Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM, Baron,S/Miller,K and Gottlob Frege

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6 ideas

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 6. Physicalism
Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow]
     Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it.
     From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B)
     A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism.
The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow]
     Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property.
     From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11)
     A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 8. Facts / c. Facts and truths
A fact is a thought that is true [Frege]
     Full Idea: A fact is a thought that is true.
     From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.342(74))
     A reaction: It strikes me as pretty obvious that facts are not thoughts, because they concern the contents of thoughts. You can't discuss facts without the notion of what a thought is 'about'. If I think about my garden, the relevant fact is aspects of my garden.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 10. Vagueness / d. Vagueness as linguistic
Vagueness is incomplete definition [Frege, by Koslicki]
     Full Idea: Frege seems to assimilate vagueness to incompleteness of definition.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884]) by Kathrin Koslicki - Isolation and Non-arbitrary Division 2.1
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 11. Ontological Commitment / a. Ontological commitment
For Frege, ontological questions are to be settled by reference to syntactic structures [Frege, by Wright,C]
     Full Idea: For Frege, syntactic categories are prior to ontological ones, and it is by reference to the syntactic structure of true statements that ontological questions are to be understood and settled.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884]) by Crispin Wright - Frege's Concept of Numbers as Objects 1.v
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 11. Ontological Commitment / c. Commitment of predicates
Second-order quantifiers are committed to concepts, as first-order commits to objects [Frege, by Linnebo]
     Full Idea: Frege claims that second-order quantifiers are committed to concepts, just as singular first-order quantifiers are committed to objects.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884]) by Øystein Linnebo - Plural Quantification 5.3
     A reaction: It increasingly strikes me that Fregeans try to get away with this nonsense by diluting both the notion of a 'concept' and the notion of an 'object'.