It is also possible to have this exchange:
A: What's the rain doing?
B: It's raining. — Herg

Never heard that one. Although "what's the weather doing" was new to me too and that apparently is a thing, so food for thought.

incidentally, by Shakespeare, in the Fool's song from 'Twelfth Night' ("For the rain it raineth every day"). — Herg

Love Shakespeare's use of language. "But me no buts" is one of my favourites.

But you have changed 'weather' to 'day' here, and so you're attacking a straw man. — Herg

Sunny day, rainy day. Sunny weather, rainy weather. Get it now?

'it' is indexical, and in any sentence about the weather, 'it is raining' or 'it is sunny', 'it' refers to the weather. — Herg

You're mixing up your forms like Terrapin did.

The "it" in "it is raining" cannot syntactically refer to the weather in the trivial way the "it" does in "it is sunny" because the syntax differs. This is made obvious when you consider that "a sunny day" is a correct form but "a raining day" isn't. The day can be "sunny" but the day cannot be "raining". Rather, it can be rainy.

So, the proper syntactical parallels are:

It (regular pronoun indexing the weather) is sunny (adjective). ✓
It (regular pronoun indexing the weather) is rainy (adjective). ✓

and

It (dummy pronoun with no clear referent) is raining (present participle). ✓
It (dummy pronoun with no clear referent) is sunning (present participle). X*

*But we can say "She is sunning herself" meaning sunbathing. The reflexive version seems to have stolen the opportunity for a non-reflexive parallel to "It is raining". So, why the difference? Maybe because of the different characteristics of each phenomena (we lie in the sun not in the rain and the rain falling seems more active and verb-like than the emission of less tangible light rays) or maybe because of some etymological accident. Fact remains, the former is valid and the latter isn't, and the most straightforward and commonly accepted logical analysis of the former is the non-indexical dummy pronoun angle, the objections given in this discussion so far having being based on misunderstandings.

Don't question @Hanover. He went to grammar school after all. Semper paratus. :smile:

The phrase "It is raining" is a semantically equivalent unit to "rain is falling" (or something along those lines).

So you didn't look at "it" in isolation in "it is raining" or you could sensibly say "I looked at it, and it is raining". As if you could also look at an "it" that wasn't raining. You looked and saw rain was falling. You looked at a state of affairs illustrated by a phrase that is a semantic whole grammatically inclusive of a dummy pronoun.

[Edit: Cross-posted with comment above]

Sure, and if you don't care you can keep responding to me. That would be a good way to show that you don't care/you're not interested. — Terrapin Station

If I had a dollar for every time you said that to someone... Carry on then. I'll leave you to it.

What I feel... — Terrapin Station

If anyone cares what you feel maybe they can write me a PM explaining why because on that I'm stumped.

s "Is it rain" the same as "The meteorological condition outside is rain"? — Terrapin Station

I guess you mean "It is rain". In which case insofar as rain is a type of meteorological condition, you can do the substitution (minus the adverb).

It (pronoun substituting for noun phrase, "The meteorological condition")
is (main verb "to be" [relationship: identifying])
rain (noun phrase).

You could also use "This wet stuff" or whatever. An analogous sentence would be "It is a cat", "It" could be a substitution for "The animal" as in "The animal is a cat". No problem here.

But these are completely different sentences grammatically to the original, so I don't see the relevance.

What I wanted to convey was that it's a matter of linguistic debate and analysis and there is a 'there' there in that context. There's no practical or philosophical 'there' there though that I see.

When I take a shower in the morning... — Hanover

But you don't.

I wouldn't say something a la "Every word must have a meaning" or "Every occurrence of 'it' must have a meaning" or anything like that, by the way--obviously not if my view is that the meaning of any x is determined simply by an individual assigning whatever meaning they do (or do not). So also, any particular occurrence of 'it' doesn't necessarily have any particular meaning, either. As I said in my first post in this thread: "(Well, or i should clarify 'What I'd normally take the subject to be in lieu of other information' . . . I dont want to suggest objectivist semantics.) " — Terrapin Station

This is irrelevant and in no way compensates for a basic lack of knowledge of grammar.

Likewise you could say something like "The meteorological condition outside is rain." — Terrapin Station

As I said, you are confusing the present continuous tense with the present tense and auxiliary and main forms of the verb 'is'. 'It is rain' is not the same kind of sentence as "It is raining". At all. That's basic grammar. And we are discussing the latter not the former. So, yes, you can make the issue disappear by changing words so we're no longer talking about what we were taking about. But so what?

Yes, it's not simple. That's the point I was making.

See, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun

It's not a kindergartener issue. It's a serious linguistic issue.

I don't know where to start because every sentence in your comment has multiple problems and I don't want to write a thousand word reply. — Terrapin Station

That bluff won't work because I know what I'm talking about.



Substitute the noun you think is appropriate for the pronoun in the sentence I provided and the original one. It should be easy under your analysis.

That's because it's wrong. @Terrapin Station seems to be confusing the main and auxiliary uses of the verb "to be". Aux use gives sub+aux verb+action verb (present continuous) as in "He is running". Main use can give attributive or identifying relations (with adjective or noun on right side respectively). Identifying relation illustrated by the sentence: "The meteorological condition is rain" is closest to the nonsense sentence he provided.

It is obvious that you're wrong that the "it" in "It is raining" behaves like any other subject pronoun (or that all pronouns behave the same way).

Now take the first "it" in the sentence above and try replacing it with a noun phrase to find out why.

(which is the view of at least one linguist, so Google tells me), — jamalrob

There's always one... :sad:

Try "The house is painting" (obsolete way of saying "The house is being painted") or "There you are!" (let's play 'find the subject' again) for more grammar fun.

Btw, the broad definition of a sentence includes "minor sentences" such as "Oh!" etc. You don't need a subject:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minor%20sentence

And, yes, this isn't philosophy as far as I can see, so moved to Questions category.

@Waya Nothing anyone has said reflects badly on you. Please stick around with the realization that anyone who shares personal information in the lounge is essentially fair game, and comments shouldn't be taken personally.

Banned @eodnhoj7 for being persistently/insistently incomprehensible.

Oh...

So did I though I had the grace not to say so. :halo:



Hang in there. I'm sure he wasn't worth you. :strong:

including all the amendments. — hks

You realize don't you that the amendments were put in place by people who didn't agree with the constitution and wanted to change it? i.e. if everyone who had disagreed with the constitution had always left, you wouldn't have your gun amendment. So, it's a self-defeating argument you're proposing.

Somebody explain to me how I can add @baden to my iggy list and ignore all his comments. He is a dedicated Sophist who uses Sophistry and lies with every exhalation of his mouth. — hks

Well, the last exhalation was just a sigh. But you are under no obligation to respond and we won't ask that you leave for having opinions we disagree with. We're rather American like that.

Born and bred in the USA should leave the USA if they cannot support the U.S. Constitution including all the amendments. — hks

I guess you don't believe in freedom of speech. Maybe you should leave the USA.

(What has the OP to do with patriotism?) — ssu

Nothing, apparently. Edited the title.

:cheer:

Musk: Because technology, everything.

:yawn:

Nellie knew when to bugger off. Other large destructive mammals are not so obliging, unfortunately.

It seemed a bit prolonged to me, but fair enough. My growing Trumpophobia is probably showing.

But I think we should continue (if we want to) this debate on the Trump dump, sorry, Trump thread. — ssu

:up:

This high horse might be more appealing if it didn't have Trump's face tattooed on its backside. Anyway please, can y'all stop taking about Baby Raindrop and his disputed hydrophobia. The conversation used to be interesting...

This discussion was merged into Empty names

Is this not sufficiently philosophical enough to remain on the front page? Trying to cooperate here. — Posty McPostface

Just to give my own opinion on this: it looks fairly low effort and over ground much travelled. You can do and have done much better in my view.

You can PM @fdrake who moved it.

Just ploughing on, and being creative especially. And being disciplined about intake of media etc. Activity over passivity, I suppose.

Yes, I have been but kind of know how to control it now. Sort of.

Cross-postyed.

The subject is depression not whether atheism is true. If you have actual evidence (i.e. data, statistics etc) of a correlation between atheism and depression, please provide it. Speculations that happen to make sense to you aren't going to cut much ice here. There are plenty of people, for example, who find the idea of an omniscient God who threatens to have you tortured for eternity for not pleasing him a tad more depressing than mere oblivion. But again, evidence. Make a link if you can or move on.

@Posty McPostface IMHO* if you continue to act depressed, you will continue to be depressed. I don't know how anyone couldn't end up depressed spending their days in bed "wallowing". There's probably much more to it than that, but if you're waiting for your depression to lift before you actually get up and do things, you're in a dangerously passive orientation. My advice would be to imagine what you would do if you weren't depressed and try to go and do that anyway.

*Take it for what it's worth. It's no subsititute for professional advice, obviously.

I was once misdiagnosed as retarded. — Hanover

Eh, I never make mistakes.