ellauri048.html on line 1840: Oh, if indeed that eye foresee
ellauri080.html on line 605: The shipwrecked castaways desperately want to leave the remote island, and various opportunities frequently present themselves, but always fail, usually due to some bumbling error committed by Gilligan. Sometimes this would result in Gilligan saving the others from some unforeseen flaw in their plan.
ellauri096.html on line 55: Michael Scriven (1964) tried to refute predictive determinism (the thesis that all events are foreseeable), by conjuring two players, “Predictor” who has all the data, laws, and calculating capacity needed to predict the choices of others. Scriven goes on to imagine, “Avoider”, whose dominant motivation is to avoid prediction. Therefore, Predictor must conceal his prediction. The catch is that Avoider has access to the same data, laws, and calculating capacity as Predictor. Thus Avoider can duplicate Predictor’s reasoning. Consequently, the optimal predictor cannot predict Avoider. Let the teacher be Avoider and the student be Predictor. Avoider must win. Therefore, it is possible to give a surprise test. This sounds silly. The Predictor can predict that the Avoider double guesses her. Both can fiture out that this will go on and on, until time runs out, and they still just sit on their asses doing nothing. Thing is, you must remember that the players are part of the game, not outside of it as idealists would have it.
ellauri096.html on line 59: Predictive determinism states that everything is foreseeable. Metaphysical determinism states that there is only one way the future could be given the way the past is. Simon Laplace used metaphysical determinism as a premise for predictive determinism. He reasoned that since every event has a cause, a complete description of any stage of history combined with the laws of nature implies what happens at any other stage of the universe. Scriven was only challenging predictive determinism in his thought experiment. The next approach challenges metaphysical determinism.
ellauri096.html on line 92: W. V. Quine insists that the student’s elimination argument is only a reductio ad absurdum of the supposition that the student knows that the announcement is true (rather than a reductio of the announcement itself). He accepts this epistemic reductio but rejects the metaphysical reductio. Given the student’s ignorance of the announcement, Quine concludes that a test on any day would be unforeseen.
ellauri096.html on line 247: There is no problem with third person counterparts of (M). Anyone else can say about Moore, with no paradox, ‘G. E. Moore went to the pictures last Tuesday but he does not believe it’. (M) can also be embedded unparadoxically in conditionals: ‘If I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I do not believe it, then I am suffering from a worrisome lapse of memory ’. The past tense is fine: ‘I went to the picture shows last Tuesday but I did not believe it’. The future tense, ‘I went to the picture shows last Tuesday but I will not believe it’, is a bit more of a stretch (Bovens 1995). We tend to picture our future selves as better informed. Later selves are, as it were, experts to whom earlier selves should defer. When an earlier self foresees that his later self believes p
ellauri096.html on line 251: Robert Binkley (1968) anticipates van Fraassen by applying the reflection principle to the surprise test paradox. The student can foresee that he will not believe the announcement if no test is given by Thursday. The conjunction of the history of testless days and the announcement will imply the Moorean sentence:
ellauri096.html on line 255: Since the less evident member of the conjunction is the announcement, the student will choose not to believe the announcement. At the beginning of the week, the student foresees that his future self may not believe the announcement. So the student on Sunday will not believe the announcement when it is first uttered.
ellauri096.html on line 267: Third, the principle of reflection may need more qualifications than Binkley anticipates. Binkley realizes that an ordinary agent foresees that he will forget details. That is why we write reminders for our own benefit. An ordinary agent foresees periods of impaired judgment. That is why we limit how much money we bring to the bar.
ellauri096.html on line 289: Some people wear T-shirts with Question Authority! written on them. Questioning authority is generally regarded as a matter of individual discretion. The surprise test paradox shows that it is sometimes mandatory. The student is rationally required to doubt the teacher’s announcement even though the teacher has not given any evidence of being unreliable. Indeed, the student can foresee that their change of mind opens a new opportunity for surprise.
ellauri100.html on line 321: What does that have to do with my final rejection of “liberalism” and turn toward libertarianism? When government intervenes in economic and social affairs, its interventions are based on crude “measures of effectiveness” (e.g., eliminating poverty and racial discrimination) without considering the intricacies of economic and social interactions. Governmental interventions are — and will always be — blunt instruments, the use of which will have unforeseen, unintended, and strongly negative consequences (e.g., the cycle of dependency on welfare, the inhibition of growth-producing capital investments). I then began to doubt the wisdom of having any more government than is necessary to protect me and my fellow Americans from foreign and domestic predators. My later experiences in the private sector and as a government contractor confirmed my view that professors, politicians, and bureaucrats who presume to interfere in the workings of the economy are naïve, power-hungry, or (usually) both. Oh I hated those M.I.T. professors. So smug, thought they knew everything.
ellauri143.html on line 747: The wise with watchful soul who coming ills foresee;
ellauri146.html on line 681: “We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself.”
ellauri146.html on line 686: started with the queerest idea conceivable, viz; that all men are born free and equal-this in the very teeth of the laws of gradation so visibly impressed upon all things both in the moral and physical universe. Every man “voted,” as they called it-that is to say, meddled with public affairs-until, at length, it was discovered that what is everybody’s business is nobody’s, and that the “Republic” (as the absurd thing was called) was without a government at all. It is related, however, that the first circumstance which disturbed, very particularly, the self-complacency of the philosophers who constructed this “Republic,” was the startling discovery that universal suffrage gave opportunity for fraudulent schemes….A little reflection upon this discovery sufficed to render evident the consequences, which were that rascality must predominate— in a word, that a republican government could never be anything but a rascally one. While the philosophers, however, were busied in blushing at their stupidity in not having foreseen these inevitable evils, and intent upon the invention of new theories, the matter was put to an abrupt issue by a fellow of the name of Mob, who took everything into his own hands and set up a despotism…. As for republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth—unless we except the case of the “prairie dogs,” an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs.
ellauri161.html on line 520: Initially the "comet" stood for climate change in the original script. But now liberals were beholden to a far more scary narrative way better than the idea of climate change that might pose a threat only in an unforeseeable future--and that is of course infectious disease medicine. They realized without "the science" they had no chance against the right. So now the comet came to represent the "virus."
ellauri302.html on line 490: Sarah, brings in Yekel's coat and funny hats and places them upon him. He offers no resistance. What a misfortune! What a misfortune! Who could have foreseen such a thing? (She straightens YekeVs coat, then puts the room in order. Runs into Rifkele's room. She is heard hiding something there, and soon returns.) I'll have a reckoning with you later. (Putting the finishing touches to the room.) Terrible days, these. Bring up children with so much care and anxiety, and... Ah! (Footsteps are heard outside. Sarah runs over to Yekel and pulls his sleeve.) They're here! For the love of God, Yekel, remember! Everything can be fixed yet. (Enter Reh Ali arid a stranger. Sarah hastily thrusts her hair under her wig and goes to the door to ivelcome the visitors.)
ellauri310.html on line 756: Technology is reducing the weight and size of the modern MBT. A British military document from 2001 indicated that the British Army would not procure a replacement for the Challenger 2 because of a lack of conventional warfare threats in the foreseeable future. The obsolescence of the tank has been asserted, but the history of the late 20th and early 21st century suggested that MBTs were still necessary.
ellauri375.html on line 487: Not exactly. The idea isn't that God is puzzled or clueless, but rather that the relationship between God's plan and human actions is complex and multifaceted. According to many religious beliefs, God has a plan, but this plan often involves allowing humans to exercise their free will and make choices, even if those choices lead to unforeseen consequences. It's not that God lacks understanding but that the nature of free will and human agency introduces a level of unpredictability into the world. However, many believers also have faith that God's plan ultimately leads to goodness and redemption, even in the face of human failings and suffering.
xxx/ellauri138.html on line 215: Wylie's final novel, The End of the Dream, was published posthumously in 1972 and foresees a dark future where America slides into ecological catastrophe.
xxx/ellauri157.html on line 204: Baal Shem (Hebrew: בַּעַל שֵׁם, pl. Baalei Shem) is a title for a historical Jewish practitioner of Practical Kabbalah and miracle worker. Employing the names of God, angels, Satan and other spirits, Baalei Shem heal, enact miracles, perform exorcisms, treat various health issues, curb epidemics, protect people from disaster due to fire, robbery or the evil eye, foresee the future, decipher dreams, and bless those who sought his powers.
xxx/ellauri167.html on line 536: He believes the Free masons were originally possessed of the true principles & objects of Christianity, & have still preserved some of them by tradition, but much disfigured. The means he proposes to effect this improvement of human nature are `to enlighten men, to correct their morals & inspire them with benevolence. Secure of our success, sais he, we abstain from violent commotions. To have foreseen the happiness of posterity & to have prepared it by irreproachable means, suffices for our felicity.
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