▽Sense-Data ●09/15 04:15 Consider your present visual experience. Suppose that you are seated at a table in a garden. You are looking at objects on the table and at the vivid colors of flowers in nearby beds. Now focus on a particular static instance of your looking: the moment in which you see a white coaster on a brown garden table with a cut daisy lying just beyond the coaster. The sense data for this scene would be th
▽Quantum Mechanics ●09/14 08:41 ￥(￥ket{A}￥) and ￥(￥ket{B}￥) are mutually perpendicular, or orthogonal, if, and only if, ￥(￥braket{A}{B} = 0￥). We can try to restore logical consistency by giving up the dynamical rule for contexts of type 2 (or, what amounts to the same thing, by denying that there are any such contexts), but then we have the problem of consistency with experience. For it was no mere blunder that that rule was in
▽Rationalism vs. Empiricism ●09/03 07:10 First published Thu Aug 19, 2004; substantive revision Thu Sep 2, 2021 In its most general terms, the dispute between rationalism and empiricism has been taken to concern the extent to which we are dependent upon experience in our effort to gain knowledge of the external world. It is common to think of experience itself as being of two kinds: sense experience, involving our five world-oriented sen
