My reading of what Wallows was asking is that he wanted to know what you meant by 'using proper nouns in possible world scenarios to place them under suspicion'. I too am curious to know what you meant by that.

I'm just happy to wait for the purported rebuttal(s) of the problem I had with the book when I read it as part of a course at Sydney Uni years ago. I read it then and found no cogent rebuttal. — Janus

Did you post that problem in this thread? If so, could you please link to it? I've only dipped in and out of this thread, so I didn't see it and, now that it's 17 pages, I have no hope of finding it.

I'm interested to see how much similarity there is to the problems I think I see in Kripke's analysis.

One could think it is permissible to kill a malevolent dictator to save and improve the lives of the people he oppresses — TheHedoMinimalist

Did the lives of Iraqis improve when they killed Saddam Hussein?

I voted Yes there are too many, not because I think there are too many religious topics, but rather that the ones being thrown up are vacuous, repetitive and uninteresting.

There are plenty of interesting topics to be discussed in the context of religion, covering things such as practice vs belief, the importance of myth, the compatibility or otherwise of mysticism and logic, similarities between different religions.

But nearly all of the posts about religion are just flogging the old dead horse of either trying to prove or disprove the 'existence of God' (whatever that means) or the correctness of any particular religion. Such topics just endlessly rehash tired old failed arguments, whether arguing for or against, without enlightening anybody.

Personally, I'd be in favour of a complete ban on any threads that purport to

• prove or disprove the 'existence of God', including all variants of that such as proving the existence of a 'first mover' or 'ultimate cause' or 'reason there is something rather than nothing'
• argue about whether morality is possible without a religious foundation
• argue that science <-> atheism
• argue that any particular religion is wrong or right

Doing that would clear the air for people that find religion philosophically interesting to discuss things that aren't just about trying to establish the superiority of one's own deeply held dogmas.

Do you mean intensionality?

Why?

It seems to me that to talk about intentionalities in the manner of being of greater significance/meaning than "what words can say" seems quite self-referential to me. — Wallows

Does intention need to be part of analysing the sentence? I feel I'm missing a link there somewhere.

I wonder about the self-referentiality. We know that a logical language cannot allow unrestricted reference to all its components because that allows the construction of Russell-type sentences that are syntactically valid yet lead to contradictions. So the language itself would be inconsistent. But it is not clear to me that such contradictions necessarily arise from allowing restricted reference to the language in which sentences are written. Consider for instance if there is a constant symbol in the language's alphabet that denotes the collection of all well-formed sentences that can be written in the language, but there are no symbols by which one can refer to truth or falsity of a sentence in the language. I cannot see how one would construct a Russell-type contradiction from that, yet perhaps it would allow expression of the sentence in the OP - assuming the language contains a grammar for expressing feelings, which seems a much harder ask regardless of self-referentiality.

I really don't know about expressing feelings in a formal language. For instance, does 'I love you more than words can say' really tell us anything? To me it seems to say there are no combinations of words I can say that could evoke in you the feeling that I am feeling - that would allow you to see that feeling. Could we not say the same about any feeling, ie any quale. Taking the usual example, we could say 'words cannot express to you the experience I have when I look at this piece of paper that we both say is "red" '. All it is doing is pointing at the incommunicability of qualia. If we accept that, is there any difference between the incommunicability of a powerful feeling like overpowering infatuation, and that of a banal feeling like looking at a piece of red paper? Perhaps both the statement about my love and the one about my experience of red are both just ordinary instances of the general statement 'qualia are incommunicable'.

Is it self-referential? — Wallows

No, because it is a statement of inequality, just like saying - 'I am taller than that anthill'. If it were a statement of equality it might be self-referential.

Another example might be 'I am heavier than this scale can measure'. It is not self-referential. It is really just saying something about the limitations of the scale.

Scale <-> words.

:up:

Let's answer one slogan with another:

If your worldview fits in a tweet, think harder!

[from a placard at an anti-hate rally several years ago, only 'in a tweet' was actually 'on a placard']

Anyway, Germany built only 22 A7V tanks and — ssu

That's a tank from the Great War. The OP reports the story as being from the Second War, in which there was a vastly greater number of German tanks. It is possible the OP misreported and the story was actually from the Great War.

It is possible that this thread has no philosophical content.
:razz:

I have no doubt that the rules of Go/chess are programmed into a Go/chess-learning AI. A specification of the rules is so tiny compared to the set of strategies the AI develops that the opportunity cost of specifying them is negligible, and the cost of not specifying them is wasting time in the search process in identifying rules that could have been known at the start.

No doubt an AI could learn most of the rules by observation (not all of them. There are some rules that are almost never used, such as changing a pawn into a bishop when it reaches the other end), but it would just waste processing time to make it do so rather than focusing on strategy and tactics.

Sure Western people dance alone. Here's a famous case:

The dharma wheel (dharmachakra):

Every moment must have a moment before it else its not valid. That's a self-evident axiom — Devans99

That helps to clarify where the differences lie between your position and that of others. That is a proposition that you regard as self-evident and that you take as an axiom. Others do not regard it as self-evident and do not accept it as an axiom. Unsurprisingly, different conclusions are reached depending on whether one accepts such an axiom.

I've moved this to the Lounge as there is no philosophy of mathematics in it. The thread is simply about a misunderstanding of the meaning of the limit operator, which the respondents have amply explained.

I'm not sure it's really all that important but at the most general level I use it to distinguish things from other things that are not physical. That is, I think it signifies what is material, made of stuff, has 3 or 4D extension, etc. — Mentalusion

An interesting discussion can be had in that direction, given wave-particle duality and that the closer we look at things, the more they are waves or fields rather than 'stuff'. But it's not that close to the issue under discussion so, on reflection, perhaps it's better left for another thread.

Where this came up was in discussing whether it is always meaningful to ask what is the meaning of a word, given that many words have multiple different possible meanings, and some have enormous numbers of meanings. This is recognised by some dictionaries that give a series of sample sentences containing a word, with the meanings of the sentences, rather than a meaning of the word on its own.

Now many words have only one possible meaning or referent and we can sensibly talk about that meaning or referent. But I don't see why we should invent hugely complex, metaphysically cumbersome theories like Kripke's just to deal with the fact that some words have no meanings or referents when considered in isolation.

My current opinion is that it is easy to explain the meaning of any sentence containing the word Pegasus, as long as it's a sentence that is likely to be said in ordinary conversation. And one doesn't need to load up on metaphysics or possible worlds semantics in order to do so.

Given enough context, we can say the same for Godel and Smith, another favourite example from N&N. In that case we need more than a sentence. We need to know what the speaker knows about Godel and Smith, in order to know shat she meant by her statement. But again, learning the context dissolves the problem. It just needs to be a somewhat bigger context.

That doesn't in any way imply that temperature itself is physical — Mentalusion

The word 'physical' often gets thrown around in philosophy, without it ever being made clear what it means. The word has a clear meaning in things like medicine (to distinguish from psychological) and finance (to distinguish from financial derivatives) and has a practical use in those disciplines. But I have yet to see either a clear meaning or a use for it in philosophy.

What does the word mean to you, in a philosophical context?

Or, to align with my general position that words on their own often have no meaning, what does the sentence 'Temperature is not physical' mean to you?

If an object does not exist at time=0, how can it exist at time=1? Thats a valid deduction. — Devans99

Really? What rule of inference does it use? Modus Ponens? Modus Tollens? Double negative elimination?

A deduction is a sequence in which each statement is justified in terms of earlier statements, or accepted axioms, via a rule of inference. There is no rule of logical inference that justifies the second and subsequent lines in either of those sequences you wrote in terms of any of the lines that go before them. Hence neither is a deduction.

Lining up a bunch of statements in a sequence and putting 'therefore' in front of all except the first does not turn it into a deduction.

Re, the last paragraph, does that simply sidestep the issues the correspondence theory of meaning has wrt. to empty names and instead advocate a contextualist/pragmatic approach to meaning? — Wallows

I think so. It finds them to be non-problems. The problem is 'dissolved', to use a popular, but not inappropriate, term.

I also don't think asking whether salt is hard is a category error. — Mentalusion

I didn't say it was. It is uncontroversial that 'salt', which in common parlance refers to a crystal of many millions of molecules, or a collection of such crystals, is hard. The category error is to ask whether a molecule of NaCl, or a molecule of any compound, is hard.

What is it about this experience which would warrant it being called a "direct experience"? You describe numerous past experiences These would be remembered and therefore not direct, at the time of creating the idea. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can drop the term 'direct' if that is seen as an obstacle. It does no work in the sentences where I used it. I suppose I may be guilty of tautology, as where somebody says "I'll meet you at nine am tomorrow morning".

What you wrote here are not deductions. The first is an analogy. The second is a non-sequiteur.

Did it just pop into existence, as something experienced, or does it rely on prior experiences? — Metaphysician Undiscovered

I would guess the latter. A person sees rocks on several occasions, notices the similarities, and forms an idea of a rock, say starting after the third or fourth sighting and solidifying at about the tenth sighting.

One can make those assertions, but one can't know them to be true or false without either observing whether they are the case, or making a deductive argument. I can't see how one would do either of those things without essentially assuming the conclusion.

Of course, one can hold an opinion that such things are true, or an opinion that such things are false, but there's not much discussion to be got out of a pure opinion.

I hope to be able to definitively answer the question in the OP before long. I have been busy in the important exercise of observing everything and identifying for every single thing whether it has a start.

When I am finished, I will post the result here, and then we'll finally know for good and all.

the argument that all ideas come from other ideas — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes I wouldn't support that argument. I think the notion is that ideas are either things we have directly experienced - like a colour - or a combination or relation between things we have experienced. With that approach the grounding that ends the regress is the ideas that have been directly experienced.

At first blush, such a perspective appears to downplay the significance of inventions that are considered epoch-making, such as the wheel or electricity. But on further reflection I find they remain just as impressive as before. The brilliance is in seeing a potential useful relationship between two or more things that were observed in completely different contexts and nobody had ever thought of as in any way related before.

For example, somebody has observed rocks rolling down a hill and people walking across the land and then had the brilliant idea that maybe we could use that rock-downhill type of motion (rolling) as a way to transport people and burdens - then voilà we have wheels and carts. Next they observe how strong oxen are and how much strength it takes for people to pull the new carts, and they get the idea of using the oxen to pull the cart.

Everything we imagine or generate in our minds is a product of an already existing element. — BrianW

David Hume made this argument in his Enquiry concerning human understanding', saying:

We shall always find, that every idea which we examine is copied from a similar impression. Those who would assert, that this position is not universally true nor without exception, have only one, and at that an easy method of refuting it; by producing that idea, which, in their opinion, is not derived from this source — David Hume

His notion was that every new idea is a connection between other ideas. eg a flying horse puts together the ideas of a bird and a horse. Strangely, he then went on to suggest that the notion of a 'missing colour blue' is an idea that is not just a connection between existing ideas. Nobody can work out why he did that, and personally I don't agree that it is a new idea.

with what Strawson wrote in his earlier essay Freedom and Resentment — SophistiCat

That was the other Strawson philosopher - Galen's Dad, Peter. :smile:

Asking what is the meaning of a word is in many cases a category error that arises from taking a concept to which the property 'has a meaning' is applicable, like a paragraph and sometimes a sentence, and then breaking that concept down to a level of granularity at which the property is no longer applicable.

For example, asking 'what is the meaning of the word "Pegasus"?' is like asking 'what is the hardness of a salt molecule?' (NaCl). A salt crystal has a measurable hardness, but a molecule does not, because hardness is a feature of how tightly molecules are bound together.

It is easy to infer an uncontroversial meaning for the statement 'Pegasus was white with grey dapples on the sides', in the context of a story involving Pegasus, or a class in which ancient myths are being discussed. Given that, trying to infer a meaning for the word 'Pegasus' in isolation is unnecessary, and also doomed to fail.

My e-book reader has a German-English dictionary with the unusual feature that for many words there is no direct definition given. Instead it gives a number of phrases that use the word, and the meanings of each phrase. It was disconcerting to use at first and took some getting used to. But now I see the point and I find it more helpful than the usual dictionary style.

I vote for 30X12 because then we could use those great old month names like Thermidor, Brumaire and Prairial. And I like the fact that the fact 30 doesn't divide into 365 is handled by a balancing minimonth of five or six days at the end of the year.

Sure the Terror was an awful time in history, but there were a few silver linings in it, one of which was the calendar.

Plus it goes beyond months. It has ten-week days, ten-hour days and 100-minute hours. How cool is that?

I watched the bit at 15 mins in the video where Feser talked about 'hierarchical ordering of causes'. The only thing I can infer from that is that either he never studied physics or he didn't understand it. He speaks of a cup on a table on Earth as being an ordered sequence of actualisers of potential - the Earth actualises the potential of the table to be where it is and the table actualises the potential of the cup to be where it is.

What he doesn't understand is that in physics there is no such ordering. It is a three-body problem in Statics. In such problems, every body in the problem depends on every other body in the problem. There is no ordering or hierarchy. Remove any one of the bodies and the equilibrium is disturbed so that all bodies move until they find a new equilibrium. So in his example, the cup actualises the potential of the table and the Earth to be where they are, just as much as the table actualises the potential of the cup. There can be no ordered sequence of causes.

What is ironic about this is that in a sense Feser, as a representative of the Roman Catholic orthodoxy, is less spiritual in regard to this example than is physics. The physical analysis, which is that 'everything depends on everything else' is essentially similar to the Mādhyamaka notion of Emptiness and Dependent Origination.

John Mill? I thought it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Supreme Court Justice in Schenck vs. United States — Bitter Crank

Aaarrgh! You are right.

Let this be my first public apology of the day. And it's not yet noon here.

I think specific examples are needed to be able to take this further. I get the impression that you have certain cases in mind where discussion has been stifled, or somebody that challenged the consensus view was shouted down. But I don't know what those cases are, and the specifics matter so much that one can't really talk general principles.

Let me try an example of a case that I see. It used to be the medical consensus as well as the widespread common opinion that homosexuality was a mental illness, and that it could potentially be 'cured'. We have learned so much about this over the last fifty years, that hardly anybody holds that view any more and it is thoroughly rejected by all psychological and medical peak bodies. If anybody publicly argues that homosexuality is a mental illness in a developed country, they will most likely be roundly condemned.

Is that a good thing? I think it is. And the same applies to denial of the Nazi genocide of Jews or claims that people of African descent are less intelligent than those of European descent. While open public discussion is generally a good thing, we need to balance that against the harm that is done by publicly stating certain opinions. That does not mean one could not discuss those things privately, and I'm sure most of the small group that hold such opinions do so amongst themselves. To expand on JS Mill's example of free speech, it's the difference between shouting 'Fire' in a crowded theatre and quietly asking one's neighbour 'Do you smell smoke?'.

Let's bear in mind that the penalty for claiming that homosexual people are mentally ill is not burning at the stake, or even imprisonment. It is just social condemnation, and free speech principles are about legal punishment, not social condemnation. I would strongly oppose laws to criminalise denial of the the Nazi genocide despite my detestation of such denial, and most countries seem to share that opinion. Germany is a special case, for powerful historical reasons and, while I think their criminalisation of public denialism is unfortunate, I can understand why they consider it necessary.

Those three examples are easy cases. There are more difficult ones, of which I think abortion and marriage equality are examples. In both cases, some (not all!) activists on one side often portray those on the other as inhuman, hateful monsters. I think it is profoundly unhelpful to call opponents of marriage equality homophobic, or opponents of abortion on demand misogynistic. But human nature being what it is, that unfortunately happens in debates that people care so deeply about.

One thing philosophers can do is provide an example of the right way to publicly discuss these things. I particularly admire the way Peter Singer argues for abortion on demand calmly, rationally and compassionately, without demonising those that disagree with him, and despite the fact that those same people often demonise him, calling him a Nazi, a child-killer and worse. And I believe there are Christian philosophers on the other side of the debate that do the same (there's a name of one on the tip of my tongue, but it eludes me at present).

The key difference is that one is a person, that many schools of philosophy (eg Kant) say is deserving of respect and fair treatment, no matter what they have done, and the other is an idea, which most people would feel has no such right.

The two can come together if what you are thinking of defending in the second case is not an idea but somebody that has been vilified for supporting the idea. But in that case you don't need to support the idea. You could defend the person by pointing out that in other aspects of their life they are very kind, or that they had an unhappy childhood and that may be why they have adopted such a toxic idea.

It's a bit like the old Catholic maxim - Hate the sin, not the sinner. Only here it's Hate the idea, not its proponent.

The diagram seems to say something disturbing about road rules in the US and how inimical to pedestrians they are.

Where I live, the speed limit near a pedestrian crossing is 40 kph. Car-pedestrian collisions are usually not fatal at that speed, as well as being much less likely. A car travelling at 40kph could stop before the crossing given the distance to the crossing that is shown in the diagram. Most pedestrian fatalities in my state occur from drivers disobeying road rules, whether it be speed limits, stop signs, give way requirements, using phones while driving or drink-driving.

A car that is not being driven too fast for the conditions can stop pretty quickly. If it can't, it must be so close to the obstacle that the time before collision is likely to also to be too short for identifying the nature of the obstacle, of potential obstacles in avoidance routes and then evaluating the significance of different alternative routes.

It seems to me that these dilemmas are mostly relevant in countries that don't have much in their road rules to protect vulnerable road users.

The solution to the problem is to have electoral processes and boundary-drawing controlled by an independent commission. In Australia that is done by the Australian Electoral Commission, for which the senior officers have long-term appointments and generally see several changes of government.
Having it controlled by the very people that stand to benefit by misuse of the power is a recipe for disaster, and that's what happens.

Apparently Democrats do gerrymander as well when they can - the 3rd district of Maryland being the most bizarre example. But most suppression of democracy seems to come from the Republican side.

Is there any prospect of the US parties ever agreeing to set up an independent electoral commission, to prevent either side doing this? Or is that yet another problem the poor country is stuck with via its 200+ year old constitution that seems almost impossible to change these days.