The title says it all: How can I post a reply in the heavily moderated philosophy section?
I am new here, but not new to philosophy. The only thing I found to respond to was in that forum, which I prepared a response for in Word. As you can see, I am in a little conundrum…
just post your reply in the regular philosophy section. i’m sure whoever your rebuttal is addressed to will see it there and reply.
I suppose…
Colleptic, post it here and the name of the topic in Philosophy HM that you want to reply to. I’ll make sure it gets put into the PHM forum.
How often are members abducted by the “100 Club?”
I think there are several new members (being only a few months old) who easily meet the criterion, and would like to see them have access to the heavily moderated forum.
Is there a vote or nomination that takes place some time? If possible I think there should be one soon.
Hi detrop,
PM me some names and we’ll have a look at them,
cheers
Simple enough, though there are some problems with that.
This setting could create some friction. Let’s say that suddenly four members get upgraded. Those members who did not will assume that because I did not mention their names they are not on the list. I do not want to create this kind of atmosphere.
Who I think should be upgraded does not matter in the political setting of ILP. The vote should involve everyone, or none at all.
Some names I would throw out there for consideration, because, frankly, I don’t care if people get upset so much as I get scared whenever I talk to Ben in PM’s. 
Dunamis
De’Trop (if he isn’t on there)
Pragmatist
Impenitent
Arendt
Xanderman
Gamer
Monooq
and what the hey, WhiteL, I mean, James No. 2
Is there a set criterion for being admitted in the Heavily Moderated Forums?
In a previous forum i posted on tension was created by a lack of criteria for the ‘exclusive’ area. People got admitted on the basis of whether they’d been noticed and whether they were liked.
I think it would be better if there were criteria, such as number of posts and a proven track record in those posts of a particular kind of attitude.
Furthermore, discussions on particular members were done in a ‘hidden’ area of the forum, so that people wouldn’t get offended by peoples reasons for not admitting them. When they were admitted, these threads discussing them were deleted.
Also, if the forum is heavily moderated as it says, then I think it would be better if you admitted anyone and everyone, people will soon learn how to abide by the rules. Though I admit it is more than reasonable to reject this on the basis of increased workload for moderators.
I’m looking after it at the moment; all you have to do is ask. But if you’ve been seen to Flame or Rant a lot then you most lightly won’t get post access. Once you start posting we’ll be reading your replies. If you’re just replying for the sake of a reply without furthering the discussion, after a number of these type of posts your ‘post access’ will be revoked. But you’ll be warned each time you post needlessly… Who decides what a needless post is, well the Mods! This is the one part of the forums where we’re tyrannical in the pursuit of knowledge.
Also there are only 2 hidden forums, one for Staff Mod discussion and one for our web development stuff. Everything else is open to all to read, while only one forum was setup to specifically to be slower in pace then the rest, Philosophy Heavily Mod’ed.
Perhaps you will see fit to post the following in the HM section.
Logo (Dec.14, 2004) writes as follows:
"Quine, for instance, thinks that Cartesian skepticism is pointless because it tries to impose deeper meanings on the terms it employs than the linguistic use of those terms would allow:
There is a certain verbal perversity in the idea that ordinary talk of familiar physical things is not in large part understood as it stands, or that the familiar physical things are not real, or that evidence for their reality needs to be uncovered. For surely the key words “understood”, “real”, and “evidence” here are too ill-defined to stand up under such punishment. We should only be depriving them of the very denotations to which they mainly owe such sense as they make to us. It was a lexicographer, Dr. Johnson, who demonstrated the reality of a stone by kicking it; and to begin with, we have little better to go on than Johnsonian usage.
-from Word and Object
For Quine, terms such as “real” and “true” do not pertain to certainties. He is a fallibilist through and through. However, these words, as they are used in English, are oblivious to Cartesian worries about what can be known or what has being. To skeptically overanalyze them is to use them illicitly. If I say, “it’s true that there is a monitor on the desk”, I don’t mean that I am absolutely certain of the monitor’s metaphysical being–or that I couldn’t be dreaming, or that I’m not living in the matrix. I only mean that I experience the monitor; that it is present to my consciousness. If you view truth in that sense, then I think you can get around skepticism of both inflated, capital-T Truth and of pure probability."
I have a certain sympathy with the spirit of all of this, but it still seems to me to be an inadequate response to skepticism. My reason is that the view of language embodied is inadequate.
Let me refer to J.L. Austin’s view as stated in his well-known, “A Plea for Excuses”. Austin is, of course, well-known as a staunch defender of ordinary language. Yet, even he said that although ordinary language is assuredly the “begin all” it is not the “end all”. Austin thinks we need to go further than to take only a Johnsonian attitude toward ordinary language for even ordinary language needs analysis, not to reject it, but to try to understand how it operates. A good example of this is Austin’s own analysis of the term “real” in his Sense and Sensibilia where he point out that “real” is a “trouser word” since it is the negative use that “wears the trousers”. So that when we use the adjective “real” as in a “real X” we are not asserting anything about X, but, rather, denying that it is a devient instance of X. Thus, a “real duck” is just a duck, and the qualification real simply denies it is, say, a toy duck, or a decoy duck. And to say that some object is real may be simply to deny that it is hallucinatory. Thus, Austin comes to the important conclusion that, “the attempt to find a characteristic common to all things that are, or could be, called ‘real’ is doomed to failure” The reason Austin gives is that the function of ‘real’ is not to contribute positively to the characterization of anything, but to exclude possible ways of being not real-and these ways are both numerous for particular kinds of things, and liable to be quite different for things of different kinds." (Sense and Sensibilia p.70.
So here Austin, although adhering to ordinary language, nevertheless analyses them. He doesn’t impose deeper meaning on them, if that implies alien meanings, but he does draw out what lies behind their ordinary meanings, and draws interesting philosophical conclusions for that.
So how do you get access to post to the HM forum or who do you ask to post to that forum?
I don’t see anything particularly interesting in the unmoderated philosophy forum.