Thank you to Aleta for taking up the opposing view of the nature of meaning in my Gotta Serve Somebody post.  I started to write a response to his comment 34 and quickly realized that any response would be OP-sized and decided to start a new OP. Some Definitions “disagreement is not an easy thing to reach.  Rather, we move into confusion.”  John Courtney Murray Part of the problem in the debate between Aleta and myself is that we use the word “meaning” in at least three different senses, (1) linguistic intention, (2) ultimate purpose, and (3) culturally-adapted belief system. In an effort to see if we can actually reach disagreement as opposed to confusion, I propose to dispense with Read More ›

It has been a very busy week digging out from under the pile of work that accumulated while I was on vacation (think of the Bride digging out of the grave in Kill Bill 2). Earlier I had time only to post a link to Mollie Hemingway’s take down of Frank Bruni’s genuflection before the alter of “science.” Today I want to revisit that topic. Before I do, a couple of definitions: Reify: to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing Fealty: the obligation or the engagement to be faithful to a lord, usually sworn to by a vassal. The money quote from Bruni’s piece: And with the right fealty to science, this next Congress would be forced Read More ›

From recent “challenges” by KS as a representative of a certain line of design objection thought, we find various unfortunate examples of a type of objection that pivots on a deep misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of the design inference, empirical evidence based inductive reasoning process.One that even more regrettably, seems strongly resistant to correction on evidence and reason; raising questions of the fallacy of the closed mind. A representative example (cf. my clip- respond- on- points here)  is the following distortion of Newton’s thought on Gravitation as both scientist and design-oriented, theistic philosophical thinker in his own right: Bob and another friend, an astronomer, observe the positions of the planets over several years. They determine that the planets are moving in Read More ›