It appears that our number system is as of yet still incomplete! — Agent Smith

So -4 = i×i×4i×i×4. A u-turn of whatever +4 is; — Agent Smith

converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds. — unenlightened

This notion of yours that concepts depend on there being multiple thinking things or mind-independent objects is very wrong. — Michael

No need. I just presented an opportunity for you to ask yourself a question. Shouldn’t be any more difficult, or use any other faculties, than asking yourself what would be nice to have for dinner. — Mww

expression which requires only a singular subjectivity, or communication, which requires a plurality of subjectivities, are only possible through a medium that is not subjective. — Mww

Yeah, well....in Kant, autonomy does not relate to universality, but causality, so whoever said Kant said, or meant, that, has merely suited himself to his own ends. And as you say, we are entitled to interpret, but we do not have license from that entitlement, to subvert. — Mww

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding [= reason] without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to make use of your own understanding [= reason]! is thus the motto of enlightenment.

It is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another.
...
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified)
...
To make use of one’s own reason means no more than to ask oneself, whenever one is supposed to assume something, whether one could find it feasible to make the ground or the rule on which one assumes it into a universal principle for the use of reason.

[N]ot even the slightest degree of wisdom can be poured into a man by others; rather he must bring it forth from himself. The precept for reaching it contains three leading maxims: (1) Think for oneself, (2) Think into the place of the other [person] (in communication with human beings), (3) Always think consistently with oneself. — Kant

We saw above (§1.4) that Kant characterizes reason in terms of a self-reflexive procedure. Reason is autonomous and submits to no external authority; it gains authority from submitting itself to critique; and critique involves rejecting any mode of thinking or acting that cannot be adopted by all. In less abstract terms, the self-scrutiny of reason is scrutiny by all those who demand justification for any particular mode of thought or action. Such a view does not assume that we are necessarily bound to our interests and inclinations (as the instrumental account does). It does not ask us to rely on what others do accept (as the communitarian account does). It does not involve the fantasy that we already know or intuit what everyone should accept (as the perfectionist account does). It proposes, instead, a vision of human beings who are able to step back from their particular inclinations, habits and intuitions, and who are willing to use this ability to seek terms that all can accept—to construct an intersubjective order of co-existence, communication and cooperation on terms that all can accept.

You'd have to separate the mind into two halves - that which holds what is the case, and that which holds beliefs about the other half (which can then be wrong). — Isaac

What....you never heard the expression “thinking outside the box”? What is a culture if not a box? Being in a culture and conditioned by it, does not necessitate being restricted to it. — Mww

....but there’s nothing in that that says the philosopher’s minimum commitment has to be language.. I would say a philosopher’s minimum commitment, is understanding. — Mww

“Something better” and “broken theory” are subjective judgements. Who says it’s better, and, better than what? — Mww

And what’s broken about some extant theory? — Mww

So....you know what justice is because you’ve experience things that seem just or unjust to you? How does an experience of an unjust incident inform you of how it could be so, if you didn’t already have an idea what form justice itself must have? — Mww

Observational vocabulary is not a vocabulary one could use though one used no other. Non-inferential reports of the results of observation do not form an autonomous stratum of language. In particular, when we look at what one must do to count as making a non-inferential report, we see that that is not a practice one could engage in except in the context of inferential practices of using those observations as premises from which to draw inferential conclusions, as reasons for making judgments and undertaking commitments that are not themselves observations.The contribution to this argument of Sellars’s inferential functionalism about semantics lies in underwriting the claim that for any judgment, claim, or belief to be contentful in the way required for it to be cognitively, conceptually, or epistemically significant, for it to be a potential bit of knowledge or evidence, to be a sapient state or status, it must be able to play a distinctive role in reasoning: it must be able to serve as a reason for further judgments, claims, or beliefs, hence as a premise from which they can be inferred.

How about “no human can know the future”. — Michael

It’s no different to saying “no human has two heads” which is true if I’m the only human or if I’m one of seven billion. — Michael

But that “soft” externality is the kind of externality that the solipsist denies can be known. They don’t deny knowledge of the metaphorical externality that you apply to such things as maths. The solipsist accepts that we can get maths wrong. — Michael

Interesting. My personal view is that the self is a modeling assumption used to delineate non-entropic forces from entropic ones. It locates the boundary between the system which is to be retained and the forces which would reduce its improbable structure to a nice even Gaussian distribution of variables. — Isaac

You could explain it without using a spatial metaphor? — Michael

Is the concept of a horse something that I can encounter and pick up? — Michael

I have no idea what it means to say that a concept is external. Is the concept of a horse something that I can encounter and pick up? — Michael

Any thinking thing, whether there be just one thinking thing or two thinking things or seven billion thinking things. — Michael

skepticism is the position that we could be wrong. — Michael

why not ditch the idea that minds are private at all, or singular, or anything. — Isaac

0 isn't divisble. 0x=0 where x is real.

What follows? Any ideas? — Agent Smith

In philosophy, to say that a statement is truth-apt is to say that it could be uttered in some context (without its meaning being altered) and would then express a true or false proposition.

Trying to argue against the coherency of solipsism is just wrong. — Michael

I understand your dukkha - something's wrong, I second that motion. — Agent Smith

It just struck me that a shaman is/was basically a comms channel between us/people and the great unknown - they (shamans) bridged this terrifying gap as best as they could and brought some semblance of what in psychology is known as closure in our/people's lives. — Agent Smith

Shamanism has always been romanticised by hippies! :sweat: — javi2541997

I still don't see the confusion over negatives and their operations, but then I "do" math every day. Oftentimes familiarity makes it difficult to see how others must view the same. — Real Gone Cat

accommodates increasingly general uses of arithmetic, which in my opinion and following Wittgenstein's general philosophy, is best understood in terms of games of increasing generality . — sime

The numberline shows us an order, and this order gives zero a place. But zero has no place within an order, because it would mean that there is a position of no order within that order, which is contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover

In one sense, geometry's anti-negative numbers and in another sense it is pro-negative numbers!

What up with that? Anyone have any ideas? — Agent Smith

They most certainly did not have any attitude at all towards the proposition "the stopped clock is working" when and while they trusted what a stopped clock said about the time. — creativesoul

Which is to prefer doing different things with the very same words/marks. There's nothing - in and of itself - wrong with doing that — creativesoul

They knew they were fallible. The general aim was to minimize the likelihood of being mistaken(of forming, having, and/or holding false belief) while increasing the likelihood of better understanding the world and/or themselves . — creativesoul

Language less creatures do not have language, do not understand words, and thus cannot understand propositions. Propositions are utterly meaningless to language less creatures. — creativesoul

I am quite curious to see exactly what you're going to do differently than me. — creativesoul

There seems to be this sense that because we can imagine a horse, the concept of a horse must be private (I needn't tell anyone what colour it is...shhh!) — Isaac

What we're imagining is not a horse, it's a hippopotamus. So my imagination cannot be the concept 'horse', otherwise it couldn't be wrong. — Isaac

it only follows from The Cogito that "doubting exists", not the doubter herself. — 180 Proof

Yes, I think people are, wary of relativism ("the Nazis were right, from their perspective"), but it's never something I've found in the least worrying. I'm embedded in a culture (and I'm probably wired with several moral-like beliefs from birth, like any other human). — Isaac

To show that we have a private concept of 'exists' you need to show not only that mental activity is private, but that the grouping of some of that mental activity into a clear concept called 'existence' is also private. — Isaac

Ryle’s criticism of the Official Doctrine begins by pointing out an absurdity in its semantic consequences. If mental conduct verbs pick out “occult” causes then we would not be able to apply those verbs as we do; so something must be wrong with a theory of mental phenomena that renders so inadequate our everyday use of these verbs. For, according to the Official Doctrine

when someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness. (1945, 17)

Ryle’s criticism of the view is that if it were correct, only privileged access to this stream of consciousness could provide authentic testimony that these mental-conduct verbs were correctly or incorrectly applied. “The onlooker, be he teacher, critic, biographer or friend, can never assure himself that his comments have any vestige of truth.” And yet,

it was just because we do in fact all know how to make such comments, make them with general correctness and correct them when they turn out to be confused or mistaken, that philosophers found it necessary to construct their theories of the nature and place of minds. Finding mental-conduct concepts being regularly and effectively used, they properly sought to fix their logical geography. But the account officially recommended would entail that there could be no regular or effective use of these mental-conduct concepts in our descriptions of, and prescriptions for, other people’s minds. (1949a, 17)