display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
3 ideas
| 8775 | A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction [Geach] |
| Full Idea: A big flea or rat is a small animal, and a small elephant is a big animal, so there can be no question of ignoring the kind of thing to which 'big' or 'small' is referred and forming those concepts by abstraction. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §9) | |
| A reaction: Geach is attacking a caricature of the theory. Abstraction is a neat mental trick which has developed in stages, from big rats relative to us, to big relative to other rats, to the concept of 'relative' (Idea 8776!), to the concept of 'relative bigness'. |
| 8776 | We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Abstractionists are unaware of the difficulty with relations - that they neither exist nor can be observed apart from the converse relation, the two being indivisible, as in grasping 'to the left of' and 'to the right of'. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §9) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to see how a rival account such as platonism could help. It seems obvious to me that 'right' and 'left' would be quite meaningless without some experience of things in space, including an orientation to them. |
| 10732 | If concepts are just recognitional, then general judgements would be impossible [Geach] |
| Full Idea: If concepts were nothing but recognitional capacities, then it is unintelligible that I can judge that cats eat mice when neither of them are present. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.164) | |
| A reaction: Having observed the importance of recognition for the abstractionist (Idea 10731), he then seems to assume that there is nothing more to their concepts. Geach fails to grasp levels of abstraction, and cross-reference, and generalisation. |