andrewk

I hope to be able to definitively answer the question in the OP before long. I have been busy in the important exercise of observing everything and id...

Yes I wouldn't support that argument. I think the notion is that ideas are either things we have directly experienced - like a colour - or a combinati...

David Hume made this argument in his Enquiry concerning human understanding', saying: His notion was that every new idea is a connection between other...

That was the other Strawson philosopher - Galen's Dad, Peter. :smile:

Asking what is the meaning of a word is in many cases a category error that arises from taking a concept to which the property 'has a meaning' is appl...

I vote for 30X12 because then we could use those great old month names like Thermidor, Brumaire and Prairial. And I like the fact that the fact 30 doe...

I watched the bit at 15 mins in the video where Feser talked about 'hierarchical ordering of causes'. The only thing I can infer from that is that eit...

Aaarrgh! You are right. Let this be my first public apology of the day. And it's not yet noon here.

I think specific examples are needed to be able to take this further. I get the impression that you have certain cases in mind where discussion has be...

The key difference is that one is a person, that many schools of philosophy (eg Kant) say is deserving of respect and fair treatment, no matter what t...

The diagram seems to say something disturbing about road rules in the US and how inimical to pedestrians they are. Where I live, the speed limit near ...

The solution to the problem is to have electoral processes and boundary-drawing controlled by an independent commission. In Australia that is done by ...

What you wrote sounded sensible, relevant and philosophical to me.

It is truly a moving poem. Perhaps in another thread, one day we could discuss the last verse, which apparently has troubled quite a few otherwise ard...

Haven't worked out what I think about the issue of the OP yet, but I really enjoyed the homage in the last line to the most famous poem ever by a Cana...

It was never in question that that was your belief. What I am interested in is what you mean by the 'ought'. My current hypothesis, based on my immedi...

Good question. I have never had a clear idea of what people mean by normative, and looking up definitions doesn't seem to help. The definitions don't ...

Would the following be a reasonable representation of your claim? We ought to use logic if we wish to acquire true beliefs because, reasoning accordin...

I don't understand whether this is referring to discovery of logic or application of logic. Is this referring to (1) identifying the best way of arriv...

Who cares what he wrote? I dare say his mum does. I expect that, like most mums, she is proud of what her son has achieved. Getting on telly and havin...

Try to mount an argument that we ought to use logic if we wish to arrive at true beliefs, without using logic.

The trouble with treating logic as normative is that the claim of normativity requires the use of logic, so it becomes circular. Further, claiming tha...

I believe that logic is a technique for thinking that is hard-wired into our brains and occurs mostly subconsciously. Explicit formal systems of logic...

Fusion is a fiendishly difficult technical problem. When I attended a science summer school at Sydney Uni in 1978, everybody was talking about tokamak...

Most of the effects are not chaotic. Some are. The creation of an individual hurricane is a chaotic effect but the increase in the expected number of ...

I don't think it's doing that unbidden. It's doing that because governments in Europe have made laws that try to internalise the externalities of foss...

I'm interested in what people think of the static problem on p21-22, of a beam supported at each end with a load in the middle. Norton says the limit ...

One of the most thought-provoking posts I've read on here for quite a while! :up:

I think the confusion arises from the fact that most propositions implicitly implicit contain the words 'at <insert time proposition is stated>.' So t...

I agree, and so I would say that the bachelor statement is analytic (ie I would not use the 'negation is self-contradictory' definition of analytic). ...

A contradiction can be deduced from the statement together with additional axioms. But a contradiction cannot be deduced from the statement on its own...

The trouble with that Britannica version is that 'self-contradictory' is not a defined term. It is not at all clear what it means. I think we can agre...

thanks for that. Given the clarification, it seems to me that if we assume that statement S: "There are no a priori synthetic truths" is true and know...

It sounds like you have proved that, if we assume there are no a priori synthetic truths then it follows, by proof by contradiction, that there are no...

It depends where you look it up. For instance the Oxford dictionary definition is in line with what I wrote above. But let's not debate definitions. I...

I am a relativist in most things, but not a nihilist. For me the difference is that both relativists and nihilists agree that there is no absolute sta...

'False' is a concept of semantics, not logic. We need to be clear whether we're discussing logic or semantics. Semantics is about interpretations of l...

If the conclusion is that, for any given conclusion that is not self-contradictory, we can always adopt some premises from which it can be deduced, th...

I don't know what P6 means.

I think so too

We need more additional premises than those two, to deduce ~(3+3=6). For a start we need 6<>9 and 7+2=9. We will also probably need some commutative a...

I don't think what an eighteen-month old knows is anything like as philosophical as that. My guess is that what they know is that you make the 'cup' n...

It isn't consistent because from P1 we can prove that 3+3=6, which contradicts the deduction that ~(3+3=6).

That's why I construct them, and I suspect it's the reason for most other people as well. In the end though, I can only speak for myself. I don't know...

These are too vaguely stated to know what they mean. I'm guessing that by C1 you mean 'For any proposition P, we can find a set of premises from which...

Where's the self-deception though? I don't necessarily disagree with anything else you've said here. I just don't see how any of it amounts to self-de...

I am not disputing that. What I am questioning is what support you have for the belief that everybody is deceiving themself. I don't think the average...

You can only speak for yourself here. Maybe you feel you are deceiving yourself, but you can have no idea whether others are. Neither can I or anybody...

How can that be a deception? It is not a proposition, and only propositions can be deceptions. People either value things because they can't help but ...

Since meaning is subjective, how can one lie about it? In any case, I doubt that many people do say to themselves that there is something more meaning...