board77

That is NOT true! We ARE VERY IRONIC!!

And I know plenty of Americans who enjoy sitcoms with African American characters.

What's the big deal? Why shouldn't people be allowed to do what they want? Why should we allow doctors to make the decisions for us?

Give her the info. If the mother wants the man, then fine. If not, then fine. It's the doctor's job to put up with whatever she decides.

I think many people choose sex as "offensive" because, of all the options, it's the one that hits closest to reality for kids and the choices they face. Most kids can distinguish fiction from reality by the time they're in their teens, so a severed head in a video game might not raise the ...

It matters whether we think of deconstruction as necessitating social action or whether we think of it as simply implicating social action. Right. I would say it’s the latter and not the former. It doesn’t necessitate any particular social action. But it does argue for a change in the way we think ...

Axordil, thanks for that article... very interesting. Criticizing something because it is socially constructed (and thus making the political turn) is what Judith Butler and Joan Scott are in danger of doing when they explain that deconstruction “is not strictly speaking a position, but rather a cri...

Mathematics is different from science, so I'm not sure the Kuhnian idea of paradigms quite works here. Math does not involve models of empirical phenomena. It's a language which is developed, well, analytically, so to speak. Wittgenstein said it was all one big tautology. Applications of mathematics...

Iavas, are you saying that no one should study this because it lacks importance in some general sense, or that no particular scientist should have to study it? I think I said earlier that it was worth having the discussion on the grounds that humans naturally want to explore every avenue available ...

One of the main problems with any deterministic argument is that we simply don't know the structure or nature of causality itself. Causality IS one of those pesky rational models Jnyusa and I are talking about.

This may seem like reaching a bit... but I tend to think that the terms "empirical" and "rational" are artificialities. I mean, if you look at the history of science, rational models like heliocentrism ultimately aid in giving rise to new paradigmatic shifts which give us in turn...

Ok, this is a bit random since my head is a little cloudy yesterday and today... but here goes. I’m always wanting to ask in which sort of argument would a particular abstraction be fruitful to the advancement of the argument. Yes, or, I think, in what type of thinking would a particular method be u...

Ok, fair enough for poetry I suppose. I guess I should have asked you to explain your view a bit first. I am also thinking of self-knowledge in the most general sense, and how an interpretation of our existence and of being generally may be seen to hinge on an understanding of that whose structure i...

You do not draw in anything beyond your five senses. But you can still arrive in the same place. And there is a limit built straight into science. Because you're limited to your senses, anything beyond that is non-detectable and therefore outside consideration. I’m not understanding why Jnyusa agre...

jadeval, I apologise but I do not see the use of answering your questions - I don't think a competent scientist needs philosophy (of the type you are preaching) to understand their profession, and that isn't going to change. All I want to know is why you think philosophy of this kind is a waste of ...

Let's put it this way. Why do you say philosophical thinking is a waste of time? Why a mistake? In order to say that it is a waste of time, you must have some criteria in mind by which you judge it a "waste of time". Now what is this criteria which you have?

Oh, and I do think, contra Axordil, that other kinds of understanding are communicable and open to validation. This is the general problem of dialogue and reason. Science is not reason.

Do we really have students spending years on this stuff instead of doing some real science? Um, yes. It's called the philosophy of science.... brought to you in its various forms by such humble intellects as Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, etc. etc. Just a few people who, oh I don't know, wanted to kno...

It seems to me that there is a tendency to gather any old kind of material observation under the rubric of empiricism, but I don't understand empiricism nearly so broadly as that. "Observation of the material world" as an explanation of how we know seems to me tautological in this context...

That kinda reminds me of that old thinking along the lines of, hey, when you leave a piece of meat out for a while, maggots start coming out. That must mean maggots come from old meat... (I'm not sure if I'm remembering that old legend right but regardless the logic sounds awfully similar to me.) Y...

It's far from a non sequitur. It's a moment of knot-cutting worthy of Alexander. The problem with philosophy, if I may generalize (and why the hell not, everyone else here is) is that it tends to operate under the assumption that since ideas are unchanging, the things they refer to are as well. Um,...

And why not? What about consciousness makes it different? The only thing I see that makes it different from any other purely material phenomenon/epiphenomenon is that unlike something like, say, lightning, or erosion, or continental drift, there's good reason to believe it's fairly recent in origin...