That's an interesting article. Like every other example I've seen of philosophers believing they have found a fatal flaw in descriptivism, it relies o...
No satisfactory definite description can be devised because there is no Lady Mondegreen. The mistaken belief that there is such a name and a person be...
I wonder if one is referring to anything at all when one asks who somebody is. Such a question typically comes up when one has overheard a conversatio...
Yes, the encoding of coordinates in an n-dimensional space into a single real number X is actually easy to describe: The first n digits of X are the f...
I've been feeling a bit bad that what started as a reading group is mostly debate, and I'm partly at fault for that. The debate has been so interestin...
I'd be grateful if you could briefly outline what revoking Article 50 involves, and its likely consequences. As I understand it, that's something that...
The example that continually comes into my head, unbidden, in this discussion is Philip K Dick's novel 'The Man in the High Castle', which is a counte...
Wittgenstein's approach to language is laid out in his later work 'Philosophical Investigations'. It's a bit like reading James Joyce - difficult and ...
'counterpart' Quote signs play the same role as italics in word games like this. People reach for them when they are unable to express what they mean ...
The difference between us seems to be in how we interpret people's use of counterfactual statements. I interpret them as meaning imagining a world tha...
One has to be careful how one sets up counterfactuals, because they usually end up being nonsense, no matter what metaphysics or language philosophy o...
I agree with this and would add my observation that - in my experience - nearly all sentences that use proper names use them in a way that is time ind...
One can only reach that conclusion if one limits consideration to immediate consequences, and ignores longer term consequences. The reason the EU woul...
Those six statements may do that. But I don't think those statements fairly represent a mature descriptivist position. For example statement 5 is some...
My opinion is that Kripke's complaints about theories of definite descriptions, and the examples he believes point to flaws in those theories, are bas...
I understand that you think it would be utterly wrong. I am not convinced of your arguments for that. My position is that the question asked in the pl...
Plebiscites aren't won or lost. They choose between options. Since all three options in my proposal above are clear, concrete and possible without agr...
What a funny name for it. We just call it preferential voting, and it seems as natural as breathing. I can't think of a single reason why anybody that...
There could be an optional preferential referendum, where people list their choices in order. Each of the options would have several paragraphs explai...
My reading of what Wallows was asking is that he wanted to know what you meant by 'using proper nouns in possible world scenarios to place them under ...
Did you post that problem in this thread? If so, could you please link to it? I've only dipped in and out of this thread, so I didn't see it and, now ...
I voted Yes there are too many, not because I think there are too many religious topics, but rather that the ones being thrown up are vacuous, repetit...
Does intention need to be part of analysing the sentence? I feel I'm missing a link there somewhere. I wonder about the self-referentiality. We know t...
No, because it is a statement of inequality, just like saying - 'I am taller than that anthill'. If it were a statement of equality it might be self-r...
That's a tank from the Great War. The OP reports the story as being from the Second War, in which there was a vastly greater number of German tanks. I...
I have no doubt that the rules of Go/chess are programmed into a Go/chess-learning AI. A specification of the rules is so tiny compared to the set of ...
That helps to clarify where the differences lie between your position and that of others. That is a proposition that you regard as self-evident and th...
I've moved this to the Lounge as there is no philosophy of mathematics in it. The thread is simply about a misunderstanding of the meaning of the limi...
An interesting discussion can be had in that direction, given wave-particle duality and that the closer we look at things, the more they are waves or ...
The word 'physical' often gets thrown around in philosophy, without it ever being made clear what it means. The word has a clear meaning in things lik...
A deduction is a sequence in which each statement is justified in terms of earlier statements, or accepted axioms, via a rule of inference. There is n...
I didn't say it was. It is uncontroversial that 'salt', which in common parlance refers to a crystal of many millions of molecules, or a collection of...
We can drop the term 'direct' if that is seen as an obstacle. It does no work in the sentences where I used it. I suppose I may be guilty of tautology...
I would guess the latter. A person sees rocks on several occasions, notices the similarities, and forms an idea of a rock, say starting after the thir...
One can make those assertions, but one can't know them to be true or false without either observing whether they are the case, or making a deductive a...
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