35 ideas
| 18405 | A 'teepee' argument has several mutually supporting planks to it [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: In a 'teepee' argument, a number of argumentative planks intersupport each other. No plank is sufficiently strong to establish the position, but each lends credibility to the others because there is the appearance of a unified phenomenon. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.5) | |
| A reaction: To attack it, they say, you have to identify the separate planks of the argument. It is a moot point whether the teepee might be so imprecise that it is better described as 'coherence'. There is a background support, as well as the planks. |
| 19125 | If we define truth, we can eliminate it [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: If truth can be explicitly defined, it can be eliminated. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: That we could just say p corresponds to the facts, or p coheres with our accepted beliefs, or p is the aim of our enquiries, and never mention the word 'true'. Definition is a strategy for reduction or elimination. |
| 19128 | If a language cannot name all objects, then satisfaction must be used, instead of unary truth [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: If axioms are formulated for a language (such as set theory) that lacks names for all objects, then they require the use of a satisfaction relation rather than a unary truth predicate. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: I take it this is an important idea for understanding why Tarski developed his account of truth based on satisfaction. |
| 19120 | Semantic theories need a powerful metalanguage, typically including set theory [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: Semantic approaches to truth usually necessitate the use of a metalanguage that is more powerful than the object-language for which it provides a semantics. It is usually taken to include set theory. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is a motivation for developing an axiomatic account of truth, that moves it into the object language. |
| 19127 | The T-sentences are deductively weak, and also not deductively conservative [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: Although the theory is materially adequate, Tarski thought that the T-sentences are deductively too weak. …Also it seems that the T-sentences are not conservative, because they prove in PA that 0=0 and ¬0=0 are different, so at least two objects exist. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: They are weak because they can't prove completeness. This idea give two reasons for looking for a better theory of truth. |
| 19124 | A natural theory of truth plays the role of reflection principles, establishing arithmetic's soundness [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: If a natural theory of truth is added to Peano Arithmetic, it is not necessary to add explicity global reflection principles to assert soundness, as the truth theory proves them. Truth theories thus prove soundess, and allows its expression. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a big attraction of axiomatic theories of truth for students of metamathematics. |
| 19126 | If deflationary truth is not explanatory, truth axioms should be 'conservative', proving nothing new [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: If truth does not have any explanatory force, as some deflationists claim, the axioms of truth should not allow us to prove any new theorems that do not involve the truth predicate. That is, a deflationary axiomatisation of truth should be 'conservative'. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: So does truth have 'explanatory force'? These guys are interested in explaining theorems of arithmetic, but I'm more interested in real life. People do daft things because they have daft beliefs. Logic should be neutral, but truth has values? |
| 19129 | The FS axioms use classical logical, but are not fully consistent [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: It is a virtue of the Friedman-Sheard axiomatisation that it is thoroughly classical in its logic. Its drawback is that it is ω-inconsistent. That is, it proves &exists;x¬φ(x), but proves also φ(0), φ(1), φ(2), … | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: It seems the theory is complete (and presumably sound), yet not fully consistent. FS also proves the finite levels of Tarski's hierarchy, but not the transfinite levels. |
| 19130 | KF is formulated in classical logic, but describes non-classical truth, which allows truth-value gluts [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: KF is formulated in classical logic, but describes a non-classical notion of truth. It allow truth-value gluts, making some sentences (such as the Liar) both true and not-true. Some authors add an axiom ruling out such gluts. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: [summary, which I hope is correct! Stanford is not wholly clear] |
| 19121 | We can reduce properties to true formulas [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: One might say that 'x is a poor philosopher' is true of Tom instead of saying that Tom has the property of being a poor philosopher. We quantify over formulas instead of over definable properties, and thus reduce properties to truth. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This stuff is difficult (because the axioms are complex and hard to compare), but I am excited (yes!) about this idea. Their point is that you need a truth predicate within the object language for this, which disquotational truth forbids. |
| 19122 | Nominalists can reduce theories of properties or sets to harmless axiomatic truth theories [Halbach/Leigh] |
| Full Idea: The reduction of second-order theories (of properties or sets) to axiomatic theories of truth is a form of reductive nominalism, replacing existence assumptions (e.g. comprehension axioms) by innocuous assumptions about the truth predicate. | |
| From: Halbach,V/Leigh,G.E. (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2013 ver) [2013], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: I'm currently thinking that axiomatic theories of truth are the most exciting development in contemporary philosophy. See Halbach and Horsten. |
| 15959 | If the substantial form of brass implies its stability, how can it melt and remain brass? [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: If we account for the stability of a piece of brass by reference to the substantial form of brass, then it is mysterious how it can be melted and yet remain brass. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 02.3) | |
| A reaction: [Alexander is discussing Boyle] |
| 15956 | The peripatetics treated forms and real qualities as independent of matter, and non-material [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: The peripatetic philosophers, in spite of their disagreements, all treated forms and real qualities as independent of matter and not to be understood in material terms. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 54) | |
| A reaction: This is the simple reason why hylomorphism became totally discredited, in the face of the 'mechanical philosophy'. But there must be a physical version of hylomorphism, and I don't think Aristotle himself would reject it. |
| 15975 | Can the qualities of a body be split into two groups, where the smaller explains the larger? [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: Is there any way of separating the qualities that bodies appear to have into two groups, one as small as possible and the other as large as possible, such that the smaller group can plausibly be used to explain the larger? | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 5.02) | |
| A reaction: Alexander implies that this is a question Locke asked himself. This is pretty close to what I take to be the main question for essentialism, though I am cautious about couching it in terms of groups of qualities. I think this was Aristotle's question. |
| 18422 | Prioprioception focuses on your body parts, not on your self, or indexicality [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Proprioception is not focused single-mindedly on the self, but is focused on a number of objects - the component bodily parts that belong to the self. There is no obvious need for a concept of the self, or of indexicality. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 07.2) |
| 18425 | We can acquire self-knowledge with mirrors, not just with proprioception and introspection [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Imagine a being that learns everything about itself by watching itself in mirrors, rather than by proprioception and introspection. Surely it can get wet in a storm, even though allegedly distinctive routes of self-knowledge are not available to it? | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 09.3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 18421 | Proprioception is only immune from error if you are certain that it represents the agent [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: The guarantee of immunity from error in prioprioception is only as strong as the guarantee that proprioception only ever represents the proprioceiving agent. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 07.1) | |
| A reaction: This is part of an interesting and sustained attack on the idea that self-knowledge is immune from error. They are thinking of science-fictiony situations where I am wired up to experience your leg movement. My experiences usually track me, that's all. |
| 18419 | Folk Functionalism is a Ramsification of our folk psychology [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: According to Folk Functionalism, mental states are theoretically defined by Ramsifying on our folk-psychological theory. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 06.2) |
| 18404 | It is assumed that indexical content is needed to represent the perspective of perception [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Because our perceptual states typically represent the world as seen from a perspective, it is sometimes thought that some distinctively indexical kind of content is needed to characterise those states. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.4) | |
| A reaction: They are summarising this view precisely so that they can oppose it, and I think they are right. |
| 18426 | All information is objective, and purely indexical information is not much use [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Fundamentally, all information is objective information. ...[176] What we want is fully portable information, and information that co-ordinates on the world, rather than on us, is best suited for the task. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
| A reaction: I agree entirely with their thesis. We just pick up information about ourselves, such as who and where we are, which is just like equivalent information about other people. It is isn't a special type of information. |
| 18427 | If some of our thought is tied to its context, it will be hard to communicate it [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: It is bad news if some of our contents are essentially tied to particular contexts. ...If information needs to be assessed relative to some ur-context, later recipients won't know what to do with it. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) |
| 18428 | You don't remember your house interior just from an experienced viewpoint [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: When you recall the look of the inside of your house ....where things are relative to one another is what persists in memory, not where they were relative to you when seen. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a very telling example, though you could postulate some system which converts perspectival input into objective information. But why bother? We seek objective information, not perspectives. |
| 18429 | Our beliefs and desires are not organised around ourselves, but around the world [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Our view on the world is not primarily a view from a perspective. Our beliefs and desires are not organized around us. They are instead organized around the world itself. Our view is a view from everywhere. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
| A reaction: Slipping in the claim that our desires are also organised around the world is not quite as persuasive as the claim about beliefs. If you want to draw a freehand straight line, focus on the far end of it. The world will guide your hand. |
| 18407 | Indexicality is not significantly connected to agency [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: There are no interesting or distinctive explanatory connections between indexicality and agency. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.8) |
| 18413 | Fregeans can't agree on what 'senses' are [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: There is little agreement among Fregeans about what senses are. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't take this to be sufficient grounds for dismissing Fregean senses. When we look into the workings of the linguistic mind, there seems little prospect of clarity or agreement. |
| 18417 | Possible worlds accounts of content are notoriously coarse-grained [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Possible worlds accounts of content are notoriously coarse-grained. They fail to distinguish between logical or mathematical truths, ..between metaphysical equivalences, ..between coreferentials, ..and between indexicals and non-indexicals. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 05.5) | |
| A reaction: [A nice summary, very compressed] |
| 18408 | Indexicals are just non-constant in meaning, and don't involve any special concepts [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Once the non-constant characters of expressions has been characterised, there is no further need for additional devices like 'first-person concepts' or 'demonstrative concepts'. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be a wonderfully liberating attack on this issue. There is a kind of creepy mysticism that has been allowed to accrue around indexicals, and it's nonsense. |
| 18414 | Fregeans say 'I' differs in reference, so it must also differ in sense [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Fregeans tend to treat as a fundamental tenet that sense determines reference; same sense, same reference. From that it follow trivially that indexicals don't have the same sense: different uses of 'I' have different referents, so sense must differ. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 04.6) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. Since it seems implausible that 'I' is profoundly different when two people use it, this seems to be a strong argument against Frege's distinction. But I rather like Frege's distinction, while being sceptical about 'I', so I'm baffled.... |
| 18423 | All indexicals can be expressed non-indexically [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Whatever can be expressed indexically could be expressed by non-indexical means. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 08.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the best summary of the thesis of their book. Indexicality in non-essential. |
| 18406 | The basic Kaplan view is that there is truth-conditional content, and contextual character [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: In what we label 'Basic Kaplanianism', each of the sentences 'Smith is happy' and 'I am happy', as uttered by Smith, has two levels of meaning. The 'content' is a truth-conditional representation. The 'character' is a function from contexts to contents. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.6) | |
| A reaction: They give this as a minimal and plausible account of the situation, without reading huge significance into the indexical. I'm inclined to see the situation in terms of the underlying proposition containing both ingredients. |
| 18411 | It is proposed that a huge range of linguistic items are context-sensitive [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: An enormous amount has been written about whether 'all', 'know', 'might', 'delicious', 'good', 'if, then', 'and', 'red', 'just', 'justified', 'probable', 'local', 'ready', and 'left-right' are context-sensitive. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 02.3) | |
| A reaction: The clearest way to approach these things is ask what the (informal) domain of quantification is for that particular context. The domain can shift in the course of a sentence. |
| 18420 | We deny that action involves some special class of beliefs [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Maybe there is a class of beliefs that plays a special role in the explanation of action. We have argued against the existence of such a class (or at least any interesting such class). | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 06.2) | |
| A reaction: The main class which has been proposed is the one that involves indexical beliefs. I agree with this idea. |
| 15963 | Science has been partly motivated by the belief that the universe is run by God's laws [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: The idea of a designed universe has not been utterly irrelevant to the scientific project; it is one of the beliefs that can give a scientist the faith that there are laws, waiting to be discovered, that govern all phenomena. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: Of course if you start out looking for the 'laws of God' that is probably what you will discover. Natural selection strikes me as significant, because it shows no sign of being a procedure appropriate to a benevolent god. |
| 15951 | Alchemists tried to separate out essences, which influenced later chemistry [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: The alchemists sought the separation of the 'pure essences' of substances from unwanted impurities. This last goal was of great importance for the development of modern chemistry at the hands of Boyle and his successors. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 01.1) | |
| A reaction: In a nutshell this gives us the reason why essences are so important, and also why they became discredited. Time for a clear modern rethink. |
| 15981 | Absolute space either provides locations, or exists but lacks 'marks' for locations [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: There are two conceptions of absolute space. In the first, empty space is independent of objects but provides a frame of reference so an object has a location. ..In the second space exists independently, but has no 'marks' into which objects can be put. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 6) | |
| A reaction: He says that Locke seems to reject the first one, but accept the second one. |