> What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples?
Good heavens, where to begin? Just about anything about natural language that came out of a philosophy department in the mid-80s. For that matter, a lot of what came out of CS departments in the mid-80s was bullshit too, but that's because people back then were basing their work on what turned out to be a false premise, that language and human reasoning could be effectively modeled by formal logic.
Two specific examples stick out in my memory as things that struck me as BS back in the day:
The second example is a whole book pointing out that the meaning of a sentence depends on the context in which it appears. Well, duh!
> Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.
One of my hobbies is studying points of view with which I radically disagree, so I've spent a fair bit of time talking to religious fundamentalists and young-earth creationists. A lot of their foundational rhetoric is philosophical. It's actually pretty impressive how much thought they've put into it. These people are wrong (IMHO obviously), but they're not stupid.
Good heavens, where to begin? Just about anything about natural language that came out of a philosophy department in the mid-80s. For that matter, a lot of what came out of CS departments in the mid-80s was bullshit too, but that's because people back then were basing their work on what turned out to be a false premise, that language and human reasoning could be effectively modeled by formal logic.
Two specific examples stick out in my memory as things that struck me as BS back in the day:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97809...
https://www.amazon.com/Situations-Attitudes-Jon-Barwise/dp/1...
The second example is a whole book pointing out that the meaning of a sentence depends on the context in which it appears. Well, duh!
> Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.
One of my hobbies is studying points of view with which I radically disagree, so I've spent a fair bit of time talking to religious fundamentalists and young-earth creationists. A lot of their foundational rhetoric is philosophical. It's actually pretty impressive how much thought they've put into it. These people are wrong (IMHO obviously), but they're not stupid.