Stephen Everson

Something like that; though not so normative that deformed or mal-functioning parts won’t count as parts. And we don’t want it, I think, so that any cell with DNA damage is thereby not a cell of the body.

What makes the tumour interesting is that it’s alive not dead and requires some ordinary functioning of the body (e.g. the circulation of the blood) to survive.

What an interesting context that had.

An interesting less obvious case might be a tumour.

The s-d of parthood is particularly obvious in the case of events: not every event that occurs on the pitch during a football match is a part of the match. But once stated, it’s pretty obvious in the case of substances too, I think. If I swallow a marble it doesn’t thereby become a part of my body.

And they often raise particularly sharply the question of when it is appropriate to think that the diversity is one of conception or concept. But even thinking through the considerations one would appeal to in addressing that sort of question can deepen one’s grasp of the concept in question.

Inevitably the theorist has to decide whether differing conceptions are so different that they’re not of the same concept). That’s not yet, though, to allow that the concept itself is idiosyncratic—but even it were, that wouldn’t make grasping it less fruitful in knowing truths.

I can see how people might well differ in their conceptions of some concept and at least some of those might be idiosyncratic (though, that a concept allows a particular idiosyncratic conception of it might well help us in clarifying our understanding of it.

Go back to experimenting on oneself (and maybe one’s interlocutors), I guess.

The right response, I think, is to accept with Wiggins that identity claims are sortal-dependent (*not* sortal-relative, of course) and to supplement with a principle that parthood is also sortal-dependent. Not everything that is contained within a substance’s borders is a material part of it.

(Provoked, that is, into reflection, not provoked into disagreement)

In so far as to say that one doubts something is to express suspicion that it’s false, that word seem to allow that whether doubting that p is warranted is independent of whether p turns out false.

There is a sense of ‘doubt’ where to doubt whether p is just to suspend belief whether p, but I suspect that’s probably an after-effect of Descartes and restricted to philosophical contexts rather than a feature of ordinary talk.

Yes. I confess that, having been provoked by your original post, the more I thought about it the less secure my grasp on what is expressed by an expression of doubt.

But I don't see anything is _required_ other than the candidates of p and not-p.

I suspect that where one thinks it's more or even as likely that she's flying than that she's drunk, it's more natural to use 'that' than 'whether'.

That seems to me to build too much in. Certainly, one could suggest different things by saying of someone that one doubts that she's drunk depending on context/shared knowledge between speaker and audience/even intonation. ('I doubt that she's *drunk*' vs 'I doubt that *she's* drunk')

Say a little more about what you have in mind by ‘a candidate proposition’.

The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care? The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight
www.cityam.com/the-british-...

So, if I believe that not-p and say that I doubt that p, is what I say false or merely misleading in its implicature?

My intuition that it would be false to say ‘I doubt whether p’ is firmer, since that suggests that I think the question ‘Is it the case that p?’ is still open.

Is there any difference between doubting that p and doubting whether p?

Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats The thermostats may no longer connect to Google’s app, but they still transmit your data.

Google stopped letting owners of early Nest themostats remotely control their devices last month. But it's still remotely collecting extensive surveillance data from them: https://www.theverge.com/news/820600/google-nest-learning-thermostat-downgraded-data-collection #privacy

Very much worth posting here too, since this is something the liberal members of Bluesky should be very uncomfortable about.

(I hope @leonidragozin.bsky.social will not mind my doing so.)

Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy.

Onassis?

My sense is that if one allows third-person, (or perhaps, if this is different, impersonal) imperatives at all, one’s probably already taking a stand with e.g. McDowell against a Gricean communication-intentions account of meaning.

I guess one difficulty is that it’s not obvious what the communicative intent of uttering it is. If it were straightforwardly a command, then that would be a good reason to find an imperative; as it is, both the mood and the syntax are up in the air.

Is the speech-act of uttering ‘Let justice be done’ an impersonal command? Would that, then, be the right way to understand that of uttering ‘Free X’?

The Blast Radius of Jeff Epstein Larry Summers controlled two Presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and organizes economists and oligarchs. Joe Biden talked to him all the time. And now he's in a serious scandal. Or is he?

1/2 Matt Stoller's devastating take-down of "The single most important neoliberal thinker of the last forty years - economist Larry Summers - had an extensive and deep political and personal relationship with Epstein".

open.substack.com/pub/mattstol...