display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
19 ideas
| 18416 | Attitudes involve properties (not propositions), and belief is self-ascribing the properties [Lewis, by Solomon] |
| Full Idea: Lewis suggests that we take attitudes to have properties, rather than propositions, as contents. To stand in the belief relation to a property is to self-ascribe that property. | |
| From: report of David Lewis (Attitudes De Dicto and De Se [1979]) by Robert C. Solomon - Erotic Love as a Moral Virtue 05.1 | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of convoluted suggestion that Lewis has to come up with, in pursuit of his project of a wholly consistent metaphysics. Examine Lewis's account of properties before you judge this proposal! Self-ascribing is joining a set! |
| 3992 | Folk psychology makes good predictions, by associating mental states with causal roles [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Folk psychology is a powerful instrument of prediction, …which associates with each mental state a typical causal role. | |
| From: David Lewis (Lewis: reduction of mind (on himself) [1994], p.416) | |
| A reaction: This seems a good account of why we should take folk psychology very seriously, even if it is sometimes wrong (e.g. about people who are mentally ill). |
| 16390 | Lewis's popular centred worlds approach gives an attitude an index of world, subject and time [Lewis, by Recanati] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers now prefer Lewis's centred worlds framework for indexicals …It is two-dimensional, saying an attitude only has a truth-value when evaluated with respect to a contextual index, containing a subject and time, as well as a world. | |
| From: report of David Lewis (Attitudes De Dicto and De Se [1979]) by François Recanati - Mental Files 18.2 | |
| A reaction: [compressed; this is said to have largely ousted the older Kaplan-Perry view] You only begin to understand the possible worlds game when you see how many problems find proposed 'solutions' there. |
| 3996 | Folk psychology doesn't say that there is a language of thought [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I don't believe that folk psychology says there is a language of thought. | |
| From: David Lewis (Lewis: reduction of mind (on himself) [1994], p.422) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at Jerry Fodor. Certainly folk psychology is a strong theory, but a so-called 'language of thought' (the brain's machine code) seems a much weaker one. |
| 3998 | If you don't share an external world with a brain-in-a-vat, then externalism says you don't share any beliefs [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If the famous brain in a bottle is your exact duplicate in brain states, but only experiences the computer's virtual reality, so that you share no objects of acquaintance, then according to externalists you share no beliefs whatsoever. | |
| From: David Lewis (Lewis: reduction of mind (on himself) [1994], p.424) | |
| A reaction: A very nice reductio ad absurdum of the idea that all concepts and beliefs have external meaning. |
| 3997 | Nothing shows that all content is 'wide', or that wide content has logical priority [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: There is nothing to support the thesis that wide content is the only kind of content, or that it is any way pre-eminent or basic. | |
| From: David Lewis (Lewis: reduction of mind (on himself) [1994], p.424) | |
| A reaction: The idea that all content is 'wide' seems quite wrong. We can't all be wrong about the meaning of a word, because the underlying facts have not yet been discovered. |
| 3999 | A spontaneous duplicate of you would have your brain states but no experience, so externalism would deny him any beliefs [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: According to externalists, Davidson's 'swampman' is your exact duplicate in brains states, but hasn't had time to become acquainted with much, so he has virtually no beliefs. | |
| From: David Lewis (Lewis: reduction of mind (on himself) [1994], p.425) | |
| A reaction: An implausible fantasy, but it does highlight the fact that beliefs and concepts are primarily internal states. |
| 4000 | Wide content derives from narrow content and relationships with external things [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Wide content is derivative, a product of narrow content and relationships of acquaintance with external things. | |
| From: David Lewis (Lewis: reduction of mind (on himself) [1994], p.430) | |
| A reaction: I would say: content is a mental state, but it is created and fixed by a community, and wide content is the part fixed by experts in the community. We can all be wrong about meanings, and occasionally most of us are wrong about a specialised meaning. |
| 8901 | Abstraction is usually explained either by example, or conflation, or abstraction, or negatively [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Abstraction is usually explained in one of four ways: the Way of Example (cf. donkeys and numbers), the Way of Conflation (same as sets), the Negative Way (non-spatial and non-causal) or the Way of Abstraction (incomplete descriptions). | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: [Compressed; a footnote dismisses Dummett's fifth way] Example has blurred boundaries, and explains nothing. Gerrymandered sets don't produce concepts. Negative accounts explain nothing. So it's the Way of Abstraction! |
| 8904 | The Way of Abstraction says an incomplete description of a concrete entity is the complete abstraction [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: The Way of Abstraction says abstract entities are abstractions from concrete entities; they result from somehow subtracting specificity, so that an incomplete description of the original concrete entity is a complete description of the abstraction. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: Defined like this, it rather looks as if abstractions would be entirely verbal - which may well be the correct situation, except that higher animals seem capable of minimal levels of abstraction. This Way is denigrated by Frege and Geach. |
| 8938 | The Way of Example compares donkeys and numbers, but what is the difference, and what are numbers? [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: The Way of Example says concrete entities are things like donkeys and puddles, but abstract entities are things like numbers. That gives us little guidance. There are no uncontroversial accounts of numbers, and donkeys and number differ in too many ways. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: That demolishes that fairly swiftly. It may be unfair to demand an agreed account of numbers, but the respect(s) in which donkeys and numbers differ needs to be spelled out before anything useful has been said. |
| 8903 | Abstracta can be causal: sets can be causes or effects; there can be universal effects; events may be sets [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Is it true that sets or universals cannot enter into causal interaction? Why can't we say that a set of things causes something, or something causes a set of effects? Or positive charge has characteristic effects? Or an event is a sort of set? | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: This idea, and 8902, form a devastating critique of attempts to define abstraction in a purely negative way, as non-spatial and non-causal. Only a drastic revision of widely held views about sets, universals and events could save that account. |
| 8902 | If abstractions are non-spatial, then both sets and universals seem to have locations [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If abstract entities are not located, then a set of things does seem to have a location, though perhaps a divided one; and universals, if they are wholly present in each particular, are where their instances are, so negation can't define abstraction. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: He admits that non-spatial accounts of sets and universals are possible, but the jury is out on both of them, and more cautious theories, even if they are realist, will give them both locations. A good argument. |
| 8905 | If universals or tropes are parts of things, then abstraction picks out those parts [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: A theory of non-spatiotemporal parts of things, whether recurring universals or non-recurring tropes, makes good sense of some abstractions. Unit negative charge is a universal common to particles, and an abstraction by being part of them. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: He cautiously refers to 'some' abstractions. It is one of Donald Williams's proud boasts concerning his trope theory that it will handle this problem well. I'm not sure that we should be saying that abstractions are actually concrete bits of things. |
| 8906 | If we can abstract the extrinsic relations and features of objects, abstraction isn't universals or tropes [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Why can't we abstract a highly extrinsic aspect of something, say its surname, or its spatiotemporal location, or its role in a causal network, or its role in some body of theory? But these are unsuitable candidates for being genuine universals or tropes. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: (This is a criticism of the proposal in Idea 8905) Obviously we can abstract such things. In particular the role in a causal network is a function, which is a central example of an abstract idea. Russell keeps reminding us that relations are universals. |
| 8907 | The abstract direction of a line is the equivalence class of it and all lines parallel to it [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: We can abstract the direction of a line by taking the direction as the equivalence class of that line and all lines parallel to it. There is no subtraction of detail, but a multiplication of it; by swamping it, the specifics of the original line get lost. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: You can ask how wide a line is, but not how wide a direction is, so a detail IS being subtracted. I don't see how you can define the concept of a banana by just saying it is 'every object which is equivalent to a banana'. 'Parallel' is an abstraction. |
| 8908 | For most sets, the concept of equivalence is too artificial to explain abstraction [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Most sets cannot be regarded as abstractions by equivalence: most sets are equivalence classes only under thoroughly artificial equivalence. (And the empty set is not an equivalence class at all). | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: [Recorded for further investigation..] My intuitions certainly cry out against such a thin logical notion giving a decent explanation of such a rich activity as abstraction. |
| 15443 | Mathematicians abstract by equivalence classes, but that doesn't turn a many into one [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: When mathematicians abstract one thing from others, they take an equivalence class. ....But it is only superficially a one; underneath, a class are still many. | |
| From: David Lewis (Against Structural Universals [1986], 'The pictorial') | |
| A reaction: This is Frege's approach to abstraction, and it is helpful to have it spelled out that this is a mathematical technique, even when applied by Frege to obtaining 'direction' from classes of parallels. Too much philosophy borrows inappropriate techniques. |
| 16289 | We can't account for an abstraction as 'from' something if the something doesn't exist [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: We cannot really be talking about the things whence an abstraction-like entity is abstracted if there are no such things. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Sounds like a killer blow, but I don't think so. I can't think of a concept which doesn't have a possible basis in reality, assuming that it might be a complex assemblage of abstracted components. |