Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.761

   He infers that Toscar’s word “water” is true of x if and only if x is twater and that when Toscar says, while pointing at a liquid in a glass, “That is water,” his utterance is true if and only if the liquid in the glass is twater. Putnam concludes that the truth conditions of Oscar’s and Toscar’s utterances of sentences containing the term “water” are not determined by their narrow psychological states. In a final step he argues that this was true even in 1750, before chemists on Earth or Twin Earth discovered the chemical structures of water and twater. Illusions of reference for general ter…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/content-externalism-and-skepticism.md

2. 02 · blog0.758

   It also supports (N): (N) It is necessary that if Oscar is thinking that water is wet, then one of the following must be the case: (i) water exists, or (ii) Oscar theorizes that H 2 O exists, or (iii) Oscar is part of a community of speakers some of whom theorize that H 2 O exists. (Brueckner 1992a: 116) The above argument for (N) relies on “the actual existence of water…in order to individuate the notions we cite in specifying the propositional attitudes” (Burge 1982: 97), however, and therefore does not establish or presuppose that CE conceptually implies (N) (Brueckner 1992a: 116). If the h…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/content-externalism-and-skepticism.md

3. 03 · blog0.758

   (C) implies that if water is an atomic natural kind concept, then (b) is true. But this does not show that one can know that (b) a priori. A holistic general content externalist who accepts (C) may reject the claim that one can know that (b) a priori if (as McLaughlin & Tye 1998: 311, argue) they can make sense of accepting i. We can know a priori that we have the concept of water, even if the concept of water is an atomic, natural kind concept, while rejecting ii. We can know a priori that the concept of water is an atomic natural kind concept. The key point is that on some holistic theories …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/content-externalism-and-skepticism.md

4. 04 · blog0.755

   As Jackson (1998, 112) puts the idea: If speakers can say what refers to what when various possible worlds are described to them, description theorists can identify the property associated in their [the speaker’s] minds with, for example, the word ‘water’: it is the disjunction of the properties that guide the speaker in each particular possible world when they say which stuff, if any, in each world counts as water. This disjunction is in their minds in the sense that they can deliver the answer for each possible world when it is described in sufficient detail, but it is implicit in the sense …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descriptions.md

5. 05 · blog0.752

   They decide to check with the airline agent. ( Ibid ., 58) Once again, contextualists claim that regarding the truth conditions of sentences using ‘know’ as context-dependent makes best sense of the flexibility in our “knowledge”-attributing behaviour. While, as we have seen, different specific versions of EC are possible, contextualists tend to agree that, in everyday cases, such as that just described, the increased practical importance of the subjects’ “getting it right” tends to raise the standards for the truth of a sentence of the form ‘ S knows that p ’. (Keep in mind, though, a point s…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/epistemic-contextualism.md

6. 06 · yt0.752

   But just so we can understand the consensus into which your discovery is trying to integrate, can you first tell us what we think we know about water and the points that those textbooks just fall short on explaining? Well, before we get into the fourth phase. >> Yeah, sure. So, so everybody knows that water has three phases, not four phases. Solid, liquid, and vapor. And that idea has persisted for so many years that we we take it as gospel. I mean you know water has three phases and because it has three phases particularly in biology um in which I'm well uh heavily im immersed um the as…

   yt/dOJt-wFNe3E-the-fourth-phase-of-water-gerald-pollack-phd-79/transcript.txt

7. 07 · blog0.750

   \(P\) determines \(Q\) iff: for a thing to be \(P\) is for it to be \(Q\), not simpliciter , but in a specific way. The parallel is useful in suggesting that determination is, like identity, a particularly intimate relation, in that determinable and determinate types and/or tokens may not be wholly distinct, and also in suggesting a modal treatment of determination. Hence just as the characterization of identity is illuminated by the following modal condition (stemming from the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals): (I) \(P\) is identical to \(Q\) only if: necessarily, for all \(x\)…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/determinables-and-determinates.md

8. 08 · blog0.749

   As a candidate for E, McKinsey may have had something like the following proposition in mind (from Brueckner 1992a: 112): (E1) Oscar inhabits an environment containing H 2 O and not XYZ. The problem with this candidate for E is that on a holistic theory of CE, as Burge explains, An individual or community might (logically speaking) have been wrong in thinking that there was such a thing as water. It is epistemically possible—it might have turned out—that contrary to an individual’s belief, water did not exist. (Burge 1982: 97) We may read “epistemically possible” here as “epistemically possibl…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/content-externalism-and-skepticism.md

9. 09 · blog0.748

   While the meaning of “water” is given by this reference-fixing description, and can be known a priori , the essence of water must be discovered empirically. The meaning of natural kind terms does not give the essence of the kind directly in the way it does with “bachelor” and “vixen”. One might think that 15a can be justified only empirically, but gemologists seem to think that it is conceptually necessary that rubies are red, that is, that the meaning of “ruby” requires that rubies be red. So given how gemologists use “ruby”, 15a is knowable a priori . The notion of a ruby seems to be a hybri…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/a-priori-justification-and-knowledge.md

10. 10 · blog0.743

    That is, can either model plausibly extend to other sorts of referential terms, beyond just names?” To answer this question, and ultimately to introduce a third distinct model of linguistic reference, we turn now to the indexicals: words like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘this’, and ‘that’. As we will soon see, it is hardly clear that all indexicals refer in the same way. In particular, a distinction has often been drawn between what are called ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ indexicals, with rather different theories of reference being offered for each. The challenges that arise in trying to o…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/reference.md