Btw, I don't think of names, unlike descriptions, as ever being translated, though they do get localized. It's an odd area.
Kind of my issue with Frege - the assumption is that syntax and semantics is the whole story for natural language, whereas it is not (although it might be for formal languages).Statements such as "John is John" in your example, insofar I understand them, presuppose information without that it is not possible to make sense of it
Who refuted it? I know Anscombe went to town on the first version of the argument Lewis presented, but Lewis revised the argument in light of her criticisms. Peter van Inwagen had a crack at the second formulation a few years ago, and as far as I remember claims that Lewis didn't do enough to establish the idea that mechanistic explanations for beliefs exclude rational explanations for them, but I'd be astonished if his was the last word on the subject.I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the canonical versions of the argument from reason, as proposed by Lewis, have been completely refuted
It lives on under other guises - most attempts to refute philosophical arguments end up being refuted themselves.I also don't know if you are aware that this argument has been mercilessly refuted by now,
By "them" do you mean logic and mathematics themselves of their predictive capacties?I contend that the predictive capacities of logic and math are entirely explainable by seeing them as emergent properties of human cognition.
I think the reason why none of us perhaps make as much sense as we'd like to concerning this subject, myself included, is that in discussing mental conditions from a philosophical perspective, we come bang up against a fundamental incompatibility between two ways of viewing human action. On the one hand there is the mechanistic view which looks at human action as just so much physiological activity, and I guess that's the kind of view that lies behind your remark that OCD is a neurological condition. It is also a view that some see as gaining corroboration from the fact that drugs can "help" with mental conditions. On the other hand there is the view that looks on human action as purposive and rational, and I have a feeling that there might be something like that lying behind your expression of your reliance on performing your routines - they have a place in your life that takes them beyond the mere motion of bodily parts. There's a temptation to think that we can have it both ways ("two aspects of just one thing") but I'm inclined to suspect that the mechanistic view, taken to its consistent conclusion, just negates the rationalistic one. Eliminative materialists would say something like "too bad for the rationalistic view in that case", and what I'm struggling with is whether that is a coherent position or not.I know I'm not making as much sense here as I would like. I'm struggling to find the most meaningful vocabulary.
Between Newtonian and Hamiltonian mechanics? Depends what you mean by fundamental. But in any case there is a difference in the tools they provide to solve problems. But all of that is irrelevant to the dispute about time-reversal symmetry.You think there is a fundamental difference?
So, you cannot find a single case where a physical system, whose time-evolution is determined by laws of motion, expressed in differential equation form, is not set for all times given a set of initial conditions.
No, I mean simply equations that relate functions to their derivatives (of any order): i.e. the mathematical definition of a differential equation. It would perhaps help the discussion if you were aware of some basic mathematical terminology.Differential equations you say? You mean the type of equations, that given the state of the system at any time, the states for all other times may be calculated?
Yet you still believe that science is about modeling known causal relations mathematically, and thus miraculously capturing unknown causal and acausal relations, without being aware of what you are doing.
I see. You claim that science merely models causal relations, but somehow manages to model unknown, unexpected, surprising causal relations, even when those relations, as in the case of quantum entanglement, are explicitly not causal?
That makes no sense.
I don't see the relevance. The fact that in most cases science models causal relations doesn't entail that it always does, nor that it cannot, on the basis of those models, predict as yet unobserved phenomena. After all that is precisely what Maxwell's equations did, and those were very definitely the result of modelling events that were taken to be causally related.If that is the case, then how can quantum entanglement be discovered in the theory, 50 years before technology was capable of testing, or observing that prediction?
What notion of determinism are you working with here? One very typical one connects it explicity to the idea that each state of a system is ineluctably caused by the previous states of the system, so I don't see how a determinisitc theory in that sense is able to render causality meaningless. You could try stripping out the explicit reference to causation and say that a system is deterministic if (and only if?) the state of that system at time t allows for precisely one next state of the system. The direction of time, though, is embedded into the idea of next state and so if by time-invariant you mean to include the idea of equivalence under time-reversal, it cannot be that sense of determinism in which you take the two theories you are talking about to be deterministic.Both quantum mechanics and general relativity are deterministic theories. Deterministic physical theories, being time-invariant, render causality meaningless.
Not really. Newton's corpuscular theory of light failed (and still fails) to account for the diffraction phenomena that Huygen's wave theory adequately explains. However, if all you mean is that Newton was right insofar as light exhibits particle-like behaviour in certain circumstances, fine, but then so was Huygens if you simply read him as claiming that light exhibits wavelike properties in many circumstances. Typically, in undergraduate physics courses in electromagnetism, it is the wavelike aspects that are focussed on.But in the end, Newton was right.
I did try, and here's something else wrong with it:Try reading all of the post.
You don't seem to understand how electromagnetic radiation was discovered. Maxwell gave us electromagnetic radiation as a new theoretical concept, Hertz gave us its empirical confirmation. Prior to Maxwell, physicists working in electricity and magnetism worked - like Maxwell - on electromagnetic fields. Maxwell brought together the previous work of those other physicists into "his" four field equations. It turned out that those equations have a solution which describes the wavelike propagation of electric and magnetic energy in a vacuum at the speed of light. After Maxwell's theoretical discovery/invention of electromagnetic radiation, that radiation became an object for physical research, and most famously Hertz's which culminated in confirmation of Maxwell's theory.I have never encountered the claim that the scientists working on e.m. radiation thought they were trying to understand something non-physical before. I just doesn't make sense.
it is interesting that many of the prominent materialist philosophers are or were Australian;
I don't think I am misrepresenting physicalism too much by describing it as the metaphysical assertion that everything that is instantiated in Reality is physical.