Mindy

My impression, admittedly made on minimal grounds, is that you live passively. You look for the world to attract you, perhaps to entertain you. Going out on a limb, I will say I suspect what you haven't "found" is yourself. Life is active. The rewards of living are rewards of one's actions. What are you good at? Do you not get a thrill from that success? When things go wrong, don't you hate that? Do you not feel resolve to take control of things so that you succeed and enjoy, rather than fail and suffer? If the things other people do are only mildly interesting, can you invent or devise a course that's better, much better, superb? Regarding life, you have to make it happen. Mindy

Intentions don't matter if the letter of the law/contract/agreement is honored. Thus, if the merchant has made an explicit return policy that the buyer relies on, the buyer is like the employer paying only 7.00 for his "10.00" workers. Notice that during the time he reads the book, the store enjoys his money. IF the language of the return policy is not violated, how is he cheating? Mindy

Mindy

I didn't express myself well. Apologies. File it in the round file. Mindy

To rely on the common meaning of terms is not the same as "assuming." When you say, for example, "...without assuming that the law of identity implies finitism..." you seem to exclude direct explanations of why identity is contradicted by the infinite. Cantor saw that the concept was a self-contradiction, because one infinity was not identical with some others, in precisely the respect being attended to. If you feel as if you're talking to Christians, consider us talking to someone who won't fess up to the limitations of a concept he names himself after--"some need for the argument to be valid?" One might think so. Mindy

In the same sense that one can accidentally elbow a neighbor in the ribs, a child can push something without having chosen to push it. Actions are actions of entities. They are not an additional perceptual content. We conceptualize actions by finding patterns in the regular changes in a thing's posture, change of place, etc. If you took each perceptible bit of information, all of them would belong to one or the other entities. Mindy

Even one entity might have an infinite number of causal interactions, assuming endless "time." Each cause does not require a separate entity. Mindy

Yes, I can say a child's pushing a thing is accidental until he forms the idea of causally moving it by pushing against it. When you say "The concept of causation has to be formed first, by induction," you seem to be agreeing with me...can't be, of course. When you say we "observe the relationship" you are claiming there is something perceptible in addition to the entities and their attributes? Mindy

You can get less than zero out of a book that raises your expectations, then disappoints them cheaply, presents despicable cultural values, depicts a rotten sense-of-life, etc. You all seem to think that the physical book is all that counts. Mindy

It seems to me that all of those presuppose what they are supposed to explain. The child pokes at a ball, and watches it roll away. Unless you presume he recognizes a causal relationship, you only have touching and the ball's motion. If you want to say the child "pushed" the ball, you are, again, presuming what you want to explain. A child doesn't choose to push something until he has grasped causality. So, he can't learn of causality from it. In this connection, think of a toddler who walks up to a ball to pick it up. As he arrives at the ball, he kicks it away. He toddles off after it, and, with his last step, he kicks it away again. This can happen over and over, without the child realizing that it is his own behavior that sends the ball away. It is achieving the concept of the act that constitutes arriving at the generalization. Do you see fire burning paper, or do you see fire, and see paper undergoing certain changes? Is the fire visibly central to those changes, or incidental? It seems to me that until you answer these questions, you can't conceptualize "burns," you can't conceptualize what you are calling the act. The question is, will conceptualizing the perceptible elements of a causal act lead one to conceptualizing the causal act. The act has two entities involved. Two entities are recognized and identified conceptually. There will also be some change to one or both of those entities. The child is able to conceptualize those changes. Where's the idea of cause? Where's the understanding that the change in the one brings about the change in the other? Mindy

I suspect that is in fact what is happening. However, it is not a logical certainty. You didn't answer my exact question, would you do so? What, exactly, is the return policy supposed to cover, if having read the book at all disqualifies you from returning it? If you can read part and then return it because it is inferior and unsatisfactory, how much can you read? How can you exclude from that consideration reading the whole book--the denouement being particularly important to the story? Assuming our OP would keep a book if it proved to be worth doing so, is he cheating when, finding it isn't worth keeping, he returns it? I have many times bought a book hoping it would be a decent read, from the blurbs and intro, then, having read it through, felt I was cheated. I don't return books for that reason, but I'm not sure it would be unfair to do so. Even given all your implicitations , if the return policy is so poorly written that it fails to line up with the usual presumptions, isn't that the store's fault? Mindy

Lol. You mistake the question. I'm asking what justification there is for electing that propositional form, the form that, indeed, fits inductive statement. There are other ways to state, in propositional form, the conceptualization of the burning paper, and those other ways do not yield an inductive statement. Mindy

I still haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how the relationship began, but a person's face, awake, tells volumes about their personality. Whether their gaze is direct or unfocused, whether their attitude is benevolent or malevolent, whether they are purposeful or passive, fearful or confident, etc. The "eyes are the window on the soul" is true, and might explain what is happening in the sort of stories you are talking about. However, I don't to defend the cultural norm in love-stories, either. I know I have instant positive or negative reactions to people on this basis. It is only a clue to the person, but it turns out to be surprisingly accurate, in my experience. Mindy

My problem is that the OP claims--at least implicitly--that he is not violating the explicit return policy. Given that hypothesis, are you saying you can determine that he is cheating the store? Mindy

A point of logic: how could you "discover" anything that "contradicts the law of identity?" Contradiction depends on identity. Mindy

When you look at an apple, and, possessing the concept, "apple," you realize that this object is an apple, you are performing a deductive-like process, just as Rand said. It is akin to deduction because the concept, "apple," which you already possess, acts in the place of the "all S is P" premise, through its genus and differentia. Then, the perceptual evidence before you--red, round-ish, hanging from a short tree, etc. operates as the second premise "here is S," and you end up categorizing the particular object as an apple, "therefore here is P." 1) "Apples are round, red/green/yellow fruit that grows on trees of this sort..." 2) "Here is a round, red, fruit growing on a tree like so and so..." 3)"Therefore this is an apple." Mindy

An explicit return policy is a legal condition on the otherwise permanent exchange, no? And it makes the criteria for a legitimate return obvious, no? So if the store has left it unsaid that returns after reading the book and finding it insufficiently valuable that you are compelled to keep it at hand are not acceptable, they would not be cheated by such an exchange. (In some contexts this is called "wardrobing.") I would wish every book I bought was worth keeping and re-reading, instead of turning out to be disappointing. I'm not talking about reference works, either. Fiction. There are products that claim to be able to prove satisfactory throughout the product's life, and stores that will take a return at any time if the product proves unsatisfactory. Their very liberal return policy is a warrant on their worth. It is possible to cheat a return policy, and it is possible to use it according to one's standards, though they be unusual. I've never asked a bookseller, what if I read it and it is disappointing, so I regret buying it it, regret wasting my time reading it, and don't want to keep it--can I return it, assuming it still looks new? Are you sure they'd all say no? What if the blurbs on the cover are misleading? Every book is something of a pig-in-a-poke, no matter what the cover and dust-jacket and reviewers, and introduction say. These are not considerations the OP presented to us. It seems to me he claimed, though, that he was fully within the explicit return policy. If he is within it, what conclusion do you draw? Mindy

Is there a question there, counselor? Mindy

I think they mean it that way, and it does, of course, come across that way. Mindy

I should have written an example that didn't involve a human. Lazy. Volition wasn't part of my example, it was a startle reflex. But I'll give one sans human action. Compress Uranium 238 enough, and you get an explosion. Compress coal the same amount, and you get coal dust. Same "cause-event," but very different effects, because the entity is different. I'm sure you can think of innumerable other examples. Cool air to 30 degrees F and you get a smaller volume of air. Cool water to the same temperature, and you get a larger volume of water. Different things with different characteristics react differently to the same event. It is the thing which possesses characteristics, and the characteristics that decide the effect.

Why is this obvious? Are you relying on the general difference between contracts to rent vs. sell? Mindy

If I ran a casino, and the government opened one for revenue, I would be competing with myself. Catch 22. But bakers wouldn't be competing with themselves... Mindy

In the example, "Fire burns paper," the evidence, the "induction" arrived at, might have been stated differently. It might have been stated as, "...burning paper..." or even, "Here is burning paper, or "...paper burning," or "Here paper is burning." You will notice that of the possibilities, only "Fire burns paper," is a generalization. It seems arbitrary to craft that,, general specific proposition from the conceptual identification of the event. What is the justification of choosing the specific propositional form used? Mindy

Would you outline the argument that shows his returns are immoral? Mindy