ToddStark

"... replace "sound" by its definition."

Yes, that's exactly what happens in a reasonable dialog, at the point where people realze they are thinking of the same thing in different ways. The trick is recognizing what that difference is so you can expand on it and compare. It happens fairly quickly and easily in most cases when both people are mostly focused on inquiry. If they are arguing their own position, they are unlikely to be looking for the difference, they are probably looking for ways to deconstruct the other person's terms and find fallacies in their logic or problems with their evidence. They will resort to arguing for... (read more)

On the general issue of the origin of various philosophical ideas, I had a thought. Perhaps we take a lot of our tacit knowledge for granted in our thinking about attributions. I suspect that abstract ideas become part of wider culture and then serve as part of the reasoning of other people without them explicitly realizing the role of those abstracts. For example, Karl Popper had a concept of "World 3" which was essentially the world of artifacts that are inherited from generation to generation and become a kind of background for the thinking of each successive generation who inherits that culure. That concept of "unconscious ideas" was... (read 358 more words →)