You respond that positions like "the cat is on the mat" are part of a modern trend of seeing cats as being located on mats, but in the past people used to think of cats as being more likely on armchairs. — Isaac
You can't just "argue on the merits of Bayesianism or propensity," if your interloceturs are firmly entrenched dogmatists who keep saying "but look, frequency IS probability just like a triangle is a three sided shape. It's what the word means, it's an analytical truth." Something has to be done to address the foundations of the dogma. — Count Timothy von Icarus
You'll note that people often refer back to earlier treatment of homosexuals when addressing contemporary issues with transgender individuals because it makes for a good argument from analogy as well (another reason to bring up history.) — Count Timothy von Icarus
a trip through history can show how the seemingly necessary (e.g. probability defined as frequency) is actually contingent. — Count Timothy von Icarus
people did math fine all the time back then despite the problems you listed, so clearly it isn't the problem you say it is. DAX and other popular data analysis languages use n/0 = ∞ for legit reasons. — Count Timothy von Icarus
the history of making division by zero undefined — Count Timothy von Icarus
Thus the canonical examples of statements in these problematics; "the cat is on the mat", "the cup is red"; force the adoption of a perspective where factual disputes of the nature of things must accord to the analysis of representative statements whose truth conditions mirror (or fail to mirror) the environmental activities they are articulated in conjunction with. — fdrake
Am I being clear enough? — Srap Tasmaner
Answer: definitely not, but don't go to any further trouble. — Wayfarer
It's quite painfully simple. — Isaac
A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train?
B: Trains have been carrying passengers traveling for both work and for pleasure since the mid-19th century. They were once the primary form of transportation, but with the advent of gas-powered automobiles in the early 20th century and the modern highway system, particularly in the wake of the Second World War, they were largely displaced by cars, buses, and trucks. — Srap Tasmaner
And because I'm tired of playing the forum's logic cop. It's my own damned fault: no one appointed me to that post and no one wants me to do it. — Srap Tasmaner
even informal arguments have a form and a content. Many faulty patterns of informal argument have acquired names we toss around (ad hominem, argument from authority, strawman, blah blah blah). — Srap Tasmaner
It's a requirement for me that the approach I end up with is science-friendly. — Srap Tasmaner
↪fdrake You're doing Joshs not @Wayfarer, and they're actually quite different. — Srap Tasmaner
Is it a form of asceticism, an epistemological veganism? — plaque flag
My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects. — Paul Grice
What did I get wrong? — fdrake
I could answer but I've already gone way over the line discussing the posting styles of members here. I allowed myself to start this thread for the wider issues it might raise and never intended to get into a back and forth about how people write. I had my reasons for giving in and doing just that, but no more. — Srap Tasmaner
Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. That's what I want to stay connected to. — Srap Tasmaner
I won't say that institutional science doesn't have its shortcomings and its blindspots, but that's just the nature of institutions. Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. — Srap Tasmaner
I think 'philosophy' also works. — plaque flag
But it's a fact that the practice of philosophy does not much resemble the practice of science. — Srap Tasmaner
There will be debate, and some new tests to replicate the date, but eventually everyone will agree to reshuffle our understanding of the populating of the Americas. Nothing like this is even conceivable in philosophy. — Srap Tasmaner
A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train? — Srap Tasmaner
I sometimes think we tend to kneel beneath the god of engineering. — plaque flag
The birth of analytic metaphysics placed the meaning of words and their correspondence to the state of things as the essential character of the relationship between thought and being, or action and environment. The problems of metaphysics thus become articulated in terms of the connection between language items and world items. ...
Thus focussing upon whether the cat is on the mat, as a paradigmatic example of the form of truth seeking dispute, brings with it a set of assumptions that render alternative problematics of the connection between thought and being next to impossible. They cannot be justified in the tacitly demanded terms. — fdrake
Natural philosophy, in that context, acts with the implicit presumption of the division of subject and object - hence the emphasis on objectivity and replicability as the sole criteria, assuming a correspondence theory of truth. — Wayfarer
But this is more “bad history”. — apokrisis
the problem is not the application of history to philosophical argument. — apokrisis
You don't make any point by trivialising the argument — Wayfarer
The issues at stake are considerably more subtle, and more significant, but I won't try to explain them again. — Wayfarer
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