Conversation

Coming back to the main question, I'm not sure I see why God could not fully specify cottage cheese. It would seem that God's defining characteristic is being unlimited in precisely this way (omnipotence and omniscience means God has all of the data and infinite computing power).
1
Well, there are many people who you’d say “I guess he’s bald-*ish*” or “somewhat bald” or something. There’s a “gray area.” This is not a matter of incomplete knowledge; you could inspect him as closely as you like and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s in the world, not map.
2
2
I am very sympathetic to that position. Pinker has an even more solipsistic version, reducing ontology to evolved linguistic convention. What gives me pause is the existence of sharp-edged things like fundamental constants that don’t seem to be a matter of adaptive efficiency
2
3
Think David C would say ontological nebulosity needn't be true of fundamental physics to be true of the eggplant-sized world. So not "mere" convention, but we get at these sharp ontologies through evolved faculties meant for eggplant-sized world.
2
3
Show replies
In that case, since the boundaries among those 3 things are themselves nebulous, I think you need an argument as to why culture exists as an independent nebulous phenomenological domain at all, distinct from language-as-social-biological-instinct.
1
1
Show replies