25 ideas
| 19090 | If we can't check our language against experience, philosophy is just comparing beliefs and words [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: If we cannot check our language against non-linguistic awareness, then philosophy can never be more than a discussion of the utility and compatibility of beliefs - and, more particularly, of the various vocabularies in which those beliefs are formulated. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Brandom on Social Practices and Representations [1998], iii.127), quoted by Danielle Macbeth - Pragmatism and Objective Truth p.178 | |
| A reaction: I'm amazed at how many people I encounter in philosophy circles (compared with none at all outside those circles) who seem to think that we cannot check our language against our non-linguistic awareness. Rorty is their guru. Weird. |
| 2557 | Analytical philosophy seems to have little interest in how to tell a good analysis from a bad one [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: There is nowadays little attempt to bring "analytic philosophy" to self-consciousness by explaining how to tell a successful from an unsuccessful analysis. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 4.1) |
| 2556 | Rational certainty may be victory in argument rather than knowledge of facts [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: We can think of "rational certainty" as a matter of victory in argument rather than relation to an object known. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 3.4) |
| 4726 | Rorty seems to view truth as simply being able to hold one's view against all comers [Rorty, by O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: Rorty seems to view truth as simply being able to hold one's view against all comers. | |
| From: report of Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: This may be a caricature of Rorty, but he certainly seems to be in the business of denying truth as much as possible. This strikes me as the essence of pragmatism, and as a kind of philosophical nihilism. |
| 10365 | We might use 'facta' to refer to the truth-makers for facts [Mellor, by Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Mellor offers a distinction between 'facts' and 'facta' (the latter being the truth-makers for facts). | |
| From: report of D.H. Mellor (The Facts of Causation [1995]) by Jonathan Schaffer - The Metaphysics of Causation 1.1 | |
| A reaction: The idea is that 'facta' can do the work in causation, because 'facts' are not part of the world. This seems a very helpful terminology, which should be encouraged, since 'fact' is plainly ambiguous in current usage. |
| 2549 | For James truth is "what it is better for us to believe" rather than a correct picture of reality [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Truth is, in James' phrase, "what it is better for us to believe", rather than "the accurate representation of reality". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Intro) |
| 8568 | A property is merely a constituent of laws of nature; temperature is just part of thermodynamics [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Being a constituent of probabilistic laws of nature is all there is to being a property. There is no more to temperature than the thermodynamics and other laws they occur in. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: How could thermodynamics be worked out without a prior concept of temperature? I think it is at least plausible to deny that there are any 'laws' of nature. But even Quine can't deny that some things are too hot to touch. |
| 8564 | There is obviously a possible predicate for every property [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: To every property there obviously corresponds a possible predicate applying to all and only those particulars with that property. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This doesn't strike me as at all obvious. If nature dictates the properties, there may be vastly more than any human language could cope with. It is daft to say that a property can only exist if humanity can come up with a predicate for it. |
| 8566 | We need universals for causation and laws of nature; the latter give them their identity [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: I take the main reason for believing in contingent universals to be the roles they play in causation and in laws of nature, and those laws are what I take to give those universals their identity. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: He agrees with Armstrong. Sounds a bit circular - laws are built on universals, and universals are identified by laws. It resembles a functionalist account of mental events. I think it is wrong. A different account of laws will be needed... |
| 8565 | If properties were just the meanings of predicates, they couldn't give predicates their meaning [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: One reason for denying that properties just are the meanings of our predicates is that, if they were, they could not give our predicates their meanings. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: Neither way round sounds quite right to me. Predicate nominalism is wrong, but what is meant by a property 'giving' a predicate its meaning? It doesn't seem to allow room for error in our attempts to name the properties. |
| 2548 | If knowledge is merely justified belief, justification is social [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: If we have a Deweyan conception of knowledge, as what we are justified in believing, we will see "justification" as a social phenomenon. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find this observation highly illuminating (though I probably need to study Dewey to understand it). There just is no absolute about whether someone is justified. How justified do you want to be? |
| 6599 | Knowing has no definable essence, but is a social right, found in the context of conversations [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: If we see knowing not as having an essence, described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we see conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Ch.5), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: This teeters towards ridiculous relativism (e.g. what if the conversation is among a group of fools? - Ah, there are no fools! Politically incorrect!). However, knowledge can be social, provided we are healthily elitist. Scientists know more than us. |
| 2566 | You can't debate about whether to have higher standards for the application of words [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: The decision about whether to have higher than usual standards for the application of words like "true" or "good" or "red" is, as far as I can see, not a debatable issue. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.6) |
| 2553 | The mind is a property, or it is baffling [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: All that is needed for the mind-body problem to be unintelligible is for us to be nominalist, to refuse firmly to hypostasize individual properties. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Edelman says the mind is a process rather than a property. It might vanish if the clockspeed was turned right down? Nominalism here sounds like behaviourism or instrumentalism. Would Dennett plead guilty? |
| 2550 | Pain lacks intentionality; beliefs lack qualia [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: We can't define the mental as intentional because pains aren't about anything, and we can't define it as phenomenal because beliefs don't feel like anything. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: Nice, but simplistic? There is usually an intentional object for a pain, and the concepts which we use to build beliefs contain the residue of remembered qualia. It seems unlikely that any mind could have one without the other (even a computer). |
| 2554 | Is intentionality a special sort of function? [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Following Wittgenstein, we shall treat the intentional as merely a subspecies of the functional. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing but obscure. Sounds wrong to me. The intentional refers to the content of thoughts, but function concerns their role. They have roles because they have content, so they can't be the same. |
| 2565 | Nature has no preferred way of being represented [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Nature has no preferred way of being represented. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: Tree rings accidentally represent the passing of the years. If God went back and started again would she or he opt for a 'preferred way'? |
| 2560 | Can meanings remain the same when beliefs change? [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: For cooler heads there must be some middle view between "meanings remain and beliefs change" and "meanings change whenever beliefs do". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: The second one seems blatanty false. How could we otherwise explain a change in belief? But obviously some changes in belief (e.g. about electrons) produce a change in meaning. |
| 2562 | A theory of reference seems needed to pick out objects without ghostly inner states [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: The need to pick out objects without the help of definitions, essences, and meanings of terms produced, philosophers thought, a need for a "theory of reference". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: Frege's was very perceptive in noting that meaning and reference are not the same. Whether we need a 'theory' of reference is unclear. It is worth describing how it occurs. |
| 2559 | Davidson's theory of meaning focuses not on terms, but on relations between sentences [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: A theory of meaning, for Davidson, is not an assemblage of "analyses" of the meanings of individual terms, but rather an understanding of the inferential relations between sentences. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: Put that way, the influence of Frege on Davidson is obvious. Purely algebraic expressions can have inferential relations, using variables and formal 'sentences'. |
| 2558 | Since Hegel we have tended to see a human as merely animal if it is outside a society [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Only since Hegel have philosophers begun toying with the idea that the individual apart from his society is just one more animal. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 4.3) |
| 4785 | Causal statements relate facts (which are whatever true propositions express) [Mellor, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Mellor argues that causal statements relate facts, where facts may be seen as whatever true propositions express. | |
| From: report of D.H. Mellor (The Facts of Causation [1995]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §2.6 | |
| A reaction: Choose between 'facts', 'objects', 'conserved quantities, 'events' (the usual one) or 'processes'. I rather like processes (Salmon) as they are a better prospect as the building blocks of an ontology. |
| 8567 | Singular causation requires causes to raise the physical probability of their effects [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Singular causation entails physical probabilities or chances. ...Causal laws require causes to raise their effects' chances, as when fires have a greater chance of occurring when explosions do. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: It seems fairly obvious that a probability can be increased without actually causing something. Just after a harmless explosion is a good moment for arsonists, especially if Mellor will be the investigating officer. |
| 8408 | Probabilistic causation says C is a cause of E if it increases the chances of E occurring [Mellor, by Tooley] |
| Full Idea: The basic idea of probabilistic causation is that a sufficient condition of C's being a cause of E is that C and E are actual, individual events, and the objective chance of E's occurring is greater given the occurrence of C than it would be without C. | |
| From: report of D.H. Mellor (The Facts of Causation [1995]) by Michael Tooley - Causation and Supervenience 5.3 | |
| A reaction: Mellor has to include objective 'chances' in his ontology to support his theory. As it stands this looks like a weak theory, since the event might not occur despite C happening, and some less likely event might turn out to be the actual cause. |
| 1513 | The Egyptians were the first to say the soul is immortal and reincarnated [Herodotus] |
| Full Idea: The Egyptians were the first to claim that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that each time the body dies the soul enters another creature just as it is being born. | |
| From: Herodotus (The Histories [c.435 BCE], 2.123.2) |