display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
3 ideas
19284 | Asserting a necessity just expresses our inability to imagine it is false [Blackburn] |
Full Idea: To say that we dignify a truth as necessary we are expressing our own mental attitudes - our own inability to make anything of a possible way of thinking which denies it. It is this blank unimaginability which we voice when we use the modal vocabulary. | |
From: Simon Blackburn (Spreading the Word [1984], 6.5) | |
A reaction: Yes, but why are we unable to imagine it? I accept that the truth or falsity of Goldbach's Conjecture may well be necessary, but I have no imagination one way or the other about it. Philosophers like Blackburn are very alien to me! |
14629 | If we are told the source of necessity, this seems to be a regress if the source is not already necessary [Blackburn] |
Full Idea: If we ask why A must be the case, and A is then proved from B, that explains it if B must be so. If the eventual source cites some truth F, then if F just is so, there is strong pressure to feel that the original necessity has not been explained. | |
From: Simon Blackburn (Morals and Modals [1987], 1) | |
A reaction: [compressed] Ross Cameron wrote a reply to this which I like. I'm fishing for the idea that essence is the source of necessity (as Kit Fine says), but that essence itself is not necessary (as only I say, apparently!). |
14529 | If something underlies a necessity, is that underlying thing necessary or contingent? [Blackburn, by Hale/Hoffmann,A] |
Full Idea: Blackburn asks of what theorists propose as underlying the necessity of a proposition, the question whether they themselves are conceived as obtaining of necessity or merely contingently. | |
From: report of Simon Blackburn (Morals and Modals [1987], p.120-1) by Bob Hale/ Aviv Hoffmann - Introduction to 'Modality' 1 | |
A reaction: I've seen a reply to this somewhere: I think the thought was that a necessity wouldn't be any less necessary if it had a contingent source, any more than the father of a world champion boxer has to be a world champion boxer. |