4 ideas
| 15873 | Laws of nature are just records of regularities and correlations, with concepts to make recording them easier [Mach, by Harré] |
| Full Idea: For Mach, the laws of nature are simply the compendious record of sensory regularities, correlations of elements. Any additional concepts are no more than symbols or devices for the convenient recording of general sensory patterns. | |
| From: report of Ernst Mach (Popular Scientific Lectures [1894], pp.201-5) by Rom Harré - Laws of Nature 2 | |
| A reaction: Mach is the high priest of scientific positivism, which is really just hard-line empiricism. |
| 18470 | Maybe truth-making is an unanalysable primitive, but we can specify principles for it [Smith,B] |
| Full Idea: The signs are that truth-making is not analysable in terms of anything more primitive, but we need to be able to say more than just that. So we ought to consider it as specified by principles of truth-making. | |
| From: Barry Smith (Truth-maker Realism: response to Gregory [2000], p.20), quoted by Fraser MacBride - Truthmakers 1.5 | |
| A reaction: This is the axiomatic approach to such problems - treat the target concept as an undefinable, unanalysable primitive, and then give rules for its connections. Maybe all metaphysics should work like that, with a small bunch of primitives. |
| 18469 | God might necessitate that something happen, but He is not the truth-maker for it [Smith,B] |
| Full Idea: Suppose that God wills that John kiss Mary now. God's willing thereby necessitates the truth of 'John is kissing Mary'. But God's act is not a truth-maker for this judgement. | |
| From: Barry Smith (Truth-maker Realism [1999], p.6), quoted by Fraser MacBride - Truthmakers 1.2 | |
| A reaction: The point is that truth-making relates to the fact that it happened, not what necessitated it to happen. But Armstrong might reply that his truth-maker 'necessitation' primitive is not the kind of necessitation found in worldly relations. |
| 13007 | Archimedes defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two points [Archimedes, by Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Archimedes gave a sort of definition of 'straight line' when he said it is the shortest line between two points. | |
| From: report of Archimedes (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Gottfried Leibniz - New Essays on Human Understanding 4.13 | |
| A reaction: Commentators observe that this reduces the purity of the original Euclidean axioms, because it involves distance and measurement, which are absent from the purest geometry. |