How about in context:

Are you saying that he is arguing that the crisis of eighteenth-century science is the current state of affairs? (I don't claim to be able to make sense of that article, anyway.)

Before moving on, please answer my question: "[D]o you think that Chomsky intends his concept of 'world' to exclude some things which are actually the case?"

Let me emphasize: I am asking you what you believe to be his intent.

I don't know what Chomsky intends with his concept of 'world' since he doesn't seem to be talking about his concept of 'world' in that quote.

Edit: Unless his concept of 'world' is the same concept that is embedded in the intellectual crisis of 18th century science.

Um...let's try again. Do you think (you don't need certainty or full understanding to answer this) that Chomsky intends his concept of 'world' to exclude some things which are actually the case? (Edit - you also don't need to parse that paragraph to answer this.)

I do not know. There is nothing in that quote or anything that I've read (that I've understood) that indicates to me what his concept of 'world' is.

Edit: Let me word myself more strongly: I *CANNOT* know this about Chomsky unless you produce something in which he describes HIS concept of 'world.'

So your final answer is: you do not know whether Noam Chomsky intends his concept of 'world' to exclude some things which are the case. You just don't know. Final answer?

The part I excerpted is representative of his position, as far as I know. But that's not the main thing. The question is: do you THINK Noam Chomsky intends his concept of 'world' to exclude some things which are the case. Yes/No/Don't Know?

Ok, I wish you luck as you go to your students and receive them knowledge. I'm not going to bother with a pointless webster argument.

This thread was supposed to be about some perceived scientific value and the original claim that the "supernatural" was rejected a priori. I claimed the term "supernatural" is rejected because the term usually has no rigor. That is not an a priori rejection, it's simply a rejection based on a common refusal to operationalize the term into a format that can be applied in science.

It seems you claim this isn't true, it's just so that the term is magically invisible to anyone who does not accept it. Conveniently this ofcourse makes me unable to grasp this debate and thus also makes me unable to see what is correct. I guess that can only mean that you win.

I don't know. But if you want to insist that Chomsky would classify his own conception of 'world' as being mired in the "intellectual crisis of eighteenth-century science," it would cause me to doubt that you actually know what you're talking about. Maybe he does feel that way, but based on how he has framed his thoughts in that short paragraph, I would be very surprised.

That the term is without rigor is irrelevant. In science, there are plenty of effects with no clear cause, and we slap labels on them all the time in the absence of rigor. Take "placebo effect." There is a definite effect, but nobody can positively identify the cause. However, whatever that cause is *MUST* be natural by assumption.

Invisible? It depends on what you mean. In the sense of people in the conversation being physically or intellectually unable to understand the ideas in play, no.

But if you mean like this:

Then, yes.

What's interesting is that there's barely even a debate going on. Nobody is winning, and I don't think anybody is losing, either. Both sides have staked out territory that is more or less disjoint, and neither side is willing to engage the other on "enemy ground."

Not exactly. I don't think materialism is necessary, but in so far as we define something to exist, it has to be detectable or measurable by our mental faculties in some way, doesn't it? There must be some way to distinguish something that exists from nothing, it must have some kind of detectable property, no matter how it is detected.
What I'm claiming is that as soon as the people inside the room determined certain things about the telekinetic man based on his effects inside the room, they have essentially "observed" him and measured some of his properties. They would have "left the room", albeit indirectly.

I don't think we are even disagreeing really, just what you choose to define as supernatural, I would simply define as those parts of the natural that have not yet been observed and measured.

You wouldn't have to detect 'it', you would just have to be able to detect 'it's' effects.

No. In order to say "it" exists by observing its effects, there must be some detectable connection between between it and its effects, otherwise the conclusion that "it" exists is purely arbitrary and meaningless.

I can observe the effects of gravity, and then say that gravity is caused by an invisible, undetectable force called Gerald, but that doesn't actually mean anything. There's no difference between such a thing and nothing.

I'm really not sure what you're trying to assert here. A miracle, by definition, requires a superseding ONTO the material world. So if the supernatural just sits out there and does nothing at all, it's no miracle.

Good, now we're getting somewhere. The difficulty now lies in the fact that the telekinetic man is an agent, and has the ability to choose to act, or not to act. So if you observe him write a message with Scrabble tiles, there's no reason to think that he's going to be forced to write the same message again, or write messages with some regularity, or even to write ever again.

Using scientific methodology, the telekinetic man (which we presume to exist for the purpose of this analogy) exists outside of the things that are knowable.

It really depends on whether you view agency as natural or not. I think agency is outside of natural law, but a hardcore determinist would claim otherwise.

Sounds about right.

So the physical vs non-physical distinction is stuff around you vs stuff in your head?

B U L L S H I T, I have done everything to try to engage on your grounds.


And then a series of attempts to avoid conversation (on YOUR grounds - from the very beginning I said that I'm willing to listen and have been trying to listen to whatever it is that you have to say - which is apparently not very much at all) for 50+ posts.

You've never once claimed that an idea is non-physical even though I've asserted this several times. Therefore, I am assuming that you agree that an idea is a non-physical object. If you disagree with me, then make a positive case that ideas are physical objects.

There is no simple heuristic for determining whether any generic object is physical or non-physical. I have taken your adamant refusal to accept this claim as evidence that you're not interested in a conversation, but rather playing silly games.

Everything except actually engage in a conversation. If you want to do silly things like defining yourself out of the conversation at the first step, that's fine with me. I've given you ample opportunity to take a shot at understanding things from my perspective. I've offered several analogies and examples of why it is that you are not able to understand things unless you abandon certain ideas, I've laid out a philosophical analysis as to why it is that you're not going to be able to understand unless you abandon certain ideas. And I've explicitly named the ideas that you must drop.

There's simply nothing left.

This confirms your word game.

If that were truly your view (the world is what is) you would not be trapped in your model universe (modeled by what you see, smell, hear, etc.) but rather you would simply say that the universe is everything that is, which would *include* the stuff that you have no experience or knowledge about.

For example, if God exists, then He exists whether you know it or not, and then He is a part of the "universe" EVEN IF YOU CAN'T TELL HE'S THERE. It simply doesn't matter under the "Chomsky conception of world" (at least, as I understand Subfallen's expression of how Chomsky would conceptualize the world, under the assumption that Subfallen actually knows what he's talking about).

So by dancing around with your epistemological game ("you haven't defined anything because you haven't given me a scheme for determining whether a generic object is in the group or not"), you have revealed yourself to not be engaging the conversation.

If you really believed the Chomsky presentation, you would have taken Subfallen's tact of "everything is or nothing is" and the game of distinctions becomes utterly irrelevant. Quoting the Chomsky passage:

Do you notice the MUCH MORE helpless tone about actually being able to talk about reality? But instead, you take some sort of intellectually bold position of "these things are the universe."

All this continues to build confidence in the idea that you aren't engaged in conversation in any useful manner.

As far as I know scientific studies on placebo effect uses exactly the kind of parameter definition I was asking for earlier. You compare the group which receive medicine with the control group that receives no treatment and the control group that receives a placebo.

And certainly you can't in a proper study be confident enough that something is a placebo effect unless you operationalize the term to such a degree that you can strip away as many confounding variables as you can.

It's not enough that anything happens to a someone who receives no something in order to call it a placebo effect, and this is the kind of broad term for "supernatural" you and jib have been touting in this thread - and objections are met with accusations as to how I think, which are nonsense.

The simple baseline is this: The definitions offered for "supernatural" in this thread would make it impossible to determine if phenomena X was supernatural, natural or something else entirely.

I can't say it much clearer than that.

For the Nth time - I don't have a clear or even non-clear understanding of what (non)physical means. The idea thing is the first example I saw you give. Anything else?

I'm not trying to make cases for anything, I'm just trying to see what you've got to say first. Yet, you keep refusing doing that.

LOL, and immediately after I dropped my idea of what the universe is you refused to continue... Stop BS'ing. Please.

See above - I'm not interested in promoting my position (even though I've been forced to state it a couple of times), I'm trying to figure out yours.

I've stated that over and over again myself.

I really don't know why you're having such a hard time with this. This is what I mean that you (at least with your current conception) cannot understand unless you give up something.

Edit: "Placebo effect" was a phenomenon *BEFORE* it was labeled. People just started noticing this strange trend of people who received no actual medicine started getting better. It wasn't until *AFTER* the trend was observed in a broad number of settings that people started to pay attention to it. It's not as if someone defined the placebo effect first, and then went looking for it.

Now that it's been found, do they have a definition for it so we all don't have to wait until "the trend" ( the old name for it) pops out at us?

This is something that I do not know... if a particular study has a placebo effect, it can be pointed out. But I'm not sure whether *EVERY* study has a placebo effect. My understanding (which could be flawed) is that it shows up sometimes, and other times it doesn't (depending on the precise nature of the study). When it shows up, you can point at it and say "There it is!" When it doesn't show up, they don't go looking around for it.

Do random quantum effects fit the (unknown) definition of supernatural? They seem to fit the definition of the telekinetic man.