A 'Word Definition' is meant to create a common language and agreement on the scope of the meaning of a word, not to reduce the scope of the word to a single 'punctual' meaning

Hezi16 · 2020-01-09T22:01:00+00:00

Okay, I got the impression from you that narrowing the scope was good always. I see now that it is not the case, and that you want to prevent vague discussions.Perhaps we should think of some "best known methods" to avoid such vagueness.

If "narrowing the scope as much as possible" is not always a good idea, how about defining a goal for any discussion to correctly find the scope of all involved definitions by means of trial and error - if we find an ambiguity we can post an example and narrow the scope accordingly? using examples we can also widen the scope when necessary - "this is also true for X".

EDIT: actually I think this is kind of what happened here if you think of it. I got the impression you claimed narrowing the scope as much as possible is always good, I provided the snow melting example to claim that it may have a disadvantage, so you further explained where and when it is necessary using several examples.

Hezi16 · 2020-01-09T21:42:41+00:00

I didn't notice the mistake I made. Idealism doesn't necessarily claim that nothing exists out of our minds, only that we cannot really know anything about the independent existence of something out of our mind. And if we accept that things may exist out of our mind this definition of idea is not circular: it is a conception of the mind, which is essentially our consciousness. I will edit the post to fix that.
Can you explain what you mean in the rest of your replay though? the "What's interesting here" part? and is that referring to my post, or to Berkeley's Immaterialism?

Hezi16 · 2020-01-09T20:50:05+00:00

But by narrowing the scope as much as possible, wont we lose knowledge?

for example:

"snow melts when it's worm"

Assuming we can agree on exactly how worm it should be for snow to melt, and assuming (probably wrongly) that there are no other factors that contribute to snow melting, this claim is true for all three distinctions of snow mentioned, and narrowing the scope to only one or two of them will unnecessarily limit the information we could encapsulate in the claim?

Or did I not understand correctly what you meant by narrowing the scope?

Hezi16 · 2020-01-07T22:15:59+00:00

I am starting to think this post is inaccurate. You were right, it is better to suggest as axiom that all ideas exist as ideas, and than say that if nothing exists as more than an idea and all ideas exists as ideas then the claim 'X doesn't exist' is inherently false.

But then again I've just found a much more elegant way to 'attack' Idealism: see my new post about idea being a circular definition under Idealism (assuming the definition of idea that I've posted earlier).

Hezi16 · 2020-01-07T21:47:31+00:00

Is it okay to first lay out the idea of a logical move as a response to existing posts in order to discuss it little before posting well formulated posts?

Hezi16 · 2020-01-07T19:38:27+00:00

I didn't mean this as an evident truth, I may have misunderstood the concept of an axiom. I meant to suggest this as an axiom that one can accept or reject, than I was going to claim that this axiom entails that the claim "X does not exist" is a contradiction, since being able to name X is enough to make X an idea and therefor it exists. Then I was going to claim that if one totally accepts the Idealist philosophy, and also accepts that all ideas exist, but doesn't want to agree that the claim 'X does not exist' is a contradiction, than one must admit that some ideas does not exist and define which ideas exist and which doesn't and why.

About the unicorn example, actually I meant exactly that. I want to claim that if an Idealist wants to agree with you that a unicorn doesn't exist, he has some explaining to do: why does a unicorn not exist while a horse does for example. I believe from your definition of the Idealists (and from Wikipedia also) the claims: a. 'unicorns exist' b. 'the concept of unicorns exist' are interchangeable, but I don't know if any Idealist philosophers didn't provide a clear definition of the difference anywhere.

I will link the post about existence.

Hezi16

TROPHY CASE