Unanswered Questions
2,995 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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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 ...
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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 '...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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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, ...
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6
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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 ...
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2
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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
- 2,772
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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, "...
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What's wrong with aretaic consequentialism?
What problems does it face, either as a classification of Buddhism or as meta ethical theory in general?
Another approach [to how to classify Buddhist ethics] is aretaic consequentialism, an indirect ...
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Does being able to remember conscious experience mean consciousness cannot be an epiphenomenon?
It has been proposed (or maybe just speculated) by a number of philosophers and scientists, including Richard Dawkins, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon, but I think this cannot be the case....
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Who has linked the analysis of modernism or post modernism to Lacan's four discourses?
Who has linked the analysis of modernism or post modernism to Lacan's four discourses?
I mean obviously there's some kinda link between the master's discourse and at least some forms of modernism. I'...
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Does Alvin Plantinga's book Knowledge and Christian Belief offer any substantial updates to Warranted Christian Belief?
The stated primary goal of Plantinga's Knowledge and Christian Belief (2015) was to condense the content of Warranted Christian Belief (2000) into a shorter and more accessible book.
My question is ...
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Malthus's argument on population - Test 1, Q14, by Mark Shepherd
I took a practice test for a law exam and am having difficulty with understanding the logic behind a question. Apologies for the length, but I included the whole question and details for completeness.
...
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Per Kant's theory of radical evil/religion, is belief in individual saviors the result of a corrupt subconscious process?
Early enough on in the Religion, he does say:
Now there appeared at a certain time among these very people, when they were feeling in full measure all the ills of an hierarchical constitution, and ...
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43
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Does direct realism rely on colour realism?
It seems to me that, to avoid the idea that the 'colouring' of the data one receives is in the mental representation of it, one would have to say that colours exist in the real world, so the data is ...
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Does second order integrity matter?
I was googling/thinking about 'integrity', and wondered if, similar to second order desires, when one desires that one desires certain goods, and second order virtue, abstract concepts of e.g. ...
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Has anyone ever studied which proof types are feasible for which theorems in mathematics? If not, why not?
For instance, when asked to prove that sqrt(2) is irrational, we go straight for the proof by contradiction where we assume it’s equal to a/b in lowest terms and end up with a and b not being in ...
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54
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Alternatives to a Philosophy degree?
I am interested in Mathematics and Philosophy but I am unable to pursue a philosophical education. I would like to not only learn basic philosophy and logic but to also be able to put it on a resume ...
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What is the first recorded use of the conditional form in human history?
The conditional form, ⟨ IF ϕ, THEN ψ ⟩, seems to have always been with us, but we don't really know.
So, what is the first attested use of the conditional form in human history?
Thank you for any ...
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Does hylomorphism have anything to do with the extremely broad use of "form" in scholasticism?
Introductions to the Aristotelian concept of form always begin with hylomorphism: everyday objects (like horses) are composed of matter and form. The form is the intelligibility of the thing (e.g., ...
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Contradictory unprovable statements in Tarski's "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages"
In Tarski's "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages", he glosses over the proof of a difficult lemma. I am looking for help writing a proof of it. In Tarski's notation, it is:
In ...
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43
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Would an erotetic operator be equivalent to its own demi-operator?
"Recap": demi-operations are e.g. "the square root of negation" in experimental(?) logic. (The association of demi-negation with using imaginary numbers as truth values is a little ...
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Position on postmodern philosophy in modern society
Let's say, there's some author. Baudrillard or Deleuze or whatever. A lot of people read them. Some of them more or less can understand what they write about.
And there's a university system that ...
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"Ought" as different from "must," and/or, "Why is there no deontic counterpart of the actuality operator?"
In the SEP article on deontic logic, they say:
Another way to put this is that the “can” of permissibility seems to be the dual of “must” not the dual of “ought”. This yields a dilemma: either ...
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How can Weber's approach be compatible with evolutionism?
Weber's epistemology is synthesized in one paragraph in Economy and Society (1921):
Sociology (in the sense in which this-highly ambiguous word is used here) is a science concerning itself with the ...
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Symmetrical patterns of supervenience?
Given all the dualities (c.f. the IEP entry on duality in language and logic) and symmetries and so on that feature in these meta/physical pictures that are prominent both historically and in the ...
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Is gratitude intentional?
Does gratitude always have an intentional object? I am often grateful for something, e.g. for a good meal or a sunset, but I think I know there's some debate about whether e.g. pain has an intentional ...
- 1,671
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Philosophy of Action 101
I am looking for a concise introductory work to the philosophy of action, to use as a background text from which to start for a work in the field of social sciences.
After extense review, I haven't ...
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Is Aquinas's "act is the principle of action" a tautology?
In Summa Contra Gentiles II.6.7, Aquinas suddenly claims that "act is the principle of action" (actus autem actionis principium est).
Is this phrase supposed to be a definition of act? Or a ...
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What does it mean to say that two theorems (provable statements) are 'equivalent'?
sometimes one sees/reads assertions such as "[the bounded inverse theorem] is equivalent to both the open mapping theorem and the closed graph theorem", but taken formally and literally this ...
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Problem of Induction in Methodology of History?
Has there been any work done in exploring how the problem of induction applies to the study of history?
It seems to me that many historical inferences might require a sort of uniformity of human/...
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52
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Is emergent property basically a subsystem?
I've been thinking about the relationships between systems, subsystems, and emergent properties, and I would appreciate your insights on this concept.
My notion is that subsystems can be viewed not ...
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How much philosophy is about terminology and human conceptions?
I see a lot of sentences like "If a tree fell and nobody hears it did it really fall", or many questions related to infinity. But each of this questions can be true or false according to ...
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Why do particles need a signal to travel to another to affect it?
I was reading up on quantum entanglement, non locality, and how people interpret QM to still be local in the sense that it does not allow for faster than light communication signals.
I have two ...
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A confliction on Univocity of Being by Deleuze between DR and LS
In Logic of Sense, Deleuze asserted:
Neither active or passive, univocal being is neutral.
But in Difference and Repetition,(LS,180) he puts advance of spinoza than Scotus as:
Instead of ...
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How do panpsychists explain death?
If mindlike features are a fundamental part of reality, what exactly happens during death? What exactly is changing at death?
From a physical perspective, we know what changes after death. We know ...
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Does Kant anywhere "rationalize" noumena on, say, moral grounds?
I ask in the context of reading various "new realists" or "objective oriented ontologists”. To my reading, many of these thinkers would like to return to Kant's attempt to unify both ...
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Is it even possible to know, from the outside, whether a physical system is conscious?
I take it for granted that other humans, and other higher animals like chimpanzees and dogs and cats, are conscious. But is it even possible to know, from the outside, whether a physical system is ...
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Is the conceptual possibility of amorphous infinite sets "evidence against" countabilism?
Countabilism is, roughly, a family of standpoints inclusive of:
There is one infinite proper set, of size ℵ0, and one infinite proper class, ℵ0ℵ0. (See about e.g. "pocket-sized" and ...
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Positive well-being or the absence of values: does it matter what to choose?
In his paper, “If Nothing Matters” (2016), Guy Kahane discusses evaluative nihilism, which is plainly described by him as:
“Nothing is good or bad. All evaluative propositions are false.”
Prof. ...
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Can there be nested possible worlds semantics?
Fairly straightforward question, I'd think: Usually, when we do Modal Logic, we think of propositions as sort of embedded within a framework of possible worlds. What, then, do we make of propositions ...
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Divine impassibility + divine simplicity = strong impassibility?
(In theory, this is a denomination- or even religion-neutral question about the concept of a divine being. We take properties (like omniscience or having avatars) or hyperproperties (like aseity or ...
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The problem of iterative skepticism
I mean the following tactics:
Christina: "There is a tree outside in the garden."
René: "I grant that this might be right, and even that your sensory information would justify your ...
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Does the anticlass principle solve the Burali-Forti problem?
Justification of the foundations-of-mathematics tag: I was reading through a long text on category theory, Abstract and Concrete Categories: The Joy of Cats, and they make much of the class/set ...
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Is Presentism or Four Dimensionalism compatible with being a conscious observer?
The most striking feature of our experience is the way that it is present simultaneously and persists over short intervals of time.
If we ignore illusionism how might our experience be explained by ...
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Can erotetic logic be used to devise a noncognitivist moral realism?
The IEP article on moral realism says that noncognitivist realism is logically possible, but goes on to assess the one attempt at such a position (Bruce Waller's) thusly:
Waller’s divide-and-conquer ...
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