Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'The Evolution of Co-Operation' and 'Perceptual experience has conceptual content'

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5 ideas

13. Knowledge Criteria / B. Internal Justification / 4. Foundationalism / c. Empirical foundations
Sense experiences must have conceptual content, since they are possible reasons for judgements [Brewer,B]
     Full Idea: Given that sense experiential states do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content, ...where a mental state with conceptual content is one where the content is of a possible judgement by the subject.
     From: Bill Brewer (Perceptual experience has conceptual content [2005], I)
     A reaction: This is, I believe, wrong. Even complex observations, like a pool of blood, only become reasons when they have been interpreted. Otherwise they are just the raw ingredients of evidence. How could an uninterpreted red patch be a 'reason'?
23. Ethics / B. Contract Ethics / 8. Contract Strategies
Good strategies avoid conflict, respond to hostility, forgive, and are clear [Axelrod]
     Full Idea: Successful game strategies avoid unnecessary conflict, are provoked by an uncalled for defection, forgive after a provocation, and behave clearly so the other player can adapt.
     From: Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Co-Operation [1984], 1)
     A reaction: [compressed] Exactly what you would expect from a nice but successful school teacher. The strategies for success in these games is the same as the rules for educating a person into cooperative behaviour. TIT FOR TAT does all these.
When players don't meet again, defection is the best strategy [Axelrod]
     Full Idea: When players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy.
     From: Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Co-Operation [1984], 5)
     A reaction: This gives good grounds for any community's mistrust of transient strangers, such as tourists. And yet any sensible tourist will want communities to trust tourists, and will therefore behave in a reliable way.
25. Social Practice / E. Policies / 5. Education / b. Education principles
Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius]
     Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.
     From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078
     A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book.
27. Natural Reality / D. Time / 1. Nature of Time / d. Time as measure
Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus]
     Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness.
     From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42
     A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them.