Show-Me the Argument

I’m wondering whether the following analysis of correct:

S’s utterance of the sentence ”x is gross” is true if and only if S has a disgusting feel upon considering x.

On this view, the truth value of grossness ascriptions is dependent on who makes them.  By “disgusting feel” I am refering to that feeling we are all aware of, the feeling you get when you think about, say, vomit.

Two other options:

1) grossness ascriptions have no truth value (and are just expressions of emotion akin to “boo” or “yay!”);

2) or grossness ascriptions have an objective truth value, i.e., the truth conditions for the ascriptions are invariant from speaker to speaker.

I think that the option expressed at the top is the best.  Any thoughts?

What is the truth value of “My avatar in Doom has hands”? The world of Doom seems pretty real when I’m playing it, but it only exists as pixels on the screen and bits in my computer’s memory. Yet including my avatar’s hands and other game-world objects in my ontology makes it easier to make predictions about what’s going to happen in the game world: “If I punch that zombie with my fist, it will kill him.” So would you say that my avatar has hands, or would you say that my avatar does not have hands? Or some Option C?

This post is primarily aimed towards those in the metaphysics seminar, but anybody’s comments are welcome.  Should realists believe that there are universals such as square circles?  Does anybody know what the main views are on this?

One afternoon in high school, I dropped my keys when unlocking my door. Let’s say that I don’t remember this and that nobody else was around to see it. It has no effect on my subconscious. It has no biological effect on me either, that is, it’s unlike dreamless sleep. This event has essentially no effect on how I acted after it happened. Is this particular experience important to my identity? If this event was somehow removed from my past, would I be the same person or would I be someone different?

Before answering these questions, we must realize that there are probably thousands of experiences like this that make up a large chronological part of our lives. Now let’s say that there was someone who was driving by at the time and saw me drop my keys and remembers it vividly for one reason or another. Even if I were to ask everyone who ever experienced any part of my life to put together the most detailed account of my life, there would clearly be some parts still missing. But then if my mother dies, a large number of experiences that I don’t remember and she does (changing my diaper, etc) would become unreachable.

If we did assume that events others remember which we do not are part of our identity (which is a fair assumption considering how much we don’t remember from our childhood), then would the saying “part of me died” when a person close to you dies be more accure than we think?

Are the following properties different?

1) the property being green

2) the property being green and being such that 1+1=2.

I’m wondering about the following argument given by Plantinga:

the truth of p and q is not sufficient for the truth of the counterfactual if p then q.  This is a point on which the usual (Lewisian, Stalnakerian) semantics for counterfactuals is inadequate.  Consider quantum effects: perhaps in fact the photon went through the right slit rather than the left; that is not enough to entail that if it had gone through either slit, it would have gone through the right.  I toss the die; it comes up 5.  That is not sufficient to entail that if I had tossed the die, it would have come up 5.  The truth of a counterfactual requires not just that p and -q be false in fact; it is also necessary that even if things had been moderately different, it still wouldn’t have been the case that p and -q.  To put it in familiar semantical terms, the counterfactual is true only if there is no sufficiently close possible world in which p is true but q is not.  How close is sufficiently close?  That is of course a question without an answer; counterfactuals are in this way quite properly vague. (Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology, pp. 328-329)

I remember reading this passage a few years ago and being convinced, but for some reason, when I read it now, it doesn’t strike me as true.  It seems that the truth of p and q is sufficient for the truth of if p were true, then q would be true, and Plantinga’s counterexamples don’t seem intuitive to me.  Any thoughts?

I hear there has been some recent debate among Show-me’rs about abstract objects. So, I thought I’d mention a few considerations that make me think they exist. (I realize that the following may not be knockdown arguments in favor of the existence of abstract objects, but I think that they provide evidence that there are such things.)

1. Numbers. How are we to think about numbers if we don’t believe in abstract objects? One approach is to simply claim that numbers, for instance ‘3′ is simply a collection of three concrete things. However, this seems unsatisfactory because what do we say about numbers that are larger than any collection of concrete things? Do we deny that these numbers exist? If so, who gets to break the bad news to the math department?

2. There is also the old ‘one over many’ consideration. Roughly, it seems that many different concrete particulars can have what appears to be the same nature. Thus, it seems that these objects share something that makes it the case that they all have the same nature–a property. It sure seems like red apples and red trucks have something in common.

3. What do we say about the following pair of sentences? a) ‘It’s raining’ b) ‘Es regnet’ How do we explain the fact that these two sentences have the same meaning, if we do not claim that they express the same proposition?

Thoughts?