Comments

  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Whats the difference? I've asked this several times. If was so easy and obvious then why can't anyone answer the question? — Harry Hindu
    I'm surprised that nobody has answered it, because I believe it is very simple. Perhaps you didn't ask it quite as directly before.
    For me, 'sex' refers to the biological sex of the person, as determined by their chromosomes and genitalia. If the chromosomes are not in one of the two standard sexual configurations or the genitalia are not consistent with the chromosomes, the person is intersex. That occurs sometimes, but rarely.

    'Gender' identifies with which of society's two standard sets of behavioural expectations the person most complies, or society expects them to comply.

    Sex is biological. Gender is a societal expectation based on sex.

    I agree with Simone de Beauvoir that gendered expectations are oppressive and that it is worth working to eradicate them. That will take a very long time, and will encounter resistance, but it is worth the effort.

    Some people use 'gender' as a synonym for 'sex', and even prefer it because it sounds less rude. I think that is a mistake and, wherever possible refuse to fill in a field in a form marked 'gender' (or choose the 'prefer not to disclose' or 'indeterminate' option if there is one), while I am perfectly happy to indicate my sex.

    Although I think it is a mistake, I confess that I made it for much of my life, before I became aware of the importance of the distinction.
    So in a gender neutral school the girls will play on the varsity tackle football team or wrestling team with the boys? — Harry Hindu
    Sure, if they want to.
    a transgender woman (a man claiming to be a woman) does call those things feminine. It is the only way they know how to express their womanhood. Are you telling the trans person that those things are not characteristics of womanhood? — Harry Hindu
    I would not presume to tell the person anything, as I am not in a position to understand their experience, much less give them advice. It has to be acknowledged that in some cases gender dysphoria of the sort you mention can come into conflict with de Beauvoir's vision of feminism, and this has caused some distress on both sides. So it behoves us to proceed carefully in areas that are vulnerable to that conflict. But I think it is possible to work to dismantle societal gender expectations without having to enter that conflict zone.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    ↪frank
    I don't understand your comments about cake, or about the fellow lifting himself up.

    If you're saying that programs in schools do not help a person that is currently suffering persecution because of the gender stereotypes held by others, I don't think anybody disagrees. But nobody is saying that school programs are the whole solution, only that they may be an important part of the solution. Solutions to social problems like this are complex and multi-faceted. Some parts - like the schools - will address the gradual removal of the stereotypes, and others will seek to protect people that currently suffer from those stereotypes. Inevitably, the experience of a nonconformist will be worse now or in five years than it will be in twenty years.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    Consider a high school senior who is a 300 lb linebacker. I don't think anyone wonders what this student's gender is. How does this conversation relate to him? — frank
    I assume you mean 'sex' rather than 'gender' here.

    The way that this conversation relates to him is that in a world in which gender stereotypes were not promoted, this male would be free to wear lipstick, dresses, play with dolls and other activities that gender stereotypes claim are 'feminine' without fear of being judged or otherwise looked-down on by others.

    His ability to play American football well is one property that is part of a male gender stereotype (by the way, that stereotype no longer applies to English football (soccer) or Australian football, in which there are popular and prosperous female leagues), but implies nothing about other aspects of his behaviour.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    ↪fdrake
    I baulk at the first sentence of (1A). Describing the journey as a 'sequence' is inaccurate and almost presupposes Zeno's conclusion.
    Also - and I'm not sure if this pedantic or crucial - I would say the journey does have a beginning, and it is the spacetime event that is the location A at the time that is the infimum of all times at which the object O is anywhere in Y - {A,B} (recall that Y is the locus of the object O). Similarly, the end of the journey is location B at the supremum of that set of times.

    In that sense, the journey has a well-defined beginning.
    It is the set of passings of the waypoints in S that has no beginning. But that set of passings is not the whole journey.
    the usual notion that a journey must have a beginning (the journey presumably being the sequence of distances travelled in their usual ordering) is not in play. — fdrake
    Yes, if 'journey' is used to refer only to the passings of waypoints in S, rather than the usual meaning of the whole path Y, that is central to where Zeno goes wrong.
    Do you think your response also addresses the case where we replace (1) with (2):

    (2) The number of distances travelled is infinite, and we cannot do an infinite task.     — fdrake
    I think this has even more problems than (1). The term 'task' is dragged up out of nowhere, with no clear meaning or relation to the problem. Nor is any support provided for the claim that we cannot do an infinite task - a claim that seems very unintuitive to me.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    It’s a series of events with no start and so cannot be started. — Michael
    'Series', like 'sequence' is a technical mathematical term. Usually it is used to describe the sequence of partial sums of a sequence, although sometimes it is used just as a synonym for 'sequence'. Either way, as we observed above that since the set of events S is not a sequence, under the natural order, neither is it a series.

    All we can say is that it is a totally ordered set. To be a series or sequence, and to have a 'start' it would have to be a 'well-ordered set'.

    But totally-ordered sets are not all well-ordered, and sets of the form S are examples of that.

    I would say that the object O passes the points in S in order. Intuitively, we feel that that implies that there must be a first passing, a 'start'. But that is only an intuition, not a logical consequence of any of the properties of the objects being considered. Sometimes our intuitions lead us astray, and this is such a case.

    That's why the Zeno paradox is veridical rather than falsidical. It conflicts with our intuitions, but not with logic. Hence we have to conclude that, in this case, our intuitions are wrong.
  • Euthyphro Dilemma (false dilemma?)
    Would you agree that simply stating that God = Goodness is a tautology and not an answer to the Euthyphro dilemma? — Walter Pound
    I see it as getting stuck on the first horn - that goodness is whatever God does or wants done, so if that is killing all the first-borns then that is 'good'.

    I also don't think it makes sense to say God = Goodness because the things people typically believe about God, like that She created the universe or that She is very powerful and omniscient, are not entailed in the concept of Goodness. One might say that Goodness is essential to God, but if one said that was all there is to God it would fall a long way short of what is generally meant by God.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    I’m saying that passing in order is a sequential series of events with no start and so cannot be started. — Michael
    'Sequential' is the problem word here. I would say that passing in order is not sequential, because the events are not sequential if we use the usual meaning of being in order-preserving bijection with the natural numbers.

    We cannot 'start' a sequence that has no start because by definition a sequence has a start - the item that is the image of natural number 0 under the bijection. But the set S, with the natural order, is not a sequence, so there is no sequence to be started. To turn S into a sequence we need to change the order. But since order-preservation is required, that cannot be done, hence there is no sequence, and no problem.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    But this is just like saying that the single act of counting all members of S is the single act of counting the rationals from 0 to 1. — Michael
    I chose to use the word 'passing' rather than 'counting', with intent. There is a critical difference between 'counting' and 'passing'.

    To me, 'counting, in order' [you didn't say 'in order' but it was implied] means identifying an order-preserving map from the natural numbers to the set S. That is impossible.

    'Passing, in order', means identifying an order-preserving map f: [0,1] -> [0,1] such that the map obtained by restricting the domain of f to f^-1(S) is order-preserving. That is easily done.

    It is the insistence that the points must not only be Passed In Order, but also Counted In Order that is equivalent to assumption (A), and which is unacceptable (and I would say also unintuitive, but intuition is in the eye of the beholder).
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    How exactly could one show that one can’t start counting each rational number between 0 and 1 from smallest to largest? — Michael
    Proving that there is no smallest will do it. Like this: Assume there is a smallest, call it x. Then x must equal 2^-M for some M. But 2^-(M+1) is less than that and is also in S, which contradicts our assumption that x was the smallest. Hence there can be no smallest.

    But that proof doesn't do anything to support a belief that it is impossible to move from A to B.
    if there is no smallest then the act of passing each member cannot start — Michael
    The single act of passing all members of S is the single act of traversing track Y from A to B. In doing so, object O will pass each member, in order. The act starts at time 0 with object O at location A.

    So we have an act that does everything we need, and which has a beginning at time 0. Observing that there is no smallest element of S and hence no 'first passing of a member of S' does nothing to obstruct that. It just demonstrates that the notion 'the first passing of a member of S' is empty, just as the notion 'the present king of France' or 'the beginning of this circle' is.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    ↪Michael
    The second part of that sentence is either an assumption (so the 'so' should be an 'and') or based on an unstated assumption, which will be something equivalent to (A). What I'm questioning is why anybody would accept that assumption.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    Because if space is infinitely divisible then there exists such a subset and if motion is continuous then it must pass through each member sequentially — Michael
    I agree with the first point. For the second point, we need to be careful about what we mean by 'sequentially'. If we mean that we pass through x before y iff x<y then there's no problem. If we take a different meaning of 'sequentially' I suspect we are going to get another dubious, controversial assumption.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    If I want to count in order the 1/(2n) numbers between 0 and 1, which is the first number I count? If I want to move from 0m to 1m which is the first 1/(2n)m distance I pass through? There isn't one, and if there isn't a first step the task cannot start. — Michael
    Thinking about this leads me to what I think is a fairly precise mathematical statement of the controversial assumption that Zeno's argument makes. It is this:

    (A) An object O cannot move from location A to a different location B on a path Y unless, for any countable subset S of points in Y, there exists an order-preserving map from the natural numbers onto S.

    In Zeno's example, S is the set of points at proportions 2^-k along the track Y, for natural number k. But there are infinitely many different types of S that present the same problem. For any real number x>1, the set of numbers x^-k for natural number k does the same thing. The sequences 1/k, 1/k^2, 1/k^3 and so on do it too. In fact, take any monotonic-decreasing function f:R+ -> [0,1]. Then the set S = f(N) provides the required "blockage".

    There are maps from N onto any countable set S in Y, but they do not preserve order. For example, the map f: k |-> 2^-k has 1/2 = f(1) < f(0) = 1, reversing the order that 0<1.

    The question is, why should we accept assumption (A)?

    As (I think) I said earlier, we don't need calculus to dissolve Zeno's problem. All we need do is identify the questionable assumption on which it relies.
  • Euthyphro Dilemma (false dilemma?)
    "God wills something because he is good. That is to say what Plato called 'The Good' just is the moral nature of God himself. God is, by nature, loving, kind, impartial, fair, just and so on. — Walter Pound
    This replaces one word, whose meaning we are wondering about, by a list of words: kind, loving, impartial, fair, just.

    All this seems to me to do is to split the Euthyphro into even more horns. For each item X on the list, we can ask:

    'is X defined as what God would do in any situation, or is it defined independently of God, and you are asserting that the nature of God is to be X?'

    Socrates asked in the Republic what 'justice' was. Many answers were offered, but I don't recall any of them being 'whatever God would do in this situation'.

    Splitting Good into a list of subsidiary qualities just makes things worse, like the buckets and mops in the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    ↪Walter Pound
    That question can only be fairly answered by an Aristotelean. I am not one, but I think there are plenty on this board. IIRC @Metaphysician Undercover is one (apologies in advance if I have misread your position MU).
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    Why do you think Aristotle invented potential infinite to get out of the paradox? — Walter Pound
    Because, while the logical discipline that he had developed was sufficient to identify the flaw in Zeno's reasoning, Aristotle did not spot how that could be done. So he instead opted for a much more elaborate and philosophically controversial approach.

    Nevertheless, his counter-argument looks reasonable to me. However, it doesn't seem to me that Aristotle's notions of 'potential infinite' and 'actual infinite' are essential to his chosen rebuttal. It suffices for him to observe that running down the track and marking the ends of every sub-interval is different from running down the track without doing that, and the runner that gets from A to B does the latter.
  • Zeno's paradoxes in the modern era
    All of the Zeno paradoxes that I know have the following form:

    1. Prove that in order for one's position to change, one must first do an infinite number of 'things'

    2. Assert that one cannot do an infinite number of 'things' in a finite time.

    From 1 and 2, conclude that one's position cannot change.

    The resolution is to observe that, if 'things' is defined in the way that it needs to be in order for the proof of 1 to succeed, there is no reason to accept assertion 2.

    I don't think modern mathematics or philosophy, or even calculus, is needed in order to perform that analysis and identify the reliance on the nebulous notion of 'things'. Aristotle's propositional logic suffices.

    The current status of the (veridical) paradoxes is what it always has been: they eloquently demonstrate that, when one reasons to a conclusion that contradicts what one confidently observes to be the case, there must be a flaw in the reasoning, and one has to carefully examine it in order to locate it.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    They who claim to be gender neutral are probably lying, quite possibly to themselves as well as to others. — Bitter Crank
    Do people claim to be gender neutral?

    I thought they aspired to be gender neutral.

    Just as people of goodwill aspire to be non-racist, while recognising that they probably still have some elements of racism in their persona because it is so natural in the human condition.

    To the extent that things like racism or gender-neutrality are seen as moral issues (and I see them that way), surely any thoughtful person that considers them a worthy goal will express them as an aspiration and encourage others to aspire towards it too. Only a fool will claim 'I am perfect, so try to be like me!'
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    I just noticed the following, as an example of how either sloppy or dishonest Jordan Peterson is in his arguments:
    The authors are claiming that men who socialize their boys in a traditional manner destroy their mental health. — Jordan Peterson
    [Italicisation by Peterson. Bolding and underlining by me.]

    If that were the case, the APA document could rightly be interpreted as an attack on men, as Peterson claims it is, because it would be saying that it is either exclusively or predominantly men that inflict psychological damage on their sons by forcing gender roles onto them.

    Yet I cannot see anywhere in the APA document that it says it is men doing this enforcement. It uses the passive voice everywhere I saw, and talks about how it is damaging for a gender role to be forced onto a child. Never does it mention men doing the forcing. The natural inference would be that it is both parents. A more realistic inference might be that, since women still do most of the child-rearing across society on average, most of the gender-role enforcement is being done by women.

    If Peterson cannot get this simple, and utterly crucial, fact right, how can he be taken seriously in anything else he says?
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    ↪Bitter Crank
    Most of the psychologists I've come across seem well-balanced, thoughtful and to have evidence-based practice methods. Sure one comes across the occasional Jordan Peterson, but most of them seem pretty sane and to provide a helpful service.
  • Identity wars in psychology and Education.
    ↪unenlightened
    I looked at some of the responses to the APA guidelines and was surprised at how completely they missed the point. They seem to believe that gender-neutrality means discouraging behaviour that gender norms label as Male. They conjure fears of how society will survive if there is nobody to be assertive, or even aggressive, when the situation calls for it.

    Oh deary me, who will defend out poor neutered nation?

    It's hard to comprehend just how badly people that are purportedly intelligent and educated can misunderstand a simple message. So hard that one can't help suspecting that the misunderstanding is, at least in part, deliberate.

    Let's lay out the message that they were unable to discern:

    Society may indeed need some people to be aggressive and others to be nurturing, but there is absolutely no reason why the aggressive ones must be male and the nurturers must be female. So let's raise out children so that it is open to them to be either, or some mixture of the two. Let us discourage only harmful behaviours and encourage any non-harmful behaviours that the child enjoys.

    For all we know, such raising may result in our having more aggressive people than we currently do. Perhaps the world's fiercest army will be that of a country where gender-neutral raising occurs, and will be dominated by women.

    There are more features encompassed by gender norms than just aggression and nurturing, but exactly the same rule applies to those. Perhaps a gender-neutral country will have more female physicists and more straight, male designers.

    But the thing that irks me the most, as well as confirming the poor education or analytical skills of the twelve fulminators, is their misuse of the term Stoic. As an admirer of the Stoic philosophy, I abhor the tendency of philosophical ignoramuses to use the term as if it means emotionless and uncaring (it doesn't), and as if it were specifically associated with being male (it isn't). This is tolerable and understandable in street talk amongst those that have no reason to know better. But it is disgraceful from people that string lists of letters after their name in their byline to apparently demonstrate how educated they are.
  • Proving a mathematical theorem about even numbers
    ↪Ulrik
    It is possible to make that proof rigorous. Actually the shortest rigorous version by that path uses the following, which is the same as the book proof but replacing 2 by 10:

    P3 "The square of any number ending in 0 ends in 0."

    Both this and the even-ness theorem are specific cases of the more general theorem:

    P4 "The square of any number divisible by integer m is divisible by integer m."

    Putting P3 together with the observations that:

    (a) 0, 2, 4, 6 and 8 and 10 are divisible by 2, and
    (b) a number ends in 0 if and only if it is divisible by 10, and

    we can infer that any number ending in 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8 is even.
    Then an expansion of (10n + k)^2 enables us to see that the square of an even number ends in 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8. Then by (a) and (b) we can show that that square is divisible by 2.

    There are gaps to be filled in here, but that's the general shape.

    It is much quicker to just prove P4 and then consider the case where m=2. But it is a good exercise to do it the long way around.

    Here are some related theorems that you might find interesting to prove:

    - for any number divisible by 3, the sum of the digits is divisible by 3
    - for any number divisible by 9, the sum of the digits is divisible by 9
    - the decimal expansion of k/9, for k in {1,2,3,4,5,6, 7, 8} consists of an infinite series of k's.
    - the decimal expansion of k/7, for k in {1,2,3,4,5,6} consists of the sequence 142857 repeated endlessly, with the first m digits removed, where m is in {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5} and depends on k.

    The fourth one seems quite bizarre and unintuitive, but when you prove it, you see why it must be so. That then leads on to showing why that sort of phenomenon doesn't happen for any other decimal numeral. But when we consider expressions in other bases (eg base-8, base-12) we find that there are conditions where a similar phenomenon appears.
  • Three Bad Ways Of Replying
    1. A reply which doesn't make proper use of the quote function. — S
    That is not always possible. The quote function on this platform is unreliable and intermittently fails in some combinations of browsers and operating systems.

    So one cannot know, when looking at a post that does not quote correctly, whether it was because of a knowledge failure or a system failure. Since charity is an important principle in philosophy, I default to assuming the latter.
  • The virtue of diversity; the virtue of the oppressed.
    It's not just a cloak for racism, it's that and also a legitimate nativism. — unenlightened
    I feel that if the nativism is applied selectively then it is nativism mixed with bigotry. Arguing against myself, I concede that a dark skin is the most easily detected indicator of not being indigenous in Wales. An accent is another easy indicator. If the author was raised in India, I presume she has an accent that is easily identified as non-welsh. My first wondering from that is whether equal discrimination would be applied against a white person with an RP voice, a cockney or a scouser. Possibly it would be. I have heard tales of Welsh having resentment against English visitors, especially when they are only there for long weekends and holidays, in their seaside cottage that is empty the rest of the time.

    What about surnames though, of somebody whose family has been in Wales for a few generations? Would the Llewellyns, Evans and Cadwalladers be as suspicious of a white person with a strong welsh accent and surname Bentley as they would of a dark-skinned person with a strong welsh accent and surname Kaur?
  • The virtue of diversity; the virtue of the oppressed.
    I made a positive comment about people striving worthily to maintain their rich cultural tradition. I utterly repudiate the implication that such striving has anything to do with land claims and race.
  • Is Objectivism a good or bad philosophy? Why?
    It seems like a moral obligation to oppose ideas like Rand's and AppLeo's. — Bitter Crank
    I think the occasional Randians that turn up here do us all a great service. It provides a rare topic on which people that have been having blazing rows about other issues like abortion, materialism or proper nouns, can all agree and recover some of the mutual warmth that may have been lost in those other theatres.

    Blessed be the peacemakers!
  • The virtue of diversity; the virtue of the oppressed.
    Here, unquestionably, is an immigrant having problems with natives and native government. — unenlightened
    That reminded me of the TV series The Indian Doctor, which I greatly enjoyed. I expect you've seen it. I thought it portrayed the issues involved in a thoughtful and sensitive way. It was also interesting to see Sanjeev Bhaskar play a non-comedic role (I'd only seen him in The Kumars before that).

    My feeling about that article is that it is reasonable for the Welsh government to privilege people who have made the effort to learn Welsh. But they need to apply that distinction even-handedly. As long as a white Welsh person whose distant ancestors lived in Wales suffers the same discrimination for not speaking the language as a first generation Welsh person whose distant ancestors lived in India, that seems fair to me. From what the writer says, it sounds like that is not happening, and language skills are just being used as a cloak for racism. Unfortunately, that is the natural human condition, but we namby-pambies can nevertheless feel unconflicted in condemning it wherever we see it.
  • The virtue of diversity; the virtue of the oppressed.
    ↪unenlightened
    I'm not sure there is a tension here. The view that I understand to be seen as the progressive one on these issues is that:

    1. it is immoral to impose one's culture on another against their consent, unless it is known that their culture causes significant harm to those living there (and the lack of consent seems to be implied by the word 'impose')

    2. those of us that live in affluent societies have some degree of moral obligation to help those who are suffering in non-affluent societies, including refugees and asylum seekers.

    People will argue greatly about the extent of the obligation in 2 but it would be a rare person indeed that says we have no obligation to help any refugee or asylum seeker ever (eg I didn't see anybody saying nobody should help the Saudi girl whose passport was stolen by a Saudi diplomat while she was in transit at Bangkok airport).

    We note that 1 is an obligation on those that are seeking to enter the land of another tribe, while 2 is an obligation on those whose tribe-land some outsiders are seeking to enter. So the two cannot conflict. An analogy is to say that it is moral to share but it is immoral to force another to share by stealing from them. Most people would agree with that to some extent.

    Another difference is that the obligation in 2 is only on the affluent. We would not say that a country whose people are struggling to survive, like South Sudan, has an obligation to accept refugees from Syria, but many would say that OECD countries do. So again this appears to dispel any conflict, as the affluent are rarely in the position of having a culture imposed on them.
  • The virtue of diversity; the virtue of the oppressed.
    When people rise up to protect a cultural identity, that usually means that identity is headed for the identity-graveyard. — frank
    Your 'usually' may be correct. I don't know the statistics of the case. But there are some interesting examples in the opposite direction - the Jews and the French.

    I am pretty sure there are many more people in the world now that follow Jewish cultural practices than lived in the ancient kingdom of Judah before the diaspora with the Roman destruction of the temple, followed by marauding barbarians, crusades and so on. Cultural Jews seem to be very protective of their cultural identity, and it is flourishing. They have even revived a dead language (or close to dead) - Hebrew - and turned it into a fully alive one.

    The French are very protective of their language and, IIRC, even have a government department devoted to its defence against Anglicisation. From what I can see, this is very effective, with far fewer anglicised words in French French than in other European languages. An interesting comparison arises from comparing French French to Canadian French, with the latter using a great number of English/American words that French French do not use.
  • Quest: refute this conception of the world.
    I don't agree, and i don't share this methodological approach — auto to on
    Since you don't agree to the use of logic, there is nothing that can be discussed. I suspect this is not the best forum for you to find sympathetic ears for your beliefs.
  • Quest: refute this conception of the world.
    Using the term 'domain' would obscure the intention to establish the self-containment of totality. Ex. 'Now we claim that a domain exists and it then follows that this domain shall appear within itself'. This point would be invalid by only arguing from the notion of a domain. — auto to on
    Logic doesn't work like that. We are not allowed to use a name for a concept and then rely on it having all the properties and associations that it has in natural language. The only properties that a named thing has in logic are those that are given to it by formal axioms.

    If you want to make an argument using a class of things called 'domains', you need to start by laying out in a series of logical statements (axioms), all the properties you want that class of things to have. The next step is then to establish that one or thing has those properties - ie that domain(s) exist. You can do that by assertion in another axiom, or by deducing it from other axioms.
  • Is Objectivism a good or bad philosophy? Why?
    Isn't electricity made with coal anyway? — AppLeo
    Not necessarily. And for technical reasons, electric cars are much more amenable to being charged with electricity from renewable energy than most other electrically-powered devices.

    It is advisable to learn a little science or engineering before trying to build political arguments based on your preconceptions about them.
  • Is Objectivism a good or bad philosophy? Why?
    There are only individuals. And your life is determined by your own efforts and choices — AppLeo
    That tends to not work out so well when one has to move a sofa or a piano, let alone a household.
  • Quest: refute this conception of the world.
    ↪auto to on
    First note that:

    'Let the world (w) be defined as: the domain that contains all domains.'

    is not a definition. The use of the definite article at the beginning is itself an assertion of the existence of at least one entity that satisfies the condition that is the rest of the sentence.

    A proper definition would be:

    'A "world" is a domain that contains all domains.'

    You then need to define domain, and then try to prove that there exists at least one domain that is also a "world".

    Your proof uses the word "world" throughout, for multiple entities, where it appears you should be using domain. We can't be sure whether your result is valid until you fix up your definitions and the words used in the proof. But if the proof is invalid, it will probably be related to using the word "world" instead of "domain", and thereby obscuring missteps in the proof.

    It may help to know that it was shown in the early 20th century that any set theory that allows there to be a 'set of all sets' is inconsistent. So if your 'domains' are like sets, your theorem will probably be doomed to the same fate (that's one reason why it's crucial to define "domain").
  • How to start a philosophical discussion
    Discussion 2:

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4945/improving-ones-own-character

    Y: What are some coherent conceptions of character?
    Among conceptions of character where character is mutable and can change in a way that could be called an improvement, how is it done?

    So, again 2 questions. This by a first time poster. Welcome to the forum.     — Amity
    I am pretty confident that post is somebody's homework, and they were just trying to get somebody on the forum to do it for them. Note how it just has two questions, written in the way that homework questions usually are. It contains no thoughts, suggestions or anything to indicate that the poster has thought about or is even interested in the topic.

    If @Baden hadn't already closed the thread I would have reported the post.
  • Meinong's Jungle
    So, how is it that we can speak about stuff like Plato having a beard or Santa Claus existing on the North Pole? — Wallows
    I think "Plato's beard" is what we call a 'play on words' and fits in the same category as the joke

    "Q. What's the difference between a duck? A. One of its legs is both the same."
    or
    "More people have been to Russia than I have".

    The joke is that it sounds like it says something, but it doesn't say anything.

    On the contrary, "Santa Claus" is about a real thing, which is a story, and refers to a real feature of that story, which is one of its characters.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    Part of that critique claims that that is a sentence that nobody would ever use. That's clearly false. We're all using it. — creativesoul
    No.

    I claimed that nobody outside a philosophy of language discussion would be likely to use it. This is a philosophy of language discussion. Note also that nearly all instances of that word string in this thread are mentions not uses - a critical distinction in this subject area.

    You did not put forth an accurate representation of the position you're critiquing. — creativesoul
    That omission of the quotes on the second 'Nixon' has already been covered. Did you miss it? I said that my understanding of English usage is that quotes can be implied by the context in instances like that. If your experience leads you to conclude that is not common English usage, just mentally put quotes around the second 'Nixon', as that was my intent.
    Here's my problem though:

    You claimed that that did not make sense to you.
    ....
    How does one validly critique that which does not make sense to one?     — creativesoul
    Saying that something does not make sense is a critique. The aim of the 'to me' part is to leave an open mind for a response that is able to make sense of it by explaining it better. Such a response did not occur.
    I simply showed how careful punctuation can eliminate what otherwise looks like a contradiction. — creativesoul
    No you didn't. You showed how careful punctuation plus insertion of an extra word (the word was 'named') can eliminate what looks like a contradiction. Do you deny that the difference between the two sentences you wrote in that post is more than just punctuation?
  • Best arguments against suicide?
    ↪Wallows
    Here are two arguments that work for me:

    Firstly, my observation from various funerals I have seen is that there are often many people that love the deceased and are greatly saddened by their death. Some of them the deceased would have known about. Some are surprising. Call me an optimist but my impression is that, except in the case of outright bastards, there are generally more people that like and are positively affected by a person than they are aware of.

    Secondly, it is possible to do a lot of good in this life. If one has spare time, there are an abundance of volunteering opportunities in which one can make the lives of others better. If one has little free time but a steady income (most people have one or the other), one can give to causes that make a material difference to people's lives. Oxfam is an easy general one, but there are great niche ones too, like those that fund medical activities in developing countries to fix things like cataract or glaucoma blindness or fistulas. One doesn't need to give a lot to make a great deal of difference. For every year that one can put off one's demise, an awful lot of suffering of others can be prevented.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    You critiqued my punctuation of the same string of words. You charged me with slyness regarding this same string of words... — creativesoul
    I'm not sure what you're referring to here. My best guess is that it's my response to this:
    ↪creativesoul
    In that post you appeared to wrongly attribute to me the sentence 'Nixon might not have been Nixon' and mock it with an eye-roll icon. I asked you not to criticise me for things I didn't write. If I misunderstood your post and it was not intended for me then say so and I will gladly apologise.

    If you are referring to some other interaction then please provide a link and I'll have a look.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    ↪creativesoul
    You appear to be upset about something I didn't write - something like that nobody ever uses counterfactuals. I don't believe I ever wrote such a thing. If I did, it was by mistake and you'll be doing me a much-appreciated service if you can find it and point it out so that I can correct it.

    What I did say was that the meaning of a counterfactual is deeply dependent on context, which can be supplied either within the sentence or in the surrounding speech acts. Without that context, ambiguity reigns. 'Nixon might not have been named "Nixon" ' is a highly complex (because it involves a name that was not given to the individual in a naming ceremony) and contextless statement, of a type that I would be astonished to hear anybody say outside of a philosophy of language discussion.
  • Naming and Necessity, reading group?
    heard — andrewk
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