6 ideas
| 18491 | The idea of 'making' can be mere conceptual explanation (like 'because') [Künne] |
| Full Idea: If we say 'being a child of our parent's sibling makes him your first cousin', that can be paraphrased using 'because', and this is the 'because' of conceptual explanation: the second part elucidates the sense of the first part. | |
| From: Wolfgang Künne (Conceptions of Truth [2003], 3.5.2) | |
| A reaction: Fans of truth-making are certainly made uncomfortable by talk of 'what makes this a good painting' or 'this made my day'. They need a bit more sharpness to the concept of 'making' a truth. |
| 19086 | Does the pragmatic theory of meaning support objective truth, or make it impossible? [Macbeth] |
| Full Idea: Peirce and Sellars takes Peirce's conception of meaning, on which pragmatism is founded, to support an adequate account of objective truth; James, Dewey and Rorty say it forecloses all possibility of such an account. | |
| From: Danielle Macbeth (Pragmatism and Objective Truth [2007], p.169) | |
| A reaction: Ah. Very helpful. I thought there was a pragmatic theory of truth, then began to think that it was just a denial of truth. I've long suspected that Peirce is wonderful, and James is not very good (on this topic). |
| 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. |
| 19093 | Greek mathematics is wholly sensory, where ours is wholly inferential [Macbeth] |
| Full Idea: Ancient mathematical concepts were essentially sensory; they were not mathematical in our sense - that is, wholly constituted by their inferential potential. | |
| From: Danielle Macbeth (Pragmatism and Objective Truth [2007], p.187) | |
| A reaction: The latter view is Frege's, though I suppose it had been emerging for a couple of centuries before him. I like the Greek approach, and would love to see that reunited with the supposedly quite different modern view. (Keith Hossack is attempting it). |
| 19091 | Seeing reality mathematically makes it an object of thought, not of experience [Macbeth] |
| Full Idea: As mathematically understood, the world is not an object of experience but instead an object of thought. | |
| From: Danielle Macbeth (Pragmatism and Objective Truth [2007], p.183) | |
| A reaction: Since I am keen on citing biology to show that science does not have to be mathematical, this nicely shows that there is something wrong with a science which places a large gap between itself and the world. |
| 19088 | For pragmatists a concept means its consequences [Macbeth] |
| Full Idea: In the pragmatist view, the meaning of a concept is exhausted by its consequences. | |
| From: Danielle Macbeth (Pragmatism and Objective Truth [2007], p.173) | |
| A reaction: I'm unclear why the concept of a volcanic eruption only concerns its dire consequences, and is supposed to contain nothing of its causes. Pragmatists seem to be all future, and no past. Very American. |