You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

T H E

Comments

If a mind knows a language, it embodies a community, carries the product of a community (its norms and conventions) within it, and uses these as the m...
April 02, 2021 at 05:37
I mentioned Crusoe already. I think you are missing the point. Even if everyone but me drops dead, the me that remains was formed by interaction with ...
April 02, 2021 at 05:34
I think it's false that you can have a reasoning mind without community. IMO, my assertions are not wild and not even original. It's just 20th century...
April 02, 2021 at 05:17
That was not aimed as a criticism toward you but just a point that rationality has a moral component. I don't think you've made a strong case against ...
April 02, 2021 at 01:32
:up:
April 02, 2021 at 01:19
Sure, those are good mentions. I tried to limit myself to activities we aren't born knowing how to do. It's easy to take reading for granted because w...
April 02, 2021 at 01:14
Even an atheist, if not playing with words, sees the reality of social mores. This is practical reality, the place where we all actually start (in a s...
April 02, 2021 at 01:11
Sure, we use the words 'mine' and 'yours' like that. But human minds have evolved for human cooperation, in particular for learning and using at least...
April 02, 2021 at 01:03
I need to get around to Goodman. But if you mean the exception of formal languages, then I agree. Of course there's still the 'problem' of how formal ...
April 02, 2021 at 00:36
Minds aren't 'really' individual though. A trained/educated mind is running public 'software.' (Of course we are individual enough to occasionally int...
April 01, 2021 at 22:18
You do raise a nice issue, but let's consider a different example. 'I have a few errands to run first.' Why might I say that instead of 'I have two er...
April 01, 2021 at 21:56
:up: :up: :up: Amazing selection of Witt quotes.
April 01, 2021 at 21:51
I have enjoyed your posts. It seems that they help explain vagueness. I'm personally coming largely from Wittgenstein's analysis of pain. What is pain...
April 01, 2021 at 21:00
I agree that language is a behavior, a skill with using sounds and scribbles. So the issue is the nature of this skill. Note that you again invoke 'we...
April 01, 2021 at 20:58
This touches the issue of the signified versus the signifier. I agree that digital copying is especially impressive. We tend not to lose a single bit....
April 01, 2021 at 20:53
We take it for granted, but how about reading? Can you imagine being illiterate in 2021? It'd be easier to not be able to drive, not able to cook, etc...
April 01, 2021 at 07:55
I agree that vagueness (and/or ambiguity) is integral to our thinking. Look up a word in the dictionary and you get other words, which you can then lo...
April 01, 2021 at 07:21
Well the cards might as well be numbers. We can translate everything about poker into numbers. But I agree that there is something subjective. With p-...
April 01, 2021 at 04:33
Informally I agree with you. But more formally it's not clear that no pattern exists in 3478907834617856 simply because one is not obvious. I like the...
April 01, 2021 at 02:10
:up: :up: :up:
March 31, 2021 at 21:26
I agree that individually we are born with the ability to (pre-)reason and learn a language. I can't agree that language is just scribbles and sounds....
March 30, 2021 at 23:24
If you look into algorithmic information theory, you'll see randomness as irreducible. It has no useless space in it. It's thick. And a truly random (...
March 30, 2021 at 01:24
I've read much of Fooled by Randomness. Taleb is great. I like that he programs simulations (and I'm quite fascinated by PRNGs and all that they can b...
March 30, 2021 at 01:22
I think I understand what you are saying, but IMV thinking itself is (counter-intuitively) not a private act. I say this because we think in and throu...
March 30, 2021 at 01:20
I agree. I don't see any way around type-I and type-II error. This is one reason I like to frame things practically. Let's say we are doing quality co...
March 30, 2021 at 00:48
But what then do you make of testing the coin for fairness as in my reply to tim?
March 30, 2021 at 00:09
Let's consider a simpler example, so you can see where I am coming from. Let's flip a coin ten times to test it for fairness and get HHHHHHHHHH. If H_...
March 30, 2021 at 00:08
I don't think it's that clear. While statistical hypothesis tests are never conclusive (because haunted by the possibility of type-I and type-II error...
March 29, 2021 at 23:42
We should keep in mind that pRNGs are a big part of modern technology and that there are lots of test. http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~garrett/students...
March 29, 2021 at 23:36
That's true, and that's a good point. Each string of ten digits is equally likely, but it's strange that we got such a monotonous sample, all in the s...
March 29, 2021 at 04:41
EDIT: At first I applied a GOF-test, but I ignored that I need more to data to justify using that test. My informal response is that there are only 10...
March 29, 2021 at 03:54
I understand the temptation to make this point, but consider this pronoun we. Perfectly private 'observation' is (or seems to be) scientifically irrel...
March 28, 2021 at 21:08
Thank you for linking to this distinction, it seems quite useful. :up:
March 28, 2021 at 21:02
:up: It makes sense to me to that this is what shooters are doing, going on a power trip, playing God, and (often) escaping into the grave from any co...
March 27, 2021 at 01:35
:up:
March 26, 2021 at 21:50
For whatever reason, the free will issue has never bothered me.I guess I'm a soft determinist. I think we can't help but enact our training. At the sa...
March 26, 2021 at 21:46
I'm guessing he means constructive in the sense that, given any countable list of real numbers, one can construct a real number not on that list, from...
March 26, 2021 at 06:41
:up: In other words: I don't have the language, the language has me. And I am more within the language than the language is within me. To exist in a c...
March 26, 2021 at 06:31
Another quote from C S P and the same essay seems to fit here (the new link includes a longer version.) http://www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/peirce-charles-fixa...
March 26, 2021 at 06:14
Yes, I was trying to bring this intuition of the ideal coin into the conversation. Did we evolve so that this intuition was available? And: how does i...
March 26, 2021 at 05:10
Nature aside, what I'm trying to get at is the ideal, mathematical model. Specifically, we can think of a Bernoulli variable with p = 0.5. But even th...
March 26, 2021 at 04:52
Deep issue, and you've got some good answers already. I'll just introduce the theme of the theoretically fair coin. This is an ideal coin. It's the pr...
March 26, 2021 at 03:20
That was my favorite quote perhaps! I'm glad you gave it a look and found the same focal point. This quote also reminds me of the idea that philosophe...
March 26, 2021 at 00:12
You put your finger right on a nice issue. I think it would have been better if Peirce had said nothing individual (or individually human). The goal i...
March 26, 2021 at 00:07
I agree that Chesterton is wrong, but then he's also fooling around. Radical skepticism is something like a pose, IMO. Genuine doubt is paralyzing. Th...
March 25, 2021 at 04:19
:up:
March 25, 2021 at 00:53