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andrewk

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I think that's the heart of what Kripke is concerned with. My account of such a counterfactual is that The Man in the High Castle imagines a world tha...
January 02, 2019 at 05:39
I don't feel that way. The best protection the US has against Trump is his own incompetence as a head of government (as opposed to his competence as a...
January 02, 2019 at 05:14
Sure, if all 'mistaken' means is 'has an opinion that I do not agree with'. If the difference between being mistaken and having a different opinion is...
January 02, 2019 at 04:51
'Mistaken' is not a relevant concept in this field. There is no correct and incorrect. There are no proofs of correctness. If there were, Kripke's opi...
January 02, 2019 at 02:43
Isn't it a moot point whether or not the questioner 'successfully referred to Thales'? I can't see that any tangible difference follows from a Yes vs ...
January 02, 2019 at 00:47
There are many different 'infinities'. The one that arguably corresponds most closely to the folk notion of infinity is "(1) the cardinality of the se...
January 01, 2019 at 23:05
Oh, sorry. I thought the 'not' was a typo and removed it in a misguided attempt to be charitable. The sex change possibility (or it could just be a wo...
January 01, 2019 at 00:39
I find that examples like these highlight the inadequacy of trying to analyse parts of speech rather than entire speech acts, and that approaching it ...
January 01, 2019 at 00:20
I think the answer is that Berkeley used the word 'idea' differently from how we use it three centuries later. We think of 'idea' as synonymous with '...
December 31, 2018 at 20:56
What comes after the ellipsis?
December 30, 2018 at 00:42
At least in the early part of the lectures, Kripke doesn't appear to address hypotheticals, which are events that, for all we know, may happen in the ...
December 29, 2018 at 22:47
All right: most of the Christians I admire do not appear to believe, or to attempt to believe, Catechism 234.
December 29, 2018 at 02:34
Yes, I think the Trinity is relevant only to theologians that have sufficient hubris to believe they can understand the nature of God. If they had kep...
December 28, 2018 at 21:45
On the contrary, I love China. I love the communitarian culture and the Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian influences in their culture. I love Chinese mus...
December 28, 2018 at 07:33
It is yet another instrument of the police state. One would get angry, only instruments like that are pretty much par for the course under this Chines...
December 28, 2018 at 03:03
As an enthusiast for David Bourland's language E-prime, which one obtains by removing all uses of versions of the verb 'to be' and synonyms thereof fr...
December 27, 2018 at 21:07
Yes, my first stab at summarising my notion of a robust descriptivist position is something like this: When a speaker uses a verbal description to ref...
December 24, 2018 at 07:44
Where do you believe he argues that? I don't see any argument on p25-6 to that effect. The only support he offers to his claim that a descriptivist mu...
December 24, 2018 at 06:47
Where in N&N do you find that? If all that Kripke is saying is that, where every single belief that a person has about a person, including that he is ...
December 24, 2018 at 06:33
I do not understand this. How can it be the case that I have a belief about somebody that is in my field of view, and yet the belief is not about that...
December 24, 2018 at 05:26
Can you help me to see the circularity? I was imagining something like the following in the speaker's mind: I am aware of the following: - person 1, a...
December 24, 2018 at 04:00
What I wrote was, not that the facts about the person match the DD, but that the speaker's beliefs about the person match the DD. See last line of my ...
December 24, 2018 at 02:13
I couldn't quite follow this. Perhaps you could elaborate on what the difficulty is that you see. It seems to me that, if the DD picks out a unique in...
December 24, 2018 at 01:50
It is not possible to prove the doctrine either coherent or incoherent, because its explanation contains so many undefined terms. All explanations of ...
December 24, 2018 at 00:53
BTW I thought of a situation where a listener can pick out the same individual as a speaker was referring to, using a DD that is completely false, wit...
December 23, 2018 at 23:07
I see this as one of a number of instances of Kripke making an uncharitable interpretation of the descriptivist position. I'm tempted to say 'straw ma...
December 23, 2018 at 22:59
Thanks for that. The context is helpful. I think I might agree with you, but I need to go back and revise the bits around that quote before commenting...
December 22, 2018 at 09:19
What does this have to do with Kripke's theory? All it does is establish that the use of descriptions can cause misunderstood speech acts when the lis...
December 20, 2018 at 11:02
I'm afraid you're too cryptic for me. I don't know what 'the primacy of the proper name' means or how it relates to the causal or descriptivist models...
December 20, 2018 at 06:25
What you appear to be saying in what was above what I quoted is that, when a speaker makes a reference using a description that consists only of false...
December 20, 2018 at 06:09
If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying that the first reference by A in a conversation between A and B is successful if B interprets it as...
December 20, 2018 at 04:59
I don't see it that way. Sometimes they can look similar, because they are both about causing harm, or at least fear. But the harm is not always to th...
December 20, 2018 at 04:37
That defence is only relevant to the extent that the punishment is retributory. The main themes of punishment in modern law systems are restraint, det...
December 20, 2018 at 02:30
Wasn't it Euclid that proved that not all that is real is rational, by manipulating the square root of two? Oh hang on, do you mean ....... Never mind...
December 20, 2018 at 02:07
Have you never failed to catch the gist of something said to you, misheard a name, or heard the name but thought the reference was to somebody else wi...
December 19, 2018 at 06:13
What do you mean by 'successfully refer'? It's not a term used by Kripke in N&N, as I recall. Yet it seems to have been used a lot in this thread, as ...
December 19, 2018 at 05:22
Beth works in an office and occasionally sees a person that works on a different floor of the same company, That person has a disability that causes h...
December 18, 2018 at 20:48
Not if you take your tape measure with you :joke:
December 18, 2018 at 20:41
In many cases where we make measurements, we don't care how closely our tape measure relates to the official metre, as long as we use the same tape me...
December 18, 2018 at 11:39
Yes, where I differ from Kripke is that I require identification of the individual that does the associating. For a DD to be associated with a proper ...
December 18, 2018 at 07:28
Yes, but only because that's commonly the case and the question of false beliefs had not yet (to my notice) been raised. I don't think I said that the...
December 18, 2018 at 06:42
I was responding to creativesoul, who was talking about 'successfully referring to someone'. Now 'successfully referring' has not been defined, but I ...
December 18, 2018 at 05:58
I think all that is required is that the speaker believes the DD to be true. The speaker uses a proper name P that she associates with an object that ...
December 18, 2018 at 04:36
Yes. However in its modern use 'apathy' usually carries additional connotations of 'neglectful', 'disengaged' and 'unhelpful'. Those would not have ap...
December 18, 2018 at 03:33
It's best to avoid using the word 'basically' in relation to anything Stoic. Their position is very nuanced. To completely avoid attachment can be to ...
December 18, 2018 at 02:04
Hume's observations on certainty are brilliant, but the most important thing he said about it is usually ignored. "I cannot be certain that this dinne...
December 17, 2018 at 21:29
The theorem is set out here. It is that homeomorphic manifolds have the same dimension. I'm afraid your other two questions are not meaningful and hav...
December 16, 2018 at 23:00
It depends on what you mean by describe. We've already established that one can construct a one-to-one correspondence ('bijection') between points in ...
December 16, 2018 at 22:31
I think your question needs clarifying. What are you trying to ask? I expect you are aware that when we want to include time as a dimension of our phy...
December 16, 2018 at 21:18
My two cents' worth: It depends on how we constrain the set of possible worlds. If the constraints include that that they must obey our laws of logic,...
December 16, 2018 at 00:16