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To: CharlesWayneCT

If you're trying to make any sense you're failing miserably.


114 posted on 06/16/2006 4:34:24 AM PDT by shuckmaster (An oak tree is an acorns way of making more acorns)
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To: shuckmaster; ahayes; Liberal Classic
I shouldn't post to these threads in the middle of the night, I get to esoteric and apparently beyond the target audience.

If any of you care, and I'm sure you don't, check out this link: ŚaṃkaraÂ’s Principle and Two Ontomystical Arguments

Excerpt:
We thus have to characterize the sort of seeming to which the principle applies while avoiding the problem of possible misidentification of oneÂ’s experience. Consider another more difficult case. Suppose that it is an essential property of living elephants to be have heads, but that it appears to me that I am faced with a living headless elephant. If ŚaṃkaraÂ’s principle applies, it would follow that headless living elephants are possible, which is false. To take care of this, we introduce the more technical locution “really seems”. “An x really seems to s” is true if and only if s would be correctly identifying the content of a single phenomenal experience of hers if she were identifying it to be an x. In the case of the apparent perception of a living headless elephant, I am presumably misidentifying the object of my experience as an elephant, since anything that is living and headless cannot be an elephant and anything that appears living and headless should not be identified as an elephant. I am making a mistake about what it is that I seem to perceive. I should instead say “An elephant-like living headless animal really seems to me”, and of course an elephant-like living headless animal is possible.

136 posted on 06/16/2006 9:09:36 AM PDT by CharlesWayneCT
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