Amalac

But what Russell seems to be saying is not that it applies to a class, it's that it is a class. But isn't it true that a “sum total” must be a class o...

I think the questions in your OP lead to the problem of psychologism, this may interest you: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychologism/ Personal...

I'd actually use only the first definition (both the known and the unknown actual material) you give, since when speaking about “all actual material” ...

Hmm, I think there may be some equivocation involved in how scientists and philosophers approach and argue that question. The former usually mean “the...

The point was just the remarks (discussing if they are wrong, and if so why), that’s why I didn’t check the “question” box. But I can make a question ...

So if Q is nonsense, it is not false. If P is nonsense, then so is not P. The conjunction of P and not P is false if either P is false or not P is fal...

I mean that it's meaningless because it's poorly formed, in order to understand it you have to rearrange the words, and then you are no longer referri...

Wrong, check the truth table for contradictions: contradictions are always false. Plus a statement such as “the gostak distims the doshes” is just sen...

I wrote “red the is apple” as an example of a phrase that's meaningless, despite the fact that the individual words that comprise it are not. I think ...

Hmm, but I thought you said such statements were not even wrong? Or were you only refering to the other statements in the OP? Of course no one dispute...

That's right, we could say that “nothing exists” is not false as Kolakowski maintains, but rather senseless. To be consistent however, we would in tha...

That's an interesting way of looking at it, perhaps that's what Kolakowski intended to say. If it were though, it still seems troubling: if the statem...

I mean specially this passage here, which is pretty clear: Perhaps this other passage (earlier on the same book) can give context:

About the question whether it's grammatically correct or not, it's interesting that Kolakowski himself seems to be more or less aware of your criticis...

Yes, but an instruction is neither true nor false.

To clarify further: according to Kolakowski, the proposition “something exists” could be analytic. An analytic proposition is a proposition such that ...

Not necessarily, the statement “Caesar is a prime number” is meaningless (according to Carnap at least), but isn't a contradiction. Another example: “...

So he just made an obvious mistake? I'm somewhat skeptical of that, but it's possible nonetheless. The statement “nothing exists” is either false or m...

Ok, but what I'm wondering about is: how can Kolakowski know that the statement “nothing exists” is false if he doesn't understand what the statement ...

So a statement may be unintelligible to some people and still be false, but it seems strange to say (though is perhaps not impossible) that a statemen...

You have a point I suppose, going by the most common definition of “unintelligible” meaning “impossible to understand”, it would seem clear that a sta...

You didn't answer the question, is the statement false or meaningless? Or should I interpret your post as saying that it is meaningless?

It's a contradiction, and therefore false. But my question has rather to do with phrases whose subject is self-contradictory and/or meaningless. In yo...

It is true that one could argue, like Leibniz, that it was logically impossible for God to have created the best possible world without the evil it co...

Examples that come to my mind are many of the philosophical problems concerning “nothing” and/or “nothingness”: If someone asks me if there's somethin...

It's not meaningless (and it's not a tautology either, since it's not logically impossible for someone to come back to life, merely physically impossi...

A premise can't be valid or invalid, only an argument can. A premise can only be true, false or meaningless. If you say that premise is false, what's ...

I didn't notice this post before, and I confess that I'm a little puzzled as to what you are getting at here. Could you elaborate a bit on how this is...

@"Trinidad" was banned, so I'm afraid he/she won't be able to respond to your post.

I think it can be summarized in this statement: postmodernism is (philosophical) scepticism on drugs. I am not thinking of people like Michel Foucault...

I was refering to Bartricks' fallacious argument, not to the OP's.

Premise 2 is false= ¬p 1. p?¬p means: ¬p v ¬p, which is ¬p. 2. p 3. Therefore ¬p. Obviously, if you have both p and ¬p as premises you can conclude an...

p: a Republican wins the election. q: if it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson (q = r?s) r?s is equivalent to ¬r v s, so q should be interpret...

Oh, well if that's what you meant then obviously, if one of the premises is the Law of Contradiction or assumes the Law of Contradiction, the sceptic ...

The baby is not the fetus. You mean to say: if you do nothing to the fetus, then in the future it will become a baby. In order for me to choose betwee...

In the future, if and only if the woman decides not to abort, not when the fetus is 2 weeks old. But the question is: does anything happen to the actu...

Suppose all this happens when the fetus is, say, 2 weeks old. Then in scenario 1, if you do nothing to the fetus, then at that moment nothing happened...

Nothing happened to the baby, there is no baby to begin with. It's like if you said the present king of France is sleeping: it's not the case that he ...

Goodness gracious... I mean that this: Does not mean the same as, nor implies: It also does not mean that: Also, I'm still waiting for your response t...

No, that doesn't mean that at all (if you mean the same baby that the destroyed fetus would have become).

1. You can't do anything to what doesn't exist (the actual baby doesn't exist, only the potential baby does). Of course, destroying the fetus can have...

No, that’s like saying that destroying the seed destroys the tree it would have become otherwise. Once again, you can’t destroy or kill what doesn’t e...

Of course I do agree that we should make language fit what we know about reality and not the other way around. It may happen that, for example, we wer...

Yes, that was my bad, I'm too tired from work, I wrote too quickly and forgot to add that other negation, I'll try writing more slowly now. (Also engl...

The problem is that I don't agree with this statement: I think logic is about what we can say, but also about the way things are (in the sense in whic...

Well, I thought you held that the Law of Contradiction was only a rule of language, but now you are saying that it does reflect how the world is. What...

Ok, but like I said, Russell doesn't disagree and neither do I:

Edit: sorry, got the quotes mixed up at first, since I'm writing from my phone's half broken screen I didn't notice. Obviously not, but what exactly d...

How do you know that (Edit: sorry, missed adding: “it's not the case that” here, I'm very tired from work) they also don't prove it as a theorem? By a...