ppi 3

time for another post on possible post/paper ideas

• standardized measurement. what kind of metaphysical properties do standardized measurements have? is a meter stick a meter long? what kind of symbol does 'yard' entail? what about yardsticks? in these matters i'll be consulting kripke's "wittgenstien on rules and private language", wittgenstein's "philosophical investigations" and peirce's collected papers. (tags: philosophy, metaphysics, language, wittgenstein, peirce).
  
• objecthood and neo-meinongianism. is it plausible to posit non-existent objects in order to solve certain linguistic puzzles? that's to say, "unicorns have one horn" and "unicorns do not exist" are both true sentences? but even if we do this, it seems that we then have to turn to the problem of objecthood. is there a to clearly define some necessary and sufficient conditions for what it takes to be an object? and if so, what are they? or what might they look like? and what do do with this apparently adverse reaction from people with metaphysical distrust? (tags: philosophy, metaphysics, metaontology, language).
  
• evolutionary ethics. i should write a post in the metaethical strain as i did once and begin to lay some groundwork for an evolutionary constructive ethics. (tags: philosophy, metaethics, ethics).
  
• ethics case studies. i've been thinking about evaluating certain issues in terms of their ethical consequences. case studies might include plagiarism and/or intellectual copyright, sports and/or steroid use, etc. (tags: ethics, applied).
• existence as property. this post, if distinct from the neo-meinongianism post, would be very similar. but this post or paper would be evaluating the strictly logical thesis of getting rid of existence as an quantifier in first order logic. existence would instead be just another property. how feasible is this, and how much logic can stand without it? what, if anything, would go in its place? this post is very related to non-existent objects "being". and could branch out to very similar topics in reference and even modality (what if referring to non-existence objects is really referring to objects in other dimensions a la lewis?) (tags: logic, philosophy, language, metaphysics, metalogic, metaontology)
  

ppi 2

another set of possible post ideas. maybe i'll expand on some of these, maybe not.

• taboos in analytic philosophy--how come it's pretty much forbidden, or at least looked down upon in certain circles, to talk about derrida, or foucoult, or any continental philosophy? (tag: metaphilosophy)
• rhetoric and logic--some interpret logic (the formal system of analyzing good arguments) to be the best kind of rhetoric (the study of persuasion). in other words, rhetoric other than logic involve appealing to emotion, arguments ad hominem, and other stuff that isn't strictly based on the soundness and validity of the arguments. so i guess my question is: are rhetorical devices other than logic sometimes justified? (tags: logic, rhetoric)
  
• innocent realism--yeah i just wanna talk about haack's innocent realism. don't really have any questions about it yet. (tag: metaphysics)
• evidence and the current war in iraq--on npr i listened to an interview with valerie plame, the outed c.i.a. official. most of the interview was spent discussing how the evidence for the war was flimsy. lots of variables in this one, but it seems there was an underlying epistemological issue here. (tags: epistemology, politics, applied philosophy)
• scientific puzzles-- i have two things in mind here when i say puzzles. first, that science has uncertainties, gaps, and other problems of sorts that scientists attempt to solve. these puzzles or maybe we could call them knowledge gaps are filled in depending on what is needed to be found out thus depending on the specific disciplines that tackle the problems at hand. secondly, both haack and kuhn use the analogy of puzzles to explain the scientific enterprise (to haack 'scientific' might be broad, meaning any type of refined, critical common-sense inquiry; to kuhn 'scientific' might be more narrow, as in the natural sciences). i'd like to explore this similarity and its relation to the problems that the sciences run into. (tag: science)

ok so i went into more detail with some ideas than with others, but i'd still like to expand on most of these later.

possible post ideas

some philosophical issues of concern to me lately that I might write about:
*multiculturalism
*political phil
*material implication in formal logic