Perhaps the reference given in the response to question 135 will prove helpful.

I'm not sure what you're presuming until you say what "biased" means. Do you believe that contemporary physics is biased? If not, then what is it about historical research that makes it impossible for historians to attain the same degree of rigor and truth that physicists do? And if so, then what would inquiry have to look like in order for it to be "unbiased"?

It seems to me that what we call "history" is largely concerned withthe description or explanation of past episodes in the social, political, military,artistic, intellectual, etc. life of humans. Study of past episodes of non-human activity, for instance, the movementof tectonic plates and the formation of stars, tends to go by other names, like "geology" or "astronomy". So perhaps it's no wonder that the doings of humans take center stage in what we call "history". (That said, plenty of histories do deal with the human consequences of natural events beyond our control.)

Very loosely and given all the assumptions of my original response, the "basic fact about our minds" in question is the fact that the rules that constitute our minds do not produce conflicting results. Is that a fact "about how the mind works" or "about some other aspect of mind"? That's too vague a question to answer, I think. The fact in question is (given all the assumptions, etc.) a basic property that our minds possess but one that we could not know that they possess. We could "understand" this property, in the sense that we could formulate the claim that says that our minds possess that property. But our minds would not have the means to establish that the claim is true.

Is this so? I don't know (I'm color blind). But assuming it is, shouldwe reach for evolution to explain this (I realize you didn't suggest this)? Somehow, one might hold,evolutionary pressures shaped our aesthetic sensibilities (for I takeit that that's what judgments about color clashes amount to) in justsuch a way that we find all color arrangements in nature pleasing. Butwhat possible evolutionary advantage would there be to that? In fact,you might have expected that there would be an evolutionary advantageto finding certain color combinations repellent : e.g., thatit would promote our survival if we were to judge that the colors ofthat dangerous carnivore's coat "just don't work together". Also,aesthetic judgments are, well, judgments . And as such, theyare sensitive to the rational give and take of reflection, experience,imagination, and so on. The judgment that these colors clash is not abrute, immutable reaction, but rather a judgment that is sensitive tomany considerations and hence beyond...

A reductio ad absurdum argument has the following form:we assume that X is true, deduce some absurdity from it, and thenconclude that not-X must be true after all. You can view reductio as arule of inference that allows us to infer not-X from our derivation ofan absurdity from X. Why does this work? Becausededuction is a process that leads from true assumptions to trueconclusions. (See also here .) But an absurdity cannot be true.Therefore, our assumption X is not true. But either X is true or not-Xis true. Consequently, it must be not-X that's true. I agree withAmy that the final upshot of a reductio argument needn't be surprising,so I'll interpret the question differently. Perhaps you're asking thefollowing: when we deduce our absurdity, how do we know whether it's soabsurd that we have no choice but to consider it false and thus toconclude, by reductio, not-X — or whether instead to conclude that,contrary to what one might have thought, the alleged absurdity is true after all! Youmight say...

You might try testing Peter Lipton's suggestion. You could ask your mother to tell you to stay up one night, or to tell you to stay in bed one morning. If it turns out that you then find it easy to do what she says, then Peter's suggestion sounds like it's on the right track. On the other hand, if you find yourself then wanting to go to bed early and to wake up early, we need another explanation.

There's a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy toward the bottom of the "Related Sites" list on the right.

To my ear, your sentence means "I was studying almost until dawn". So Itake "nearly" to be an adverb that modifies the adjectival phrase"until dawn", to create a new adjectival phrase, "nearly until dawn", which in turn applies to your studying. Thus, I take thesentence to be structurally parallel to "I was running very fast",where "fast" plays the role of "until dawn" and "very" that of "nearly".

When someone says "I expect the unexpected" we might hear that alongthe lines of "I fathered someone fatherless". That is, we mightinterpret him as meaning that he expects some event which he also doesnot expect. That does seem like a contradiction. But isn't that tomisunderstand what he's trying to say? What he expects is not someevent (which he also doesn't expect); rather, what he expects is thathe doesn't expect some event. His expectation applies not to some eventitself but rather to his non-expectation of some event. What he expectsis that there will be some event that he does not expect. Thisexpectation is a second-order expectation: it applies to his first-order non-expectation of some event. (My expectation that a credit card billwill soon arrive is a first-order expectation. My expectation that Melanie will expect me to pay for dinner is a second-order expectation. See here for a similar distinction.) That's why, as Peter Liptonsays, "Even if you expect the unexpected, you may...