http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_versus_intentionalism

I see a few people posting on here saying that they try to contribute but their contributions are just reverted by other editors. However, no one supplies any examples in the edit histories. I'm suspicious. I've been editing lately, and haven't had any of my contributions reverted. I edited quite a bit maybe 6 months ago too, and had maybe two of those edits reverted. What are you people including as references for your edits? I'm guessing not much. If you want your edits to go through include an inline citation to your source; published academic works written by an expert on the topic at hand make the best sources generally. If you don't include that, don't be surprised that someone will doubt and delete it. I'm not saying that contributions aren't reverted for no good reason, I know this happens because it has happened to me; but in my experience this is rare.

As to TFA:

Obviously I'm not familiar with every Wikipedia article. I know that many important articles in philosophy are very poor and nowhere near "completion". Compare the current Platonic realism with the SEP article. Many important philosophy articles are lacking like this. This situation is similar for many important religion articles.

It's widely known that after atheists declared that God was dead, they began work on their Gay Science.

You can also not equivocate and still equivocate.

That's not what these demands for tolerance are. When you actively speak against black people moving in to your neighbourhood, for many that is intolerant and should be denounced. When you actively speak against homosexual activity, for many that is intolerant and should be denounced. Many people demanding tolerance for Islam are asking for that sort of tolerance -- not speaking against Islam and denouncing those who do.

Why would me not mentioning such a postulate affect the validity of the argument in any way?

The validity of an argument depends only on the statements of which it is made, not on those of which it is not made. Hidden premises should be gestured towards, for example, by being the minor in a syllogism when the major and conclusion are given. They can't just be anything that would make the argument valid, otherwise every statement of an argument would be of a valid argument, which would be absurd.

Their error was not in not mentioning something. Their error was in confusing necessary and sufficient conditions, as is common. If they were presented with "He was justified in shooting only if he tried the flee. But it isn't the case that he tried to flee, therefore it isn't the case that he was justified in shooting", they would have had a valid argument and they would have identified it as such. But they can't distinguish between that and the original fallacious argument because they have no firm conceptual distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions.

An understanding of implication is exactly what critical thinking courses teach. The distinction between the sound and merely valid argument is brow-beaten into them. The distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions likewise. Many such students won't fully appreciate the distinctions, but on average they'll be a lot better than most students who constantly deny the antecedent and think they have a knock-down argument for it.* A lot of what you say are just baseless aspersions. They are not taught to always question. They "don't get" that subject-matter expertise is needed for subjects no more than others. Not understanding and not asking is worse than not understanding and asking -- this is one of the foundational views of most academics, well-established since Socrates, even if people like you and Polus get annoyed by those asking the questions. Those students who have no special power of judgement and, having taken a critical thinking course, now ask annoying questions didn't become less powerful in their judgement, they just now have the tools to ask those annoying questions. At least now they have a chance of appreciating arguments. Before they could only go by their prejudices.

*I heard this one yesterday: "If he tried to flee, then he was justified in shooting. But it isn't the case that he tried to flee, therefore it isn't the case that he was justified in shooting." Passing that one by some people with no training in logic, they all agreed that it was a good argument.

An M2, probably.

"you can do whatever you damn well want with the video once you've downloaded it"

To supplement your point: When you say something like this to most people, they respond: "But I don't download YouTube videos -- I just watch them on the website!"

They don't own it; they don't even "own" it. Edit /etc/hosts and point "google.docs" whithersoever you wish. ICANN just own a list to which people subscribe. If you don't like their list, don't subscribe to it. They control nothing of importance in that capacity except what you let them control.

Let us just all hope that Russian Sovtek factory never goes out of business or rock would be screwed.

JJ Electronic in Slovakia also makes most tubes which are used in guitar amps, independent of any Russian production.

"Head over to JSTOR, ArXiv or your favorite archive of peer-reviewed (or under-review) scholarly research and peruse the works cited sections of a few published academic papers. You won't find any encyclopedias listed."

That's a bold claim, and, as in turns out, entirely false. The very first one that I tried referred to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy thrice and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy once. Four encyclopedia references in an article in a peer-reviewed publication by a leading scholar in his field.

The article:
Block, Ned. "Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience" in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2007) 30, pp. 481â"548.

I cannot agree. There is nothing about something's being an encyclopedia that makes it unreferable. Sometimes encyclopedia articles are eminently referable. If you wrote a thorough-going article on Desgabets and you didn't refer to Easton's article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy then I would wonder whether you did your research.

There is DuckDuckGo's privacy policy which is really it's raison d'Ãtre. But obviously it needs to have good search capabilities as well, or else you won't use it.

And DuckDuckGo does have some good things about it. For example, I searched for, with the quotation marks, "first- and second-century" on Google yesterday. Received a lot of hits with "first and second century". Okay, I thought quotation marks are supposed to deliver exact hits? In fact Google's support page says: "By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change." Without any change? Apparently not. Well, whatever. So go to the sidebar, click on "More search options", turn on "Verbatim" (since I do not keep any cookies between sessions, this is not a "set it and forget it" thing). Slightly different results, but still mostly "first and second century". So what now? I don't even know. I just gave up and went to DuckDuckGo: Every result that I saw had exactly the phrase searched for.

But Google has their Books search and Google Scholar which are both immensely useful to me.

I think you have overstepped.

What do you consider to be popular Beethoven and Bach works? I would guess his 9th Symphony would be Beethoven's most popular. What Radiohead piece compares to that in terms of complexity?

For Bach? Well-tempered Clavier? Look at Bk. II, No.9: A triple fugue with 38 subject entires, 13 countersubjects including inverted subjects, with inverted counterpoint and stretti all over the place. The thing is a monster of complexity.

If Mozart's audiences would never have tolerated 9ths or augmented 4ths, then why did they? Second bar of KV. 465 has an augmented fourth (F# over a C). At least Wikipedia says that this is his "most famous" quartet. And ninths? I would be hard-pressed to find a famous work by Mozart that didn't use a ninth. But since we like positive examples on Slashdot, I guess I'll give one, but I won't have to travel far: The very next bar in KV. 465 just cited, the third bar, a C over a B.

I see that Slashdot does not take IPA very well. Let me try something more confusing: hai.er not haier