of a semantic load that has a definite...

The article argues for a hard binary choice. Which isn't really pragmatism. So yes, in some sense instrumentalism has to be the position of last resor...

A diagrammic approach to predicate logic would seem to explode this, demonstrating the essential contextuality or holism of such relations as x is lar...

Being is dynamism or chance constrained. Steady existence is what you get once a process has gone to an equilibrium balance and now simply persists in...

An atom was uncuttable matter. But it still had a shape or form. It still had a location and so a potential for motion. Relatively speaking, it could ...

So your pure data vs empirical data distinction is less equivocal here? You would have to explain.

:up:

A way of looking at it is that commonsense supports an objective notion of realism. We naturally believe that we exist in a world of "medium-sized dry...

Back to front. We use the structure of language to constrain our phenomenological state so that it has “mental content”. That is, the way to avoid the...

So what is this public state but the belief that the private state is sufficiently shared? Is there a public state unless you have phenomenology in pl...

Yes. It doesn't seem to require or involve an explanation in any form.

Again that is half the story - the dynamical bit. The other half is the informational bit - the regulation or semiosis that switches logarithmic growt...

My misleading punctuation has been fixed. :grin:

You forgot to mention the "irreducible, invisible thing-in-the-mind" which is a sense of things being surprising or unsurprising in relation to "heavi...

Yep. And for those pushing a tight identification of thought/belief :) with the human-only power of grammatical speech, that question usually leads to...

The problem is that regular reductionist physics targets equilibrium descriptions of nature - nature that has "emerged" in the sense of crossing a cri...

They know what they look like in a general enough fashion to agree with us about particular instances. Their behaviour demonstrates a concept. And an ...

Kim represents the view that emergence is "nothing but" the sum of the microphysics. So he stands at the other end of the spectrum to folk who think e...

Normally it means an idea - particularly an abstract idea or an idea that is a mental picture of a set of relations. For example, a "right angle" is a...

I would say the difference lies more in the quality of the evidence being accepted. Mystics are quite happy to claim proof of their theories in terms ...

The mental reality is of course often much vaguer or more indeterminate than the words called forth to account for it. That just is a consequence of t...

Hah, yes. I admit that saying M-P was veering right towards a sense-data view was a wild exaggeration on my part. M-P's basic gestalt approach is of c...

So it seems you accept that there is at least a para-linguistic translation going on here. There is something communicable between two states of mind....

What, the entire visible universe and this putative unproven anisotropy is so vanishingly faint? And you still haven’t said why the dark matter outflo...

As usual, your responses are an insult to all Riesling. :razz: Again, you thus need to provide a theory of what makes for a point of view. So does Jac...

Just read it quickly. I like the phenomenological slant. And I like the nice summary of symmetry-breaking as differentiation or individuation. The poi...

Yeah. But how do you not understand symmetry breaking? :) You are an engineer. You must be familiar with classic examples like the magnetisation of a ...

But blasting dark matter out to create "cosmic voids" doesn't connect with a dark energy story of a faint added accelerative repulsion that is part of...