153 ideas
| 6779 | Instrumentalists say distinctions between observation and theory vanish with ostensive definition [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Instrumentalists treat the theoretical/non-theoretical and the observational/non-observational distinctions as the same, ..because they think words get their meaning by way of ostensive definition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: To be honest, I'm not sure I quite understand this, but it sounds interesting... Ostensive definition seems to match the pragmatic spirit of instrumentalism (for which, see Idea 6778). Bird explains it all more fully. |
| 13407 | All worthwhile philosophy is synthetic theorizing, evaluated by experience [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I would say that all worthwhile philosophy consists of synthetic theorizing, evaluated against experience. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Insignificance of A Priori Knowledge [2010], §1) | |
| A reaction: This is the view that philosophy is just science at a high level of abstraction, and he explicitly rejects 'conceptual analysis' as a fruitful activity. I need to take a stance on this one, but find I am in a state of paralysis. Welcome to philosophy... |
| 9449 | The plausible Barcan formula implies modality in the actual world [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Modality in the actual world is the import of the Barcan formula, and there are good reasons for accepting the Barcan formula. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: If you thought logic was irrelevant to metaphysics, this should make you think twice. |
| 9501 | If all existents are causally active, that excludes abstracta and causally isolated objects [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If one says that 'everything that exists is causally active', that rules out abstracta (notably sets and numbers), and it rules out objects that are causally isolated. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I like the principle. I take abstracta to be brain events, so they are causally active, within highly refined and focused brains, and if your physics is built on the notion of fields then I would think a 'causally isolated' object incoherent. |
| 9500 | If naturalism refers to supervenience, that leaves necessary entities untouched [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If one's naturalistic principles are formulated in terms of supervenience, then necessary entities are left untouched. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be part of the reason why some people like supervenience - that it leaves a pure 'space of reasons' which is unreachable from the flesh and blood inside a cranium. Personall I like the space of reasons, but I drop the 'pure'. |
| 6780 | Anti-realism is more plausible about laws than about entities and theories [Bird] |
| Full Idea: There is anti-realism with regard to unobservable entities and the theories that purport to mention them, but the more plausible version attaches to theories concerning what laws of nature are. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: This sounds right. I certainly find anti-realism about the entities of science utterly implausible. I also doubt whether there is any such thing as a law, above and beyond the behaviour of matter. Theories float between the two. |
| 3509 | Externalism may be the key idea in philosophical naturalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Some people view an externalist approach to epistemology as the essence of philosophical naturalism. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I suspect philosophers avoid psychology and mental events, simply because they are elusive. Externalism is a theory about justification, and independent of naturalism as a metaphysic. |
| 13409 | Our best theories may commit us to mathematical abstracta, but that doesn't justify the commitment [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Our empirically best-supported theories may commit us to certain abstract mathematical entities, but this does not necessarily mean that this is what justifies our commitment. That we are committed doesn't explain why we should be. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Insignificance of A Priori Knowledge [2010], §4) | |
| A reaction: A nice point. It is only a slightly gormless scientism which would say that we have to accept whatever scientists demand. Who's in charge here - scientists, mathematicians or philosophers? Don't answer that... |
| 9502 | There might be just one fundamental natural property [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The thought that there might be just one fundamental natural property is not that strange. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: A nice variation on the Parmenides idea that only the One exists. Bird's point would refer to a possible unification of modern physics. We see, for example, the forces of electricity and of magnetism turning out to be the same force. |
| 9477 | Categorical properties are not modally fixed, but change across possible worlds [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Categorical properties do not have their dispositional characters modally fixed, but may change their dispositional characters (and their causal and nomic behaviour more generally) across different worlds. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the key ground for Bird's praiseworth opposition to categorical propertie. I take it to be a nonsense to call the category in which we place something a 'property' of that thing. A confusion of thought with reality. |
| 9490 | The categoricalist idea is that a property is only individuated by being itself [Bird] |
| Full Idea: In the categoricalist view, the essential properties of a natural property are limited to its essentially being itself and not some distinct property. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: He associates this view with Lewis (modern regularity view) and Armstrong (nomic necessitation), and launches a splendid attack against it. I have always laughed at the idea that 'being Socrates' was one of the properties of Socrates. |
| 9495 | If we abstractly define a property, that doesn't mean some object could possess it [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The possibility of abstract definition does not show that we have defined a property that we can know, independently of any theory, that it is physically possible for some object to possess. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a naturalist resisting the idea that there is no more to a property than set-membership. I strongly agree. We need a firm notion of properties as features of the actual world; anything else should be called something like 'categorisations'. |
| 9492 | Categoricalists take properties to be quiddities, with no essential difference between them [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The categoricalist conception of properties takes them to be quiddities, which are primitive identities between fundamental qualities, having no difference with regard to their essence. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: Compare 'haecceitism' about indentity of objects, though 'quidditism' sounds even less plausible. Bird attributes this view to Lewis and Armstrong, and makes it sound well daft. |
| 9503 | To name an abundant property is either a Fregean concept, or a simple predicate [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It isn't clear what it is to name an abundant property. One might reify them, as akin to Fregean concepts, or it might be equivalent to a simple predication. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.1.2) | |
| A reaction: 'Fregean concepts' would make them functions that purely link things (hence relational?). One suspects that people who actually treat abundant properties as part of their ontology (Lewis) are confusing natural properties with predicates. |
| 14540 | Only real powers are fundamental [Bird, by Mumford/Anjum] |
| Full Idea: Bird says only real powers are fundamental. | |
| From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum - Getting Causes from Powers 1.5 | |
| A reaction: They disagree, and want higher-level properties in their ontology. I'm with Bird, except that something must exist to have the powers. Powers are fundamental to all the activity of nature, and are intrinsic to the stuff which constitutes nature. |
| 9450 | If all properties are potencies, and stimuli and manifestation characterise them, there is a regress [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Potencies are characterized in terms of their stimulus and manifestation properties, then if potencies are the only properties then these properties are also potencies, and must be characterized by yet further properties, leading to a vicious regress. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is cited as the most popular objection to the dispositional account of properties. |
| 9498 | The essence of a potency involves relations, e.g. mass, to impressed force and acceleration [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The essence of a potency involves a relation to something else; if inertial mass is a potency then its essence involves a relation to a stimulus property (impressed force) and a manifestation property (acceleration). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.3.3) | |
| A reaction: It doesn't seem quite right to say that the relations are part of the essence, if they might not occur, but some other relations might happen in their place. An essence is what makes a relation possible (like being good-looking). |
| 9474 | A disposition is finkish if a time delay might mean the manifestation fizzles out [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Finkish dispositions arise because the time delay between stimulus and manifestation provides an opportunity for the disposition to go out of existence and so halt the process that would bring about the manifestation. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a problem for the conditional analysis of dispositions; there may be a disposition, but it never reaches manifestation. Bird rightly points us towards actual powers rather than dispositions that need manifestation. |
| 9475 | A robust pot attached to a sensitive bomb is not fragile, but if struck it will easily break [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If a robust iron pot is attached to a bomb with a sensitive detonator. If the pot is struck, the bomb will go off, so they counterfactual 'if the pot were struck it would break' is true, but it is not a fragile pot. This is a 'mimic' of the disposition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.5.1) | |
| A reaction: A very nice example, showing that a true disposition would have to be an internal feature (a power) of the pot itself, not a mere disposition to behave. The problem is these pesky empiricists, who want to reduce it all to what is observable. |
| 9499 | Megarian actualists deny unmanifested dispositions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The Megarian actualist denies that a disposition can exist without being manifested. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I agree with Bird that this extreme realism seems wrong. As he puts it (p.109), "unrealized possibilities must be part of the actual world". This commitment is beginning to change my understanding of the world I am looking at. |
| 9486 | Why should a universal's existence depend on instantiation in an existing particular? [Bird] |
| Full Idea: An instantiation condition seems to be a failure of nerve as regards realism about universals. If universals really are entities in their own right, why should their existence depend upon a relationship with existing particulars? | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: I like this challenge, which seems to leave fans of universals no option but full-blown Platonism, which most of them recognise as being deeply implausible. |
| 9472 | Resemblance itself needs explanation, presumably in terms of something held in common [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The realist view of resemblance nominalism is that it is resemblance that needs explaining. When there is resemblance it is natural to want to explain it, in terms of something held in common. Explanations end somewhere, but not with resemblance. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
| A reaction: I smell a regress. If a knife and a razor resemble because they share sharpness, you have to see that the sharp phenomenon falls within the category of 'sharpness' before you can make the connection, which is spotting its similarity. |
| 9482 | If the laws necessarily imply p, that doesn't give a new 'nomological' necessity [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It does not add to the kinds of necessity to say that p is 'nomologically necessary' iff (the laws of nature → p) is metaphysically necessary. That trick of construction could be pulled for 'feline necessity' (true in all worlds that contain cats). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: I love it! Bird seems to think that the only necessity is 'metaphysical' necessity, true in all possible worlds, and he is right. The question arises in modal logic, though, of the accessibility between worlds (which might give degrees of necessity?). |
| 9481 | Logical necessitation is not a kind of necessity; George Orwell not being Eric Blair is not a real possibility [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I do not regard logical necessitation as a kind of necessity. It is logically possible that George Orwell is not Eric Blair, but in what sense is this any kind of possibility? It arises from having two names, but that confers no genuine possibility. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: How refreshing. All kinds of concepts like this are just accepted by philosophers as obvious, until someone challenges them. The whole undergrowth of modal thinking needs a good flamethrower taken to it. |
| 6796 | Subjective probability measures personal beliefs; objective probability measures the chance of an event happening [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Subjective probability measures a person's strength of belief in the truth of a proposition; objective probability concerns the chance a certain sort of event has of happening, independently of whether anyone thinks it is likely to occur or not. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: The challenge to the second one is that God would know for certain whether a meteor will hit the Earth next week. The impact looks like 'bad luck' to us, but necessary to one who really knows. |
| 6797 | Objective probability of tails measures the bias of the coin, not our beliefs about it [Bird] |
| Full Idea: In tossing a coin, the objective probability of tails is a measure of the bias of the coin; the bias and the probability are objective features of the coin, like its mass and shape; these properties have nothing to do with our beliefs about the coin. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: Despite my reservation that God would not seem to be very interested in the probabilities of coin-tossing, since he knows each outcome with certaintly, this is fairly convincing. God might say that the coin has a 'three-to-two bias'. |
| 9505 | Empiricist saw imaginability and possibility as close, but now they seem remote [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Whereas the link between imaginability and possibility was once held, under the influence of empiricism, to be close, it is now widely held to be very remote. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8) | |
| A reaction: Tim Williamson nicely argues the opposite - that assessment of possibility is an adjunct of our ability to think counterfactually, which is precisely an operation of the imagination. Big error is possible, but how else could we do it? |
| 9491 | Haecceitism says identity is independent of qualities and without essence [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The core of haecceitism is the view that the transworld identity of particulars does not supervene on their qualitative features. ...The simplest expression of it is that particulars lack essential properties. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be something the 'bare substratum' account of substance (associated with Locke). You are left with the difficulty of how to individuate an instance of the haecceity, as opposed to the bundle of properties attached to it. |
| 12583 | Belief truth-conditions are normal circumstances where the belief is supposed to occur [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The truth condition of the belief is the 'normal' circumstances in which, given the learning process, it is biologically supposed to be present. | |
| From: David Papineau (Reality and Representation [1987], p.67), quoted by Christopher Peacocke - A Study of Concepts 5.2 | |
| A reaction: How do we account for a belief in ghosts in this story? The notion of 'normal' circumstances and what is 'biologically supposed' to happen don't seem very appropriate. This is the 'teleological' view of belief. |
| 13406 | A priori knowledge is analytic - the structure of our concepts - and hence unimportant [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I am a fully paid up-naturalist, but I see no reason to deny that a priori knowledge is possible. My view is that a priori knowledge is unimportant (esp to philosophy). If there is a priori knowledge, it is analytic, true by the structure of our concepts. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Insignificance of A Priori Knowledge [2010], §1) | |
| A reaction: It is one thing to say it is the structure of our concepts, and another to infer that it is unimportant. I take the structure of our concepts to be a shadow cast by the structure of the world. E.g. the structure of numbers reveals the world. |
| 7871 | Perceptual concepts can't just refer to what causes classification [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: We may say that a perceptual concept refers to that entity which normally causes classificatory uses of that concept...but this won't work because such deployments are often caused by things which the concept doesn't refer to. A model might cause 'bird'. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 4.6) | |
| A reaction: This rejects the causal theory of perceptual concepts. I like the approach, because classifying things strikes me as absolutely basic to what brains do. To see that x is a bird is to place x in the class of birds. |
| 13408 | Intuition and thought-experiments embody substantial information about the world [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Naturalists can allow for thought-experiments in philosophy. Intuitions play an important role, but only because they embody substantial information about the world. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Insignificance of A Priori Knowledge [2010], §3) | |
| A reaction: In this sense, intuitions are just memories which are too complex for us to articulate. They are not the intuitions of 'pure reason'. It is hard to connect the intuitive spotting of a proof with memories of the physical world. |
| 6800 | Many philosophers rate justification as a more important concept than knowledge [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers take the notion of justification to be more important or more basic than the concept of knowledge. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing. Given the obvious social and conventional element in 'knowledge' ("do we agree that the candidate really knows the answer?"), justification may well be closer to where the real action is. 'Logos', after all, is at the heart of philosophy. |
| 6786 | As science investigates more phenomena, the theories it needs decreases [Bird] |
| Full Idea: A remarkable fact about modern science is that as the number of phenomena which science has investigated has grown, the number of theories needed to explain them has decreased. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: This rebuts the idea that theories are probably false because we are unlikely to have thought of the right one (Idea 6784). More data suggests more theories, yet we end up with fewer theories. Why is simplification of theories possible? |
| 6792 | If theories need observation, and observations need theories, how do we start? [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If we cannot know the truth of theories without observation, and we cannot know the truth of observations without theories, where do we start? | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 6793. You make a few observations, under the illusion that they are objective, then formulate a promising theory, then go back and deconstruct the observations, then tighten up the theory, and so on. |
| 6757 | Explanation predicts after the event; prediction explains before the event [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Explanation is prediction after the event and prediction is explanation before the event. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice slogan, fitting Hempel's 'covering law' view of explanation. It doesn't seem quite right, because explanations and predictions are couched in very different language. Prediction implies an explanation; explanation implies a prediction. |
| 6777 | Realists say their theories involve truth and the existence of their phenomena [Bird] |
| Full Idea: A realist says of their theories that they can be evaluated according to truth, they aim at truth, their success favours their truth, their unobserved entities probably exist, and they would explain the observable phenomena. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be the only sensible attitude towards scientific theories, even if they do become confusing down at the level of quantum theory. Theories aim to be true explanations. |
| 6804 | There is no agreement on scientific method - because there is no such thing [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I find little concurrence as to what scientific method might actually be - the reason being, I conclude, that there is no such thing. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: I take the essence of science to be two things: first, becoming very fussy about empirical evidence; second, setting up controlled conditions to get at the evidence that seems to be needed. I agree that there seems to be no distinctive way of thinking. |
| 6805 | Relativity ousted Newtonian mechanics despite a loss of simplicity [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The theories of relativity ousted Newtonian mechanics despite a loss of simplicity. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998]) | |
| A reaction: This nicely demonstrates that simplicity is not essential, even if it is desirable. The point applies to the use of Ockham's Razor (Idea 6806), and to Hume's objection to miracles (Idea 2227), where strange unnatural events may be the truth. |
| 6778 | Instrumentalists regard theories as tools for prediction, with truth being irrelevant [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Instrumentalism is so called because it regards theories not as attempts to describe or explain the world, but as instruments for making predictions; for the instrumentalist, asking about the truth of a theory is a conceptual mistake. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: It cannot be denied that theories are used to make predictions, and there is nothing wrong with being solely interested in predictions. I cannot make head or tail of the idea that truth is irrelevant. Why is a given theory so successful? |
| 6775 | Induction is inference to the best explanation, where the explanation is a law [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Induction can be seen as inference to the best explanation, where the explanation is a law. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I like this. I increasingly think of explanation as central to rational thought, as the key route for empiricists to go beyond their immediate and verifiable experience. Laws can be probabilistic. |
| 6791 | If Hume is right about induction, there is no scientific knowledge [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If Hume is right about induction then there is no scientific knowledge. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: The first step is to recognise that induction is not deductively valid, but that does not make it irrational. If something happens five times, get ready for the sixth. If we discover the necessary features of nature, we can predict the future. |
| 6790 | Anything justifying inferences from observed to unobserved must itself do that [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Whatever could do the job of justifying an inference from the observed to the unobserved must itself be an inference from the observed to the unobserved. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: We must first accept that the unobserved might not be like the observed, no matter how much regularity we have, so it can't possibly be a logical 'inference'. Essences generate regularities, but non-essences may not. |
| 6738 | Any conclusion can be drawn from an induction, if we use grue-like predicates [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It looks as if any claim about the future can be made to be a conclusion of an inductive argument from any premises about the past, as long as we use a strange enough grue-like predicate. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Intro) | |
| A reaction: So don't use strange grue-like predicates. If all our predicates randomly changed their reference each day, we would be unable to talk to one another at all. Emeralds don't change their colour-properties, so why change the predicates that refer to them? |
| 6739 | Several months of observing beech trees supports the deciduous and evergreen hypotheses [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If someone were to observe beech trees every day over one summer they would have evidence that seems to support both the hypothesis that beech trees are deciduous and the hypothesis that they are evergreens. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Bird offers this to anyone who (like me) is tempted to dismiss the 'grue' problem as ridiculous. Obviously he is right; 'deciduous' works like 'grue'. But we invented the predicate 'deciduous' to match an observed property. |
| 6799 | We normally learn natural kinds from laws, but Goodman shows laws require prior natural kinds [Bird] |
| Full Idea: We know what natural kinds there are by seeing which properties appear in the laws of nature. But one lesson of Goodman's problem is that we cannot identify the laws of nature without some prior identification of natural kinds. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: For Goodman's problem, see Idea 4783. The essentialist view is that the natural kinds come first, and the so-called 'laws' are just regularities in events that arise from the interaction of stable natural kinds. (Keep predicates and properties separate). |
| 6798 | Bayesianism claims to find rationality and truth in induction, and show how science works [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Keen supporters of Bayesianism say it can show how induction is rational and can lead to truth, and it can reveal the underlying structure of actual scientific reasoning. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 2798 for Bayes' Theorem. I find it intuitively implausible that our feeling for probabilities could be reduced to precise numbers, given the subjective nature of the numbers we put into the equation. |
| 6752 | The objective component of explanations is the things that must exist for the explanation [Bird] |
| Full Idea: There is an 'objective', non-epistemic component to explanations, consisting of the things that must exist for A to be able to explain B, and the relations those things have to one another. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be some question-begging here, in that you have to decide what explanation you are after before you can decide which existences are of interest. There are objective facts, though, about what causally links to what. |
| 6754 | We talk both of 'people' explaining things, and of 'facts' explaining things [Bird] |
| Full Idea: We talk both of 'people' explaining things, and of 'facts' explaining things. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: An important point, and it is the job of philosophers to pull the two apart. How we talk does not necessarily show how it is. The concept of explanation is irrelevant in a universe containing no minds, or one containing only God. People seek the facts. |
| 9487 | We can't reject all explanations because of a regress; inexplicable A can still explain B [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Some regard the potential regress of explanations as a reason to think that the very idea of explanation is illusory. This is a fallacy; it is not a necessary condition on A's explaining B that we have an explanation for A also. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.4) | |
| A reaction: True, though to say 'B is explained by A, but A is totally baffling' is not the account we are dreaming of. And the explanation would certainly fail if we could say nothing at all about A, apart from naming it. |
| 6750 | Explanations are causal, nomic, psychological, psychoanalytic, Darwinian or functional [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Explanations can be classified as causal, nomic, psychological, psychoanalytic, Darwinian and functional. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: These could be subdivided, perhaps according to different types of cause. Personally, being a reductionist (like David Lewis, see Idea 3989), I suspect that all of these explanations could be reduced to causation. Essences explain causes. |
| 6761 | Contrastive explanations say why one thing happened but not another [Bird] |
| Full Idea: A 'contrastive explanation' explains why one thing happened but not another. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: If I explain why the ship sank, is this contrastive, or just causal, or both? Am I explaining why it sank rather than turned into a giraffe? An interesting concept, but I can't see myself making use of it. |
| 6758 | 'Covering law' explanations only work if no other explanations are to be found [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The fact that something fits the 'covering law' model of explanation is no guarantee that it is an explanation, for that depends on what other explanations are there to be found. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: He gives Achinstein's example of a poisoned man who is run over by a bus. It has to be a basic requirement of explanations that they are the 'best', and not just something that fits a formula. |
| 6759 | Livers always accompany hearts, but they don't explain hearts [Bird] |
| Full Idea: All animals with a liver also have a heart; so we can deduce from this plus the existence of Fido's liver that he also has a heart, but his liver does not explain why he has a heart. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This is a counterexample to Hempel's deductive-nomological view of explanation. It seems a fairly decisive refutation of any attempt to give a simple rule for explaining things. Different types of explanation compete, and there is a subjective element. |
| 6756 | Probabilistic-statistical explanations don't entail the explanandum, but makes it more likely [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The probabilistic-statistical view of explanation (also called inductive-statistical explantion) is similar to deductive-nomological explanation, but instead of entailing the explanandum a probabilistic-statistical explantion makes it very likely. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: If people have umbrellas up, does that explain rain? Does the presence of a psychopath in the audience explain why I don't go to a rock concert? Still, it has a point. |
| 6760 | An operation might reduce the probability of death, yet explain a death [Bird] |
| Full Idea: An operation for cancer might lead to a patient's death, and so it explains the patient's death while at the same time reducing the probability of death. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This attacks Hempel's 'covering law' approach. Increasing probability of something clearly does not necessarily explain it, though it often will. Feeding you contaminated food will increase the probability of your death, and may cause it. |
| 6785 | Inference to the Best Explanation is done with facts, so it has to be realist [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Explanation of a fact is some other fact or set of facts. And so Inference to the Best Explanation is inference to facts; someone who employs it cannot but take a realist attitude to a theory which is preferred on these grounds. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: So my personal commitment to abduction is entailed by my realism, and my realism is entailed by my belief in the possibility of abduction. We can't explain the properties of a table just by referring to our experiences of tables. |
| 6788 | Maybe bad explanations are the true ones, in this messy world [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It is objected to 'best explanation' that this may well not be the best of all possible worlds - so why think that the best explanation is true? Maybe bad (complicated, unsystematic and weak) explanations are true. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: The only rebuttal of this objection to best explanation seems to be a priori. It would just seem an odd situation if very simple explanations fitted the facts and yet were false, like the points on a graph being a straight line by pure coincidence. |
| 6787 | Which explanation is 'best' is bound to be subjective, and no guide to truth [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It is objected to 'best explanation' that beauty is in the eye of the beholder - the goodness of possible explanations is subjective, and so the choice of best explanation is also subjective, and hence not a suitable guide to truth. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: Explanation is indeed dependent both on the knowledge of the person involved, and on their interests. That doesn't, though, mean that you can choose any old explanation. Causal networks are features of the world. |
| 6751 | Maybe explanation is so subjective that it cannot be a part of science [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers have thought that explanation is hopelessly subjective, so subjective even that it is should have no part in proper science. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: God requires no explanations, and children require many. If fundamental explanations are causal, then laying bare the causal chains is the explanation, whether you want it or not. God knows all the explanations. See Idea 6752. |
| 7852 | The only serious mind-brain theories now are identity, token identity, realization and supervenience [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Anybody writing seriously about mind-brain issues nowadays needs to explain whether they think of materialism in terms of identity, token identity, realization, or supervenience. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], Intro §6) | |
| A reaction: Dualists are not invited. Functionalists are attending a different party. I wonder if his four categories collapse into two: the token/supervenience view, and the identity/realization view? |
| 7864 | Maybe mind and body do overdetermine acts, but are linked (for some reason) [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Maybe physical effects of mental causes are always overdetermined by distinct causes (the 'belt and braces' view). Defenders say the two are still counterfactually dependent - but that would raise the question of why, if they are ontologically distinct. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: [He cites D.H. Mellor as defending 'belt and braces'] This strikes me as the sort of theory that arises from desperation: traditional dualism won't work, but we MUST keep mind separate, so that we can have free will, and save morality. All very confused! |
| 7873 | Young children can see that other individuals sometimes have false beliefs [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The classic manifestation of being able to think about other individuals' mental states is success on the 'false belief test', which requires attribution of mistaken representations to other agents. Children aged three or four can do this. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 4.7) | |
| A reaction: There may be an other minds problem, but there is empirical evidence that we can 'read' the minds of others (from their behaviour) even if other animals can't. That seems to be clear, even if folk psychology is fiction, and we make mistakes. |
| 7874 | Do we understand other minds by simulation-theory, or by theory-theory? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: There is debate about whether we attribute beliefs and desires to others, and predict their behaviour, by simulating the decisions we would make ourselves ('simulation-theory'), or by deducing them from some general theory ('theory-theory'). | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 4.7) | |
| A reaction: Could be both. If someone is hurt, empathy leads to direct mind-reading (which seems like simulation), but if someone is behaving strangely we may have to bring theories to bear, because this person seems to be different. |
| 7882 | Researching phenomenal consciousness is peculiar, because the concepts involved are peculiar [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: It is a mistake to suppose that research into phenomenal consciousness can proceed just like other kinds of scientific research. Phenomenal concepts are peculiar, and some of the questions they pose for empirical investigation are peculiar too. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.01) | |
| A reaction: This arises from Papineau's Conceptual Dualism, that our concepts are deeply dualist, when the underlying ontology is not. Brain researchers are wise to ignore phenomenology, and creep slowly forward from the physical end, where the concepts are clear. |
| 7854 | Whether octopuses feel pain is unclear, because our phenomenal concepts are too vague [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Our phenomenal concepts are irredeemably vague in certain dimensions, in ways that preclude there being any fact of the matter about whether octopuses feel phenomenal pain, or silicon-based humanoids would have any phenomenal consciousness. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], Intro §7) | |
| A reaction: It would be hard for Papineau to prove this point, but clearly our imagination finds it very hard to grasp the idea of a thing which is 'somewhat conscious'. The concept of being much more conscious than humans also bewilders us. |
| 7889 | Our concept of consciousness is crude, and lacks theoretical articulation [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Our phenomenal concept of consciousness-as-such is a crude tool, lacking theoretical articulation | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.13) | |
| A reaction: This is a point well made. Given that the human brain is the most complex thing (for its size) in the known universe, we shouldn't expect it to divide up into three or four clear-cut activities. Compare the precision of 'geography' as a concept. |
| 7891 | We can’t decide what 'conscious' means, so it is undecidable whether cats are conscious [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: If consciousness is availability for HOT judgements, then cats are not conscious, but if it consists in attention, then they are. I say the concept of consciousness is indefinite between the two, so there is no fact about whether cats are conscious. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.16) | |
| A reaction: Nice point. My personal view is that the question of whether cats are conscious is hopeless because philosophers insist on making consciousness all-or-nothing (e.g. Idea 5786). If I experienced cat mentality, I might say I was 'semi-conscious'. |
| 7890 | Maybe a creature is conscious if its mental states represent things in a distinct way [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The thesis of 'representational theories of consciousness' is that a creature is conscious just in case it is in a certain kind of representational state, some state which represents in a certain way. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002]) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Harman, Dretske and Tye] The immediate impediment I see to this view is the extreme difficulty of explaining what the special 'way' is that turns representations into consciousness. Some mental states are not representational, and vice versa. |
| 7885 | The 'actualist' HOT theory says consciousness comes from actual higher judgements of mental states [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The 'actualist' HOT theory says that a state is conscious if the subject is 'aware' of it, where this is understood as a matter of the subject forming some actual Higher-Order judgement about it. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.11) | |
| A reaction: As stated there seems an obvious regress problem. Is the consciousness in the mental state, or in the higher awareness of it? If the former, how does being observed make it conscious? If the latter, what gives the higher level its consciousness? |
| 7886 | Actualist HOT theories imply that a non-conscious mental event could become conscious when remembered [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Actualist HOT theories face an awkward problem with memory judgements: ...how can an earlier mental state be rendered conscious by some later act of memory? As when I see a red pillar box with no higher-order judgement, and then recall it later. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.11) | |
| A reaction: [See 7886 for 'Actualist' HOT theories] This is not altogether absurd. A red pillar box could be somewhere in my field of vision, and then I might suddenly become conscious of it (if it moved!). Police interrogation reminds me of what I only glimpsed. |
| 7887 | States are conscious if they could be the subject of higher-order mental judgements [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The 'dispositional' HOT thesis says that a state is conscious just in case it could have been the subject of an introspective Higher-Order judgement, even if it wasn't actually so subject. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.13) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Dennett and Carruthers for this view] This is designed to meet other problems, but it sounds odd. Does it really make no difference whether higher-judgement actually occurs? How can conscious events be distinguished once they've gone? |
| 7888 | Higher-order judgements may be possible where the subject denies having been conscious [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Dispositional Higher-Order judgeability will be present in some cases which the empirical methodology catalogues as not conscious (as when a subject denies having heard a sound, or seen a bird). | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.13) | |
| A reaction: (This attacks Idea 7887) This confirms my intuition, that we can be quite unconscious of things which can still be recalled at a later date. Of course, one could always challenge the reliability of the subject's report in such a case. |
| 17527 | Causation seems to be an innate concept (or acquired very early) [Bird] |
| Full Idea: There is evidence that the concept of causation is innate, or that we are primed to acquire it very early in life, within months at most. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Causation and the Manifestation of Powers [2010], p.167) | |
| A reaction: Bird doesn't give any references. This is important for our understanding of induction. Creatures seem to learn from a single instance, rather than waiting for habit to be ingrained by many instances. They must infer a cause. |
| 7860 | The epiphenomenal relation of mind and brain is a 'causal dangler', unlike anything else [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: If epiphenomenalism were true, then the relation between mind and brain would be like nothing else in nature. After all, science recognises no other examples of 'causal danglers', ontologically independent states with causes but no effects. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This would be a good enough reason for me to reject the epiphenomenalist view, even if I thought it was a coherent proposal. Insofar as it proposes the existence of something (mind) with no causal powers at all, it strikes me as nonsense. |
| 7862 | Maybe minds do not cause actions, but do cause us to report our decisions [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Even if conscious decisions did not contribute causally to the actions normally attributed to them, they would still presumably be the causes of the sounds I make when I later report my earlier conscious decisions. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a good reply to my view (borrowed from Dennett - Idea 7379), that epiphenomalism proposes an absurdity (an entity with no causal powers). But if mind can cause speech, why could it not cause arm movements? |
| 3513 | How does a dualist mind represent, exist outside space, and be transparent to itself? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Even dualists must explain how the mind represents things, but then their mind-stuff has so many special powers already (being outside space but in time, being transparent to itself etc.) that one more scarcely seems worth worrying about. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.1 n1) | |
| A reaction: I share the exasperation. It is hard to see how a dualist could even begin to formulate a theory about HOW the mind does so many different things. Could Descartes get a research grant for it? Would we understand God if he tried to explain it to us? |
| 3514 | Functionalism needs causation and intentionality to explain actions [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The functionalist approach to the mind needs to invoke assumptions about what desires are for and beliefs are about, in order to infer what agents will do. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Isn't the idea that you discover what desires are for and what beliefs are about by examining their function, and what the agent does? Which end should we start? |
| 7870 | Role concepts either name the realising property, or the higher property constituting the role [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Role concepts can be of two kinds: they can name whichever property realises the role, or they can name the higher property which constitutes the role. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 4.2 n1) | |
| A reaction: This points strikes me as being crucial to discussions of mental functions. Perhaps labels of Realising Properties and Constituting Properties would help. Analytical philosophy rules. |
| 7858 | If causes are basic particulars, this doesn't make conscious and physical properties identical [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: If causes are basic particulars, then the causal argument won't carry you to the identity of conscious and physical properties, since this only requires them to be instantiated in the same particular, not that the properties are themselves identical. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: [See Idea 7857; Papineau is rejecting the Davidson view] This explains how Davidson reaches a token-token identity view. Can two events occur in the same particular at the same moment? Depends what you mean by a 'particular'. |
| 3510 | Epiphenomenalism is supervenience without physicalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is a necessary condition for physicalism, but it is not sufficient. Epiphenomenalism rules out mental variation without physical variation, but says mental properties are quite distinct from physical properties. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: I take full epiphenomenalism about mind to be incoherent, and not worth even mentioning (see Idea 7379). Papineau seems to be thinking of so-called property dualism (which may also be incoherent!). |
| 3511 | Supervenience requires all mental events to have physical effects [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The argument for supervenience rests on the principle that any mental difference must be capable of showing itself in differential physical consequences. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: With our current knowledge of the brain, to assume anything less than this sort of correlation would be crazy. |
| 7865 | Supervenience can be replaced by identifying mind with higher-order or disjunctional properties [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I would argue that any benefits offered by the notion of supervenience are more easily gained simply by identifying mental properties directly with higher-order properties or disjunctions of physical properties. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: Those who talk of supervenience seem to me to have retreated into a mystery that is not far from substance dualism. We want the explanation of a supervenience. If you accompany me everywhere, I think you are stalking me, or are tied to my ankle. |
| 3515 | Knowing what it is like to be something only involves being (physically) that thing [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism does not deny that there are conscious experiences, nor that 'it is like something to have them'. The claim is only that this is nothing different from what it is to be a physical system of the relevant kind. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: The implication is that no physicalist is an extreme eliminativist about consciousness, which seems to be correct. We all concede that weather exists, but have a reductive view of it. The key question is whether mind is reducible to physics. |
| 7892 | The completeness of physics is needed for mind-brain identity [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Without the completeness of physics, there is no compelling reason to identify the mind with the brain. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], App 7) | |
| A reaction: Papineau says the completeness of physics was accepted from the 1950s. Why were Epicurus and Hobbes physicalists? Do we have a circularity here? How do you establish the completeness of physics, without asserting mind to be physical? |
| 7879 | Mind-brain reduction is less explanatory, because phenomenal concepts lack causal roles [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Mind-brain reductions are less explanatory than characteristic reductions in other areas of science, ...because phenomenal concepts have no special associations with causal roles. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: This may always have some truth in it, but I would expect reductive accounts in the far future to get much closer to giving explanations of phenomenal experience. We can't work down from the phenomenal end, but we can work up from the physical/causal end. |
| 20971 | Weak reduction of mind is to physical causes; strong reduction is also to physical laws [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Weak reduction of mind requires only that mental causes be identified with physical causes. A strong reduction requires also that the laws by which such causes operate follow by composition from non-special laws. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], App 3 n8) | |
| A reaction: I'm cautious about laws, but I still vote for strong reduction. No new principles are needed to make a mind from a brain. |
| 7856 | It is absurd to think that physical effects are caused twice, so conscious causes must be physical [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Many effects that we attribute to conscious causes have full physical causes. But it would be absurd to suppose that these effects are caused twice over. So the conscious causes must be identical to some part of those physical causes. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: [Papineau labelled this the Causal Argument] Of course two causes can combine to produce an effect, and there can be redundant physical overcausation, but in general I think this is a good argument. |
| 7881 | Accept ontological monism, but conceptual dualism; we think in a different way about phenomenal thought [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: We should be ontological monists, but we should be conceptual dualists. We need to recognise a special phenomenal way of thinking about conscious properties, if we are to dispel the confusions that persuade us that conscious properties cannot be material. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.01) | |
| A reaction: This idea came to me as a revelation, and strikes me as spot on. We have developed conceptual dualism simply because humans cannot directly see that their thinking is actually physical brain activity. Thought seems ungrounded, and utterly different. |
| 3512 | If a mental state is multiply realisable, why does it lead to similar behaviour? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: If functionalism implies that there is nothing physically in common among the realisations of a given mental state, then there is no possibility of any uniform explanation of why they all give rise to a common physical result. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the well known interaction problem for dualism. The standard reply is to accept interaction as a given (with no apparent explanation). A miracle, if you like. |
| 7866 | Mary acquires new concepts; she previously thought about the same property using material concepts [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: While there is indeed a before-after difference in Mary, this is just a matter of coming to think in new ways, and acquiring a new concept. There is no new experiential property. She could think about the property perfectly well, using material concepts. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: I think it is better to talk of Mary encountering a new mode of experiencing something, just as experience becomes blurred when glasses are removed. No one acquires new 'knowledge' of blurred objects when they remove their glasses. |
| 7850 | Thinking about a thing doesn't require activating it [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Thinking about something doesn't require activating some version of it. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], Intro §5) | |
| A reaction: E.g. I can discuss 'red' without visualising it. This observation strikes me as simple and basic to what thinking is. Papineau thinks that confusion about this simple point leads to major errors in the philosophy of mind. |
| 7851 | Consciousness affects bodily movement, so thoughts must be material states [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Conscious states clearly affect our bodily movements. But surely anything that so produces a material effect must itself be a material state. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], Intro §6) | |
| A reaction: This is Papineau's simplest possible statement of what he calls the Causal Argument, which he considers to be a knock-down argument for materialism. I agree, but it is really only an intuition. You never know... |
| 16369 | There is a single file per object, memorised, reactivated, consolidated and expanded [Papineau, by Recanati] |
| Full Idea: For Papineau there is just one file, which is initialised on the first encounter with the object, stored in memory, reactivated on further encounters, and consolidated with familiarity. Accumulation of information shows it is the same file. | |
| From: report of David Papineau (Phenomenal and Perceptual Concepts [2006]) by François Recanati - Mental Files 7.2 | |
| A reaction: Recanati attempts to refute this view, defending a more complex taxonomy of files. I'm sympathetic to Papineau, as distinct shift in file type doesn't sound very plausible. Simplicity suggests Papineau as a better starting-point. |
| 7884 | Most reductive accounts of representation imply broad content [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Broadness of content is sometimes defended purely on intuitive grounds, but it is also a corollary of most reductive accounts of representation, including standard teleosemantic and causal accounts. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002]) | |
| A reaction: (For Causal and Teleosemantic views, see Idea 7871, Idea 7872) Presumably a causal/purposeful relationship would only make sense if both halves of the relationship were specified. I suspect this is obscured by over-simplifications. Cf Idea 6634! |
| 7863 | If content hinges on matters outside of you, how can it causally influence your actions? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: How can 'broad contents', which hinge on matters outside your head, exert a causal influence on your bodily movements? Surely your bodily movements are causally influenced solely by matters inside your skin, not by how matters are outside you. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This supports my suspicion that there are some extremely simplistic interpretations of the Twin Earth case floating around. If Putnam means by 'elm' whatever experts mean, it is still his idea of what counts as an expert view. |
| 7883 | Verificationists tend to infer indefinite answers from undecidable questions [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The verificationist sin is to infer an indefiniteness of answers immediately from the undecidability of questions. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.02) | |
| A reaction: This remark is aimed at Dummett's anti-realism. It strikes me that what is being described really is a sort of arrogance, in believing that reality can somehow be inferred from studying the epistemic apparatus of a few miserable little mammals. |
| 13410 | Verificationism about concepts means you can't deny a theory, because you can't have the concept [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Verificationism about concepts implies that thinkers will not share concepts with adherents of theories they reject. Those who reject the phlogiston theory will not possess the same concept as adherents, so cannot say 'there is no phlogiston'. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Insignificance of A Priori Knowledge [2010], §6) | |
| A reaction: The point seems to be more general - that it is hard to see how you can have a concept of anything which doesn't actually exist, if the concept is meant to rest on some sort of empirical verification. |
| 7872 | Teleosemantics equates meaning with the item the concept is intended to track [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The teleosemantic view of perceptual concepts is that the referential value of the concept can be equated with those items which it is the biological function of the concept to track. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 4.6) | |
| A reaction: This seems to work quite nicely for 'bird', which is concept which is used to track birds. It might even work for complex entities, or abstract entities, or even negative entities. Imagination must play a role in that last one. |
| 7869 | Truth conditions in possible worlds can't handle statements about impossibilities [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Basing content on possible worlds that result in truth leaves no room for thoughts about genuine impossibilities, since there are not possible worlds whose actuality would make an 'impossible thought' true. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 3.7) | |
| A reaction: Negative existentials like 'no rabbits in this room' and 'no snakes in this room' seem to have the same truth conditions as well. I suppose the sentences must be translated into a logical form which suits the theory, with negation stuck on the end. |
| 7868 | Thought content is possible worlds that make the thought true; if that includes the actual world, it's true [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The content of our thoughts can be equated with those possible worlds whose actuality would make the thought true. On this model, a true thought is one whose content includes the actual world, while a false thought is one whose content does not. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 3.7) | |
| A reaction: This is the possible worlds semantics version of truth conditions theories of meaning. Papineau offers a nice difficulty for the theory (Idea 7869). Dummett says the whole approach is circular, because content precedes truth. |
| 3516 | The Private Language argument only means people may misjudge their experiences [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I take the moral of the Private Language argument to be that there must be room for error in people's judgements about their experiences, not that those judgements must necessarily be expressed in a language used by a community. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.4 n10) | |
| A reaction: These two readings don't seem to be in conflict, and the argument must have something to say about the communal nature of thought expressed in language. Language imposes introspection on us? |
| 7810 | The 'Eumenides' of Aeschylus shows blood feuds replaced by law [Aeschylus, by Grayling] |
| Full Idea: The 'Eumenides' of Aeschylus tells how the old rule of revenge and blood feud was replaced by a due process of law before a civil jury. | |
| From: report of Aeschylus (The Eumenides [c.458 BCE]) by A.C. Grayling - What is Good? Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 1659, where this revolution is attributed to Protagoras (a little later than Aeschylus). I take the rule of law and of society to be above all the rule of reason, because the aim is calm objectivity instead of emotion. |
| 6776 | Natural kinds are those that we use in induction [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Natural kinds are the kinds one should make use of in inductive inference (if that is explanation which leads to laws). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: The problem with this is that it is epistemological rather than ontological. In induction we use superficial resemblences that are immediately obvious, whereas the nature of kinds can be buried deep in the chemistry or physics. |
| 6767 | Rubies and sapphires are both corundum, with traces of metals varying their colours [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Both rubies (valuable) and sapphires (less valuable) are corundum (Al2O3), differing only in their colours, for which traces of iron, titanium and chomium are responsible. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: A nice example which illustrates how natural kinds determined by nominal essence could be drastically different from those suggested by real essence. It certainly suggests that corundum might be a natural kind, but ruby isn't. |
| 6768 | Tin is not one natural kind, but appears to be 21, depending on isotope [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If real essences are decided by microstructure, then what we call the element tin is not a natural kind, but a mixture of 21 different kinds, one for each isotope. There also exist two different allotropes of tin - white tin and grey tin. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: This example vividly brings out the difficulties of the Kripke-Putnam view. If natural kinds 'overlap', then there would be a very extensive overlap among the 21 isotopes of tin. |
| 6770 | Membership of a purely random collection cannot be used as an explanation [Bird] |
| Full Idea: One might randomly collect diverse things and give the collection a name, but one would not expect it to explain anything to say that a certain object belonged to this collection. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: This is in support of Bird's view that natural kinds are formulated because of their explanatory role. There is, though, an undeniable subjective aspect to explanation, in that explanations arise from the ignorance and interests of persons. |
| 6771 | Natural kinds may overlap, or be sub-kinds of one another [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It seems clear that in some cases one natural kind may be a subkind of another, while in other cases natural kinds may overlap without one being the subkind of another. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Given the enormous difficulty of pinpointing natural kinds (e.g. Idea 6768), it is hard to know whether the comment is correct or not. Ellis says natural kinds come 'in hierarchies', which would make subkinds normal, but overlapping unlikely. |
| 6773 | If F is a universal appearing in a natural law, then Fs form a natural kind [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The proposal is that if F is a universal appearing in some natural law, then Fs form a natural kind. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Such proposals always invite the question 'What is it about F that enables it to be a universal in a natural law?' Nothing can be ultimately defined simply by its role. The character (essence, even) of the thing makes the role possible. |
| 6769 | In the Kripke-Putnam view only nuclear physicists can know natural kinds [Bird] |
| Full Idea: In the Kripke-Putnam view, it is very difficult for anyone except nuclear physicists to pick out natural kinds, since everything else is made out of compounds of different isotopes. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: The concept of a rigid 'natural kind' does not have to be sacred. Tin might be considered a natural kind, despite having 21 isotopes. What matters is protons, not the neutrons. |
| 6774 | Darwinism suggests that we should have a native ability to detect natural kinds [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Creatures that are able to recognise natural kinds and laws have a selective advantage, so Darwinism suggests that we should have some native ability to detect natural kinds. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, but it makes 'natural kind' a rather instrumental concept, relative to our interests. True natural kinds cut across our interests, as when we discover by anatomy that whales are not fish, or that rubies and sapphires are both corundum. |
| 6764 | Nominal essence of a natural kind is the features that make it fit its name [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The nominal essence of a natural kind K consists of those features a thing must have to deserve the name 'a K' by virtue of the meaning of that name. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Some people think 'nominal essence' is the only essence there is, which would make it relative to human languages. The rival view is that there are 'real essences'. I favour the latter view. |
| 6766 | Jadeite and nephrite are superficially identical, but have different composition [Bird] |
| Full Idea: There might be more than one natural kind that shares the same superficial features, …jade, for example, has two forms, jadeite and nephrite, which are similar in superficial properties, but have different chemical composition and structure. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: It might be questioned whether jadeite and nephrite really are natural kinds, either together or separately. |
| 6808 | Reference to scientific terms is by explanatory role, not by descriptions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I propose that reference to scientific terms, such as natural kinds and theoretical terms, is not determined by a sense or description attached to the term, but by its explanatory role. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: He gives the example of an electron, which had the same role in electrical theory, despite changes in understanding its nature. One might talk of its 'natural' (causal) role, rather than its 'explanatory' role (which implies a human viewpoint). |
| 17528 | The dispositional account explains causation, as stimulation and manifestation of dispositions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The analysis of causation in terms of dispositions provides no conceptual reduction, but it does provide insight into the metaphysics of causation. We then know what causation is - it is the stimulation and manifestation of a disposition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Causation and the Manifestation of Powers [2010], p.167) | |
| A reaction: I would say that it offers the essence of causation, by giving a basic explanation of it. See Mumford/Lill Anjum on this. |
| 9493 | We should explain causation by powers, not powers by causation [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The notion of 'causal power' is not to be analysed in terms of causation; if anything, the relationship is the reverse. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
| A reaction: It is a popular view these days to take causation as basic (as opposed to the counterfactual account), but I prefer this view. If anything is basic in nature, it is the dynamic force in the engine room, which is the active powers of substances. |
| 7853 | Causation is based on either events, or facts, or states of affairs [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Any serious theory of the mind-brain must explain whether it thinks of causation in terms of events, facts, or states of affairs. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], Intro §6) | |
| A reaction: I instantly prefer events, simply because they can be specified a little more precisely than the other two. Since cause has a direction in time, it would be nice to specify the times of its components, and events have times. |
| 7857 | Causes are instantiations of properties by particulars, or they are themselves basic particulars [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: One view of causes is that they are facts, or instantiations of properties (maybe by particulars, making them 'Kim-events'); the alternative view is that causes themselves are basic particulars ('Davidson-events'). | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Like Papineau, I incline to the Kim view. It is too easy for philosophers to treat key ideas as unanalysable axioms of thought. An event typically has components and features. It is a contingent matter whether there are any events. |
| 6753 | Laws are more fundamental in science than causes, and laws will explain causes [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I think laws are fundamental and where there is a cause there is always a set of laws that encompasses the cause; identifying a cause will never be the final word in an scientific investigation, but will be open to supplementation by the underlying law. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: I think this is wrong. I would say (from the essentialist angle) that essences have causes, and the laws are the regularities that are caused by the essences. If laws are the lowest level of explanation, why these laws and not others? God? |
| 9494 | Singularism about causes is wrong, as the universals involved imply laws [Bird] |
| Full Idea: While singularists about causation might think that a particular has its causal powers independently of law, it is difficult to see how a universal could have or confer causal powers without generating what we would naturally think of as a law. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
| A reaction: This is a middle road between the purely singularist account (Anscombe) and the fully nomological account. We might say that a caused event will be 'involved in law-like behaviour', without attributing the cause to a law. |
| 17526 | The counterfactual approach makes no distinction between cause and pre-condition [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The counterfactual approach makes no distinction between cause and condition, ...but when the smoke sets off the fire alarm, the smoke is the cause, whereas the presence of the alarm is just the condition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Causation and the Manifestation of Powers [2010], p.162) | |
| A reaction: Bird defends the idea that causes are what stimulate dispositions to act. |
| 6762 | Newton's laws cannot be confirmed individually, but only in combinations [Bird] |
| Full Idea: None of Newton's laws individually records anything that can be observed; it is only from combinations of Newton's laws that we can derive the measurable motions of bodies. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This certainly scuppers any traditional positivist approach to how we confirm laws of nature. It invites the possibility that a different combination might fit the same observations. Experiments attempt to isolate laws. |
| 6763 | Parapsychology is mere speculation, because it offers no mechanisms for its working [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Wegener's theory of continental drift was only accepted when the theory of plate tectonics was developed, providing a mechanism. While some correlations exist for parapsychology, lack of plausible mechanisms leaves it as speculation. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: But parapsychology is not even on a par with Wegener's speculation, because his was consistent with known physical laws, whereas parapsychology flatly contradicts them. The so-called correlations are also not properly established. |
| 6772 | Existence requires laws, as inertia or gravity are needed for mass or matter [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I suspect that what we mean by 'mass' and 'matter' depends on our identifying the existence of laws of inertia and gravity; hence the idea of a world without laws is incoherent, for there to be anything at all there must be some laws and some kinds. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I find this counterintuitive. Reasonably stable existence requires something reasonably like laws. We only understand the physical world because we interact with it. But neither of those is remotely as strong as Bird's claim. |
| 9507 | Laws are explanatory relationships of things, which supervene on their essences [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The laws of a domain are the fundamental, general explanatory relationships between kinds, quantities, and qualities of that domain, that supervene upon the essential natures of those things. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the scientific essentialist view of laws [see entries there, in 'Laws of Nature']. There seems uncertainty between 'kinds' and 'qualities' (with 'quantities' looking like a category mistake). I vote, with Ellis, for natural kinds as the basis. |
| 9488 | Laws are either disposition regularities, or relations between properties [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Instead of viewing laws as regular relationships between dispositional properties and stimulus-manifestation, they can be conceived of as a relation between properties. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: Bird offers these as the two main views, with the first coming from scientific essentialism, and the second from Armstrong's account of universals. Personally I favour the first, but Bird suggests that powers give the best support for both views. |
| 6740 | 'All uranium lumps are small' is a law, but 'all gold lumps are small' is not [Bird] |
| Full Idea: 'Uranium lumps have mass of less than 1000 kg' is a law, but 'gold lumps have mass of less than 1000kg' is not a law. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: A nice example. Essentialists talk about the nature of the substances; regularity theorists prefer to talk of nested or connected regularities (e.g. about explosions). In induction, how do you decide what your duty requires you to observe? |
| 6741 | There can be remarkable uniformities in nature that are purely coincidental [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Bode's non-law (of 1772, about the gaps between the planets) shows that there can be remarkable uniformities in nature that are purely coincidental. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: If Bode's law really were confirmed, even for asteroids and newly discovered planets, it might suggest that an explanation really is required, and there is some underlying cause. How likely is the coincidence? Perhaps we have no way of telling. |
| 6742 | A law might have no instances, if it was about things that only exist momentarily [Bird] |
| Full Idea: A law might have no instances at all; for example, about the chemical and electrical behaviour of the transuranic elements, which only exist briefly in laboratories. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Nice example. We need to distinguish, though, (as Bird reminds us) between laws and theories. We have no theories in this area, but there are counterfactual truths about what the transuranic elements would do in certain circumstances. |
| 6743 | If laws are just instances, the law should either have gaps, or join the instances arbitrarily [Bird] |
| Full Idea: For the simple regularity theorist, the function ought to be a gappy one, leaving out values not actually instantiated; …one function would fit the actual points on the graph as well as any other. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: The 'simple' theorist says there is nothing more to a law than its instances. Clearly Bird is right; if the points line up, we join them with a straight line, making counterfactual assumptions about points which were not actually observed. |
| 6744 | Where is the regularity in a law predicting nuclear decay? [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If a law of nuclear physics says that nuclei of a certain kind have a probability p of decaying within time t, what is the regularity here? | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Hume gives an answer, in terms of regularities observed among previous instances. Nevertheless the figure p given in the law does not itself have any instances, so the law is predicting something that may never have actually happened before. |
| 6747 | Laws cannot explain instances if they are regularities, as something can't explain itself [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It can be objected that laws cannot do the job of explaining their instances if they are merely regularities, ...because something cannot explain itself. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: A nice point. The objection assumes that a law should explain things, rather than just describing them. I take the model to be smoking-and-cancer; the statistics describe what is happening, but only lung biochemistry will explain it. |
| 9496 | That other diamonds are hard does not explain why this one is [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The fact that some other diamonds are hard does not explain why this diamond is hard. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.3.2) | |
| A reaction: A very nice aphorism! It pinpoints the whole error of trying to explain the behaviour of the world by citing laws. Why should this item obey that law? Bird prefers 'powers', and so do I. |
| 6748 | Similar appearance of siblings is a regularity, but shared parents is what links them [Bird] |
| Full Idea: There may be a regularity of siblings looking similar, but the tie that binds them is not their similarity, but rather their being born of the same parents. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: A nice objection to the regularity view. Regularities, as so often in philosophy (e.g. Idea 1364), may be the evidence or test for a law, rather than the law itself, which requires causal mechanisms, ultimately based (I think) in essences. |
| 6749 | We can only infer a true regularity if something binds the instances together [Bird] |
| Full Idea: We cannot infer a regularity from its instances unless there is something stronger than the regularity itself binding the instances together. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Spells out the implication of the example in Idea 6748. The reply to this criticism would be that no account can possibly be given of the 'something stronger' than further regularities, at a lower level (e.g. in the physics). |
| 6803 | If we only infer laws from regularities among observations, we can't infer unobservable entities. [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If the naïve inductivist says we should see well-established regularities among our observations, and take that to be the law or causal connection…this will not help us to infer the existence of unobservable entities. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: The obvious solution to this difficulty is an appeal to 'best explanation'. Bird is obviously right that we couldn't survive in the world, let alone do science, if we only acted on what we had actually observed (e.g. many bodies, but not the poison). |
| 6801 | Accidental regularities are not laws, and an apparent regularity may not be actual [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Many actual regularities are not laws (accidental regularities), and many perceived regularities are not actual ones (a summer's worth of observing green leaves). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: These problems are not sufficient to refute the regularity view of laws. Accidental regularities can only be short-lived, and perceived regularities support laws without clinching them. There is an awful lot of regularity behind laws concerning gravity. |
| 9479 | Dispositional essentialism says laws (and laws about laws) are guaranteed regularities [Bird] |
| Full Idea: For the regularity version of dispositional essentialism about laws, laws are those regularities whose truth is guaranteed by the essential dispositional nature of one or more of the constituents. Regularities that supervene on such laws are also laws. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Even if you accept necessary behaviour resulting from essential dispositions, you still need to distinguish the important regularities from the accidental ones, so the word 'guarantee' is helpful, even if it raises lots of difficulties. |
| 6746 | There may be many laws, each with only a few instances [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It might be that there is a large number of laws each of which has only a small number of instances. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a problem for the Ramsey-Lewis view (Idea 6745) that the laws of nature are a simple, powerful and coherent system. We must be cautious about bringing a priori principles like Ockham's Razor (Idea 3667) to bear on the laws of nature. |
| 6745 | A regularity is only a law if it is part of a complete system which is simple and strong [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The systematic (Ramsey-Lewis) regularity theory says that a regularity is a law of nature if and only if it appears as a theorem or axiom in that true deductive system which achieves a best combination of simplicity and strength. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Personally I don't accept the regularity view of laws, but this looks like the best account anyone has come up with. Individual bunches of regularities can't add up to or demonstrate a law, but coherence with all regularities might do it. |
| 6802 | With strange enough predicates, anything could be made out to be a regularity [Bird] |
| Full Idea: We learned from Goodman's problem that with strange enough predicates anything could be made out to be a regularity. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: For Goodman's problem, see Idea 4783. The point, as I see it, is that while predicates can be applied arbitrarily (because they are just linguistic), properties cannot, because they are features of the world. Emeralds are green. |
| 9473 | Laws cannot offer unified explanations if they don't involve universals [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Laws, or what flow from them, are supposed to provide a unified explanation of the behaviours of particulars. Without universals the explanation of the behaviours of things lacks the required unity. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Sounds a bit question-begging? Gravity seems fairly unified, whereas the frequency of London buses doesn't. Maybe I could unify bus-behaviour by positing a few new universals? The unity should first be in the phenomena, not in the explanation. |
| 9484 | If the universals for laws must be instantiated, a vanishing particular could destroy a law [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If universals exist only where and when they are instantiated, this make serious trouble for the universals view of laws. It would be most odd if a particular, merely by changing its properties, could cause a law to go out of existence. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This sounds conclusive. He notes that this is probably why Armstrong does not adopt this view (though Lowe seems to favour it). Could there be a possible property (and concomitant law) which was never ever instantiated? |
| 9506 | Salt necessarily dissolves in water, because of the law which makes the existence of salt possible [Bird] |
| Full Idea: We cannot have a world where it is true both that salt exists (which requires Coulomb's Law to be true), and that it fails to dissolve in water (which requires Coulomb's Law to be false). So the dissolving is necessary even if the Law is contingent. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8.2) | |
| A reaction: Excellent. It is just like the bonfire on the Moon (imaginable through ignorance, but impossible). People who assert that the solubility of salt is contingent tend not to know much about chemistry. |
| 23713 | Most laws supervene on fundamental laws, which are explained by basic powers [Bird, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| Full Idea: According to Bird, non-fundamental laws supervene on fundamental laws, and so are ultimately explained by fundamental powers. | |
| From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by Friend/Kimpton-Nye - Dispositions and Powers 3.6.1 | |
| A reaction: This looks like the picture I subscribe to. Roughly, fundamental laws are explained by powers, and non-fundamental laws are explained by properties, which are complexes of powers. 'Fundamental' may not be a precise term! |
| 6789 | If flame colour is characteristic of a metal, that is an empirical claim needing justification [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I might say that flame colours are a characteristic feature of metals, but this is an empirical proposition which is in part about the unobserved, and stands in need of justification. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This draws attention to the fact that essentialism is not just a metaphysical theory, but is also part of the scientific enterprise. Among things to research about metals is the reason why they have a characteristic flame. |
| 9489 | Essentialism can't use conditionals to explain regularities, because of possible interventions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The straightforward dispositional essentialist account of laws by subjunctive conditionals is false because dispositions typically suffer from finks and antidotes. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: [Finks and antidotes intervene before a disposition can take effect] This seems very persuasive to me, and shows why you can't just explain laws as counterfactual or conditional claims. Explanation demands what underlies them. |
| 20974 | Modern biological research, especially into the cell, has revealed no special new natural forces [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: In the 1950s a great deal became known about biochemical and neurophysiological processes, especially at the level of the cell, and none of it gave any evidence for the existence of special forces not found elsewhere in nature. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], A 6) | |
| A reaction: Papineau says that this plus the conservation of energy makes the closure of physics faily conclusive. I would think the similar failure of modern research into the brain to find evidence of weird forces strengthens the case. |
| 20976 | The completeness of physics cannot be proved [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: There is no knock down argument for the completeness of physics. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], App 7) | |
| A reaction: This is commendably honest, given that he pins his view of the mind on it. He makes the case sound overwhelming, though. The thing which would breach the completeness is like the Loch Ness monster - you can't prove it isn't there, if it hides. |
| 20970 | Determinism is possible without a complete physics, if mental forces play a role [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: We can accept determinism without accepting physical determinism, and so without accepting the completeness of physics. ...We can have a deterministic model in which sui generis mental forces play an essential role. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], App 3) | |
| A reaction: Papineau cites (on p.241) the 18th century biologist Robert Whytt as an example of this view. |
| 20975 | Quantum 'wave collapses' seem to violate conservation of energy [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The conservation of energy is apparently violated by 'wave collapses' in quantum systems. | |
| From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], A 7 n15) | |
| A reaction: One could imagine it being a little harder to verify the conservation of energy at the quantum levels, where particles and anti-particles pop in and out of existence. I've been wondering why there is some suspicion of collapses. |
| 6807 | In Newton mass is conserved, but in Einstein it can convert into energy [Bird] |
| Full Idea: According to Newton mass is conserved, while in Einstein's theory mass is not conserved but can be converted into and from energy. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Philosophy of Science [1998]) | |
| A reaction: Perhaps this is the most fundamental difference between the theories. It certainly suggests that 'mass' was a conventional concept rather than a natural one. Maybe the relative notion of 'weight' is more natural than 'mass'. |
| 9504 | The relational view of space-time doesn't cover times and places where things could be [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The obvious problem with the simple relational view of space and time is that it fails to account for the full range of spatio-temporal possibility. There seem to be times and places where objects and events could be, but are not. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.3.2) | |
| A reaction: This view seems strongly supported by intuition. I certainly don't accept the views of physicists and cosmologists on the subject, because they seem to approach the whole thing too instrumentally. |