Unanswered Questions
3,006 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
12
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How does Quine effectively shift from points he has made about knowledge acquisition to conclusions he makes about knowledge simpliciter?
Quine propagated forward an approach to epistemology wherein there was no need of any sort of justification "beyond observation and the hypothetico-deductive method" (Quine 1981).
Quine is going ...
9
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2
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198
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What is the philosophical meaning of the Curry-Howard correspondence?
I understand the Curry-Howard correspondence, and its usefulness, from a technical angle; but I don’t understand its philosophical implications.
For example, does the resulting conceptualization of '...
8
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1
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227
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Did any philosopher promote a “pure” pragmatic conception of truth?
William James often associated truth with usefulness (utility), but overall his conception of truth was not pure in this regard. It shares some elements of the correspondence and coherence theory. For ...
6
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60
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Can Balaguer’s argument we don’t, and couldn’t, have any good argument for Platonism or ficitonalism in math extend to realism/antirealism in general?
Mark Balaguer is a philosopher who advances the position there is one form of mathematical Platonism, that every consistent mathematical object exists, and one form of anti Platonism, ficitonalism. ...
6
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The different Egos in Husserl's Cartesian Meditations
So I thought I had understood the different 'Egos', mainly the distinction between the psychological and transcendental Ego, in the text. But throughout meditation 2 it becomes a bit confusing to me, ...
6
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2
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258
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Who, if anyone did say it, was the first to say that because no qualia exist it is meaningless to say what I call "red" could be what you call "blue"?
There's a famous question that asks whether two people who agree that they are seeing a red object might be seeing (in their respective subjective experiences) different colors. For example, one is ...
6
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2
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147
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Does Kant implicitly commit the paralogism of pure reason when saying that to have a representation it is necessary to accompany it with 'I think'?
In Caygill's Kant Dictionary entry of 'I Think' there is this part:
Kant further claims that 'I think' is the necessary vehicle/form/accompaniment of experience: to have a representation it is ...
6
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6
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Do percentages of negative things in a given sample matter more or less than the quantity of negative things?
Do percentages of negative things in a given sample matter more or less than the quantity of negative things? And is there a name for this concept? Is it some sort of fallacy to appeal to percentages?
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6
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1
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189
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Was there an influence of Schellings Naturphilosophie on Einstein?
Darrigol in Electrodynamics from Ampere to Einstein writes:
In Germany, a few marginal followers of Schellings Naturphilosophie criticised the general notion of fluids acting at a distance and ...
6
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0
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435
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How has Foucault Philosophy of Surveillance been critiqued?
One of the horrors of the communist police-states of Eastern Europe was the incredible amount of information that the police force kept on the general population. This was often not gathered just by ...
5
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Sheldrake's Fields as Formal Causes
Why do we not consider fields as formal causes, especially in light of Rupert Sheldrake's analysis of morphogenetic fields? How does Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation challenge our ...
5
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Is there any difference between abduction and induction in Bayesian terms?
In abduction we take some observations and try to find the hypothesis that best explains them.
In Bayesian terms this sounds like finding the Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimate. To a Bayesian, "...
5
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0
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108
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What is the formal name of this logical fallacy?
The fallacy goes like this.
The drunkard drinks a bottle of tequila with ice on Monday and gets drunk. The drunkard drinks a bottle of vodka with ice on Tuesday and gets drunk. The drunkard drinks a ...
5
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128
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Is Occam's razor a philosophical application of Occam's razor itself in epistemology? Is it a meta for itself?
I have to apologize for my title but this seems to me the only way I could have articulated this weird intuitive idea I had for the Occam's razor meta-analysis. Usually I tend to analyze things on the ...
5
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1
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Learning metaphysical truths by introspection
There might be many psychological benefits of meditation and other introspective habits. I'm looking for something different. What metaphysical facts can we discover by this process? How many of these ...