61 ideas
18996 | A statement S is 'partly true' if it has some wholly true parts [Yablo] |
Full Idea: A statement S is 'partly true' insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 01.6) | |
A reaction: He suggests that if we have rival theories, we agree that it is one or the other. And 'we may have pork for dinner, or human flesh' is partly true. |
19006 | An 'enthymeme' is an argument with an indispensable unstated assumption [Yablo] |
Full Idea: An 'enthymeme' is a deductive argument with an unstated assumption that must be true for the premises to lead to the conclusion. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 11.1) |
8859 | The main modal logics disagree over three key formulae [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Lewis's different systems of modal logic differed about such formulae as □P implies □□P; ◊□P implies □P; and ◊S implies □◊S | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Apriority and Existence [2000], §06) | |
A reaction: Yablo's point is that the various version don't seem to make much difference to our practices in logic, mathematics and science. The problem, says Yablo, is deciding exactly what you mean by 'necessarily' and 'possibly'. |
18999 | y is only a proper part of x if there is a z which 'makes up the difference' between them [Yablo] |
Full Idea: The principle of Supplementation says that y is properly part of x, only if a z exists that 'makes up the difference' between them. [note: that is, z is disjoint from y and sums with y to form x] | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) |
19001 | 'Pegasus doesn't exist' is false without Pegasus, yet the absence of Pegasus is its truthmaker [Yablo] |
Full Idea: 'Pegasus does not exist' has a paradoxical, self-undermining flavour. On the one hand, the empty name makes it untrue. But now, why is the name empty? Because Pegasus does not exist. 'Pegasus does not exist' is untrue because Pegasus does not exist. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.7 n20) | |
A reaction: Beautiful! This is Yablo's reward for continuing to ask 'why?' after everyone else has stopped in bewilderment at the tricky phenomenon. |
9138 | An infinite series of sentences asserting falsehood produces the paradox without self-reference [Yablo, by Sorensen] |
Full Idea: Banning self-reference is too narrow to avoid the liar paradox. With 1) all the subsequent sentences are false, 2) all the subsequent sentences are false, 3) all the subsequent... the paradox still arises. Self-reference is a special case of this. | |
From: report of Stephen Yablo (Paradox without Self-Reference [1993]) by Roy Sorensen - Vagueness and Contradiction 11.1 | |
A reaction: [Idea 9137 pointed out that the ban was too narrow. Sorensen p.168 explains why this one is paradoxical] This is a nice example of progress in philosophy, since the Greeks would have been thrilled with this idea (unless they knew it, but it was lost). |
8865 | If 'the number of Democrats is on the rise', does that mean that 50 million is on the rise? [Yablo] |
Full Idea: If someone says 'the number of Democrats is on the rise', he or she wants to focus on Democrats, not numbers. If the number is 50 million, is 50 million really on the rise? | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Apriority and Existence [2000], §14) | |
A reaction: This is a very nice warning from Yablo, against easy platonism, or any sort of platonism at all. We routinely say that numbers are 'increasing', but the real meaning needs entangling. Here it refers to people joining a party. |
12154 | Are 'word token' and 'word type' different sorts of countable objects, or two ways of counting? [Geach, by Perry] |
Full Idea: If we list the words 'bull', 'bull' and 'cow', it is often said that there are three 'word tokens' but only two 'word types', but Geach says there are not two kinds of object to be counted, but two different ways of counting the same object. | |
From: report of Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by John Perry - The Same F II | |
A reaction: Insofar as the notion that a 'word type' is an 'object', my sympathies are entirely with Geach, to my surprise. Geach's point is that 'bull' and 'bull' are the same meaning, but different actual words. Identity is relative to a concept. |
19002 | A nominalist can assert statements about mathematical objects, as being partly true [Yablo] |
Full Idea: If I am a nominalist non-Platonist, I think it is false that 'there are primes over 10', but I want to be able to say it like everyone else. I argue that this because the statement has a part that I do believe, a part that remains interestingly true. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.8) | |
A reaction: This is obviously a key motivation for Yablo's book, as it reinforces his fictional view of abstract objects, but aims to capture the phenomena, by investigating what such sentences are 'about'. Admirable. |
8863 | We must treat numbers as existing in order to express ourselves about the arrangement of planets [Yablo] |
Full Idea: It is only by making as if to countenance numbers that one can give expression in English to a fact having nothing to do with numbers, a fact about stars and planets and how they are numerically proportioned. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Apriority and Existence [2000], §13) | |
A reaction: To avoid the phrase 'numerically proportioned', he might have alluded to the 'pattern' of the stars and planets. I'm not sure which -ism this is, but it seems to me a good approach. The application is likely to precede the theory. |
10735 | Abstraction from objects won't reveal an operation's being performed 'so many times' [Geach] |
Full Idea: For an understanding of arithmetic the grasp of an operation's being performed 'so many times' is quite indispensable; and abstraction of a feature from groups of nuts cannot give us this grasp. | |
From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.170) | |
A reaction: I end up defending the empirical approach to arithmetic because remarks like this are so patently false. Geach seems to think we arrive ready-made in the world, just raring to get on with some counting. He lacks the evolutionary perspective. |
10580 | Mathematics is both necessary and a priori because it really consists of logical truths [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Mathematics seems necessary because the real contents of mathematical statements are logical truths, which are necessary, and it seems a priori because logical truths really are a priori. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Abstract Objects: a Case Study [2002], 10) | |
A reaction: Yablo says his logicism has a Kantian strain, because numbers and sets 'inscribed on our spectacles', but he takes a different view (in the present Idea) from Kant about where the necessity resides. Personally I am tempted by an a posteriori necessity. |
8862 | Platonic objects are really created as existential metaphors [Yablo] |
Full Idea: The means by which platonic objects are simulated is existential metaphor. Numbers are conjured up as metaphorical measures of cardinality. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Apriority and Existence [2000], §12) | |
A reaction: 'Fictional' might be a better word than 'metaphorical', since the latter usually implies some sort of comparison. |
10579 | Putting numbers in quantifiable position (rather than many quantifiers) makes expression easier [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Saying 'the number of Fs is 5', instead of using five quantifiers, puts the numeral in quantifiable position, which brings expressive advantages. 'There are more sheep in the field than cows' is an infinite disjunction, expressible in finite compass. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Abstract Objects: a Case Study [2002], 08) | |
A reaction: See Hofweber with similar thoughts. This idea I take to be a key one in explaining many metaphysical confusions. The human mind just has a strong tendency to objectify properties, relations, qualities, categories etc. - for expression and for reasoning. |
10577 | Concrete objects have few essential properties, but properties of abstractions are mostly essential [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Objects like me have a few essential properties, and numerous accidental ones. Abstract objects are a different story. The intrinsic properties of the empty set are mostly essential. The relations of numbers are also mostly essential. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Abstract Objects: a Case Study [2002], 01) |
10578 | We are thought to know concreta a posteriori, and many abstracta a priori [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Our knowledge of concreta is a posteriori, but our knowledge of numbers, at least, has often been considered a priori. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Abstract Objects: a Case Study [2002], 02) |
19489 | For me, fictions are internally true, without a significant internal or external truth-value [Yablo] |
Full Idea: A 'myth' or fiction for me is a true internal statement (a statement endorsed by the rules) whose external truth value is as may be, the point being that that truth value is from an internal standpoint quite irrelevant. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? [1998], IX) | |
A reaction: This contrasts with Carnap, for whom talk of 'ghosts' is false in an internal thing-framework. Yablo seems here to say a statement can be true while having no truth value. Presumably he is relaxing the internal rules. |
19490 | Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Make-believe games can make it easier to reason about facts, to systematize them, to visualize them, to spot connections with other facts, and to evaluate potential lines of research. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? [1998], XI) | |
A reaction: This is the key pragmatic defence of the fictionalist view of abstract objects. Fictions are devices to help us think better. I think a lot of ontology turns out that way. |
19491 | 'The clouds are angry' can only mean '...if one were attributing emotions to clouds' [Yablo] |
Full Idea: It is an open question whether the clouds that we call 'angry' are literally F, for any F other than 'such that it would be natural and proper to regard them as angry if one were going to attribute emotions to clouds'. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? [1998], XII) | |
A reaction: His point is that it is TRUE, in those circumstances, that the clouds are angry. Thus fictions are a valid and useful part of ordinary sensible course, giving real information. I like it. |
8864 | We quantify over events, worlds, etc. in order to make logical possibilities clearer [Yablo] |
Full Idea: It is not that the contents of sentences are inexpressible without quantifying over events, worlds, etc. (they aren't). But the logical relations become much more tractable if we represent them quantificationally. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Apriority and Existence [2000], §13) | |
A reaction: Yablo is explaining why we find ourselves committed to abstract objects. It is essentially, as I am beginning to suspect, a conspiracy of logicians. What on earth is 'the empty set' when it is at home? What's it made of? |
19494 | Fictionalism allows that simulated beliefs may be tracking real facts [Yablo] |
Full Idea: The fictionalist offers the option that your simulated beliefs and assertions may be tracking a realm of genuine facts, or a realm of what you take to be facts. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Go Figure: a Path through Fictionalism [2001], 13) | |
A reaction: This means that fictionalism does not have to be an error theory. That is, we aren't mistakenly believing something that we actually made up. Instead we are sensibly believing something we know to be not literally true. Love it. |
8780 | Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2' [Geach] |
Full Idea: Attributes should not be thought of as identifiable objects. It is better to follow Frege and compare them to mathematical functions. 'Square of' and 'double of' x are distinct functions, even though they are not distinguishable in thought when x is 2. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §11) | |
A reaction: Attributes are features of the world, of which animals are well aware, and the mathematical model is dubious when dealing with physical properties. The route to arriving at 2 is not the same concept as 2. There are many roads to Rome. |
8858 | Philosophers keep finding unexpected objects, like models, worlds, functions, numbers, events, sets, properties [Yablo] |
Full Idea: There's a tradition in philosophy of finding 'unexpected objects' in truth-conditions, such as countermodels, possible worlds, functions, numbers, events, sets and properties. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Apriority and Existence [2000], §02) | |
A reaction: This is a very nice perspective on the whole matter of abstract objects. If we find ourselves reluctantly committed to the existence of something which is ontologically peculiar, we should go back to the philosophical drawing-board. |
8969 | We should abandon absolute identity, confining it to within some category [Geach, by Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: Geach argued that the notion of absolute identity should be abandoned. ..We can only grasp the meaning of a count noun when we associate it with a criterion of identity, expressed by a particular relative identity sortal. | |
From: report of Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by John Hawthorne - Identity | |
A reaction: In other words, identity needs categorisation. Hawthorne concludes that Geach is wrong. Geach clearly has much common usage on his side. 'What's that?' usually invites a categorisation. Sameness of objects seems to need a 'respect'. |
14381 | A statue is essentially the statue, but its lump is not essentially a statue, so statue isn't lump [Yablo, by Rocca] |
Full Idea: Yablo proposes the argument that Statue A is essentially a statue, and Lump 1 is not essentially a statue, so Statue A is not identical with Lump 1. | |
From: report of Stephen Yablo (Identity, Essence and Indiscernibility [1987]) by Michael della Rocca - Essentialists and Essentialism I | |
A reaction: Della Rocca and Yablo unashamedly elide necessary properties with essential properties, so this argument doesn't bother me too much. It concerns the statue and the clay having different modal properties. |
18998 | Parthood lacks the restriction of kind which most relations have [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Most relations obtain only between certain kinds of thing. To learn that x is a part of y, however, tells you nothing about x and y taken individually. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) | |
A reaction: Too sweeping. To be a part of crowd you have to be a person. To be part of the sea you have to be wet. It might depend on whether composition is unrestricted. |
16075 | Denial of absolute identity has drastic implications for logic, semantics and set theory [Wasserman on Geach] |
Full Idea: Geach's denial of absolute identity has drastic implications for logic, semantics and set theory. He must deny the axiom of extensionality in set theory, for example. | |
From: comment on Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by Ryan Wasserman - Material Constitution 6 | |
A reaction: I'm beginning to think we have two entirely different concepts here - the logicians' and mathematicians' notion of when two things are identical, and the ordinary language concept of two things being 'the same'. 'We like the same music'. |
12152 | Identity is relative. One must not say things are 'the same', but 'the same A as' [Geach] |
Full Idea: Identity is relative. When one says 'x is identical with y' this is an incomplete expression. It is short for 'x is the same A as y', where 'A' represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance. | |
From: Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980], p.39), quoted by John Perry - The Same F I | |
A reaction: Perry notes that Geach's view is in conscious opposition to Frege, who had a pure notion of identity. We say 'they are the same insofar as they are animals', but not 'they are the same animal'. Perfect identity involves all possible A's. |
16073 | Leibniz's Law is incomplete, since it includes a non-relativized identity predicate [Geach, by Wasserman] |
Full Idea: Geach rejects the standard formulation of Leibniz's Law as incomplete, since it includes a non-relativized identity predicate. | |
From: report of Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by Ryan Wasserman - Material Constitution 6 | |
A reaction: Not many people accept Geach's premiss that identity is a relative matter. I agree with Wiggins on this, that identity is an absolute (and possibly indefinable). The problem with the Law is what you mean by a 'property'. |
11910 | Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X' [Geach] |
Full Idea: "The same" is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean "the same X", where X represents a general term. ...There is no such thing as being just 'the same'. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §16) | |
A reaction: Geach seems oddly unaware of the perfect identity of Hespherus with Phosphorus. His critics don't spot that he was concerned with identity over time (of 'the same man', who ages). Perry's critique emphasises the type/token distinction. |
19493 | Governing possible worlds theory is the fiction that if something is possible, it happens in a world [Yablo] |
Full Idea: The governing fiction of possible worlds theory says that whenever something is possible, there is a world where it happens. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Go Figure: a Path through Fictionalism [2001], 05) | |
A reaction: This sounds like the only sensible attitude to possible worlds I can think of. |
19004 | Gettier says you don't know if you are confused about how it is true [Yablo] |
Full Idea: We know from Gettier that if you are right to regard Q as true, but you are sufficiently confused about HOW it is true - about how things stand with respect to its subject matter - then you don't know that Q. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 07.4) | |
A reaction: I'm inclined to approach Gettier by focusing on the propositions being expressed, where his cases tend to focus on the literal wording of the sentences. What did the utterer mean by the sentences - not what did they appear to say. |
19007 | A theory need not be true to be good; it should just be true about its physical aspects [Yablo] |
Full Idea: A physical theory need not be true to be good, Field has argued, and I agree. All we ask of it truth-wise is that its physical implications should be true, or, in my version, that it should be true about the physical. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 12.5) | |
A reaction: Yablo is, of course, writing a book here about the concept of 'about'. This seems persuasive. The internal terminology of the theory isn't committed to anything - it is only at its physical periphery (Quine) that the ontology matters. |
18993 | If sentences point to different evidence, they must have different subject-matter [Yablo] |
Full Idea: 'All crows are black' cannot say quite the same as 'All non-black things are non-crows', for the two are confirmed by different evidence. Subject matter looks to be the distinguishing feature. One is about crows, the other not. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
A reaction: You might reply that they are confirmed by the same evidence (but only in its unobtainable totality). The point, I think, is that the sentences invite you to start your search in different places. |
19003 | Most people say nonblack nonravens do confirm 'all ravens are black', but only a tiny bit [Yablo] |
Full Idea: The standard response to the raven paradox is to say that a nonblack nonraven does confirm that all ravens are black. But it confirms it just the teeniest little bit - not as much as a black raven does. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 06.5) | |
A reaction: It depends on the proportion between the relevant items. How do you confirm 'all the large animals in this zoo are mammals'? Check for size every animal which is obviously not a mammal? |
8775 | A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction [Geach] |
Full Idea: A big flea or rat is a small animal, and a small elephant is a big animal, so there can be no question of ignoring the kind of thing to which 'big' or 'small' is referred and forming those concepts by abstraction. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §9) | |
A reaction: Geach is attacking a caricature of the theory. Abstraction is a neat mental trick which has developed in stages, from big rats relative to us, to big relative to other rats, to the concept of 'relative' (Idea 8776!), to the concept of 'relative bigness'. |
8776 | We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too [Geach] |
Full Idea: Abstractionists are unaware of the difficulty with relations - that they neither exist nor can be observed apart from the converse relation, the two being indivisible, as in grasping 'to the left of' and 'to the right of'. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §9) | |
A reaction: It is hard to see how a rival account such as platonism could help. It seems obvious to me that 'right' and 'left' would be quite meaningless without some experience of things in space, including an orientation to them. |
10732 | If concepts are just recognitional, then general judgements would be impossible [Geach] |
Full Idea: If concepts were nothing but recognitional capacities, then it is unintelligible that I can judge that cats eat mice when neither of them are present. | |
From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.164) | |
A reaction: Having observed the importance of recognition for the abstractionist (Idea 10731), he then seems to assume that there is nothing more to their concepts. Geach fails to grasp levels of abstraction, and cross-reference, and generalisation. |
2567 | You can't define real mental states in terms of behaviour that never happens [Geach] |
Full Idea: We can't take a statement that two men, whose overt behaviour was not actually different, were in different states of mind as being really a statement that the behaviour of one man would have been different in hypothetical circumstances that never arose. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §3) | |
A reaction: This is the whole problem with trying to define the mind as dispositions. The same might be said of properties, since some properties are active, but others are mere potential or disposition. Hence 'process' looks to me the most promising word for mind. |
2568 | Beliefs aren't tied to particular behaviours [Geach] |
Full Idea: Is there any behaviour characteristic of a given belief? | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §4) | |
A reaction: Well, yes. Belief that a dog is about to bite you. Belief that this nice food is yours, and you are hungry. But he has a good point. He is pointing out that the mental state is a very different thing from the 'disposition' to behave in a certain way. |
8781 | The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them [Geach] |
Full Idea: Having a concept is not recognizing a feature of experience; the mind makes concepts. We then fit our concepts to experience. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §11) | |
A reaction: This seems to imply that we create concepts ex nihilo, which is a rather worse theory than saying that we abstract them from multiple (and multi-level) experiences. That minds create concepts is a truism. How do we do it? |
10731 | For abstractionists, concepts are capacities to recognise recurrent features of the world [Geach] |
Full Idea: For abstractionists, concepts are essentially capacities for recognizing recurrent features of the world. | |
From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.163) | |
A reaction: Recognition certainly strikes me as central to thought (and revelatory of memory, since we continually recognise what we cannot actually recall). Geach dislikes this view, but I see it as crucial to an evolutionary view of thought. |
8769 | If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts [Geach] |
Full Idea: If a man struck with aphasia can still play bridge or chess, I certainly wish to say he still has the concepts involved in the game, although he can no longer exercise them verbally. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §5) | |
A reaction: Geach proceeds thereafter to concentrate on language, but this caveat is crucial. To suggest that concepts are entirely verbal has always struck me as ridiculous, and an insult to our inarticulate mammalian cousins. |
8770 | 'Abstractionism' is acquiring a concept by picking out one experience amongst a group [Geach] |
Full Idea: I call 'abstractionism' the doctrine that a concept is acquired by a process of singling out in attention some one feature given in direct experience - abstracting it - and ignoring the other features simultaneously given - abstracting from them. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §6) | |
A reaction: Locke seems to be the best known ancestor of this view, and Geach launches a vigorous attack against it. However, contemporary philosophers still refer to the process, and I think Geach should be crushed and this theory revived. |
10805 | A sentence should be recarved to reveal its content or implication relations [Yablo] |
Full Idea: A sentence invites recarving iff it will then do better justice to the internal structure of its content and/or its implication relations. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Carving Content at the Joints [2002], §11) | |
A reaction: This invites human intervention in a logical process (by choosing which recarvings to do, instead of allowing all equivalences to generate them). He seems to think we should abstract in order to reveal logical form. |
8771 | 'Or' and 'not' are not to be found in the sensible world, or even in the world of inner experience [Geach] |
Full Idea: Nowhere in the sensible world could you find anything to be suitably labelled 'or' or 'not'. So the abstractionist appeals to an 'inner sense', or hesitation for 'or', and of frustration or inhibition for 'not'. Personally I see a threat in 'or else'! | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §7) | |
A reaction: This is a key argument of Geach's against abstractionism. As a logician he prefers to discuss connectives rather than, say, colours. I think they might be meta-abstractions, which you create internally once you have picked up the knack. |
8772 | We can't acquire number-concepts by extracting the number from the things being counted [Geach] |
Full Idea: The number-concepts just cannot be got by concentrating on the number and abstracting from the kind of things being counted. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §8) | |
A reaction: This point is from Frege - that if you 'abstract away' everything apart from the number, you are simply left with nothing in experience. The objection might, I think, be met by viewing it as second-order abstraction, perhaps getting to a pattern first. |
8773 | Abstractionists can't explain counting, because it must precede experience of objects [Geach] |
Full Idea: The way counting is learned is wholly contrary to abstractionist preconceptions, because the series of numerals has to be learned before it can be applied. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §8) | |
A reaction: You might learn to parrot the names of numbers, but you could hardly know what they meant if you couldn't count anything. See Idea 3907. I would have thought that individuating objects must logically and pedagogically precede counting. |
8774 | The numbers don't exist in nature, so they cannot have been abstracted from there into our languages [Geach] |
Full Idea: The pattern of the numeral series that is grasped by a child exists nowhere in nature outside human languages, so the human race cannot possibly have discerned this pattern by abstracting it from some natural context. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §8) | |
A reaction: This is a spectacular non sequitur, which begs the question. Abstractionists precisely claim that the process of abstraction brings numerals into human language from the natural context. Structuralism is an attempt to explain the process. |
8778 | Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently [Geach] |
Full Idea: It is not true that men born blind can form no colour-concepts; a man born blind can use the word 'red' with a considerable measure of intelligence; he can show a practical grasp of the logic of the word. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §10) | |
A reaction: Weak. It is obvious that they pick up the word 'red' from the usage of sighted people, and the usage of the word doesn't guarantee a grasp of the concept, as when non-mathematicians refer to 'calculus'. Compare Idea 7377 and Idea 7866. |
8777 | If 'black' and 'cat' can be used in the absence of such objects, how can such usage be abstracted? [Geach] |
Full Idea: Since we can use the terms 'black' and 'cat' in situations not including any black object or any cat, how could this part of the use be got by abstraction? | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §10) | |
A reaction: [He is attacking H.H. Price] It doesn't seem a huge psychological leap to apply the word 'cat' when we remember a cat, and once it is in the mind we can play games with our abstractions. Cats are smaller than dogs. |
8779 | We can form two different abstract concepts that apply to a single unified experience [Geach] |
Full Idea: It is impossible to form the concept of 'chromatic colour' by discriminative attention to a feature given in my visual experience. In seeing a red window-pane, I do not have two sensations, one of redness and one of chromatic colour. | |
From: Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §10) | |
A reaction: Again Geach begs the question, because abstractionists claim that you can focus on two different 'aspects' of the one experience, as that it is a 'window', or it is 'red', or it is not a wall, or it is not monochrome. |
10733 | The abstractionist cannot explain 'some' and 'not' [Geach] |
Full Idea: The abstractionist cannot give a logically coherent account of the features that are supposed to be reached by discriminative attention, corresponding to the words 'some' and 'not'. | |
From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.167) | |
A reaction: I understand 'some' in terms of mereology, because that connects to experience, and 'not' I take to derive more from psychological experience than from the physical world, building on thwarted expectation, which even animals experience. |
10734 | Only a judgement can distinguish 'striking' from 'being struck' [Geach] |
Full Idea: To understand the verb 'to strike' we must see that 'striking' and 'being struck' are different, but necessarily go together in event and thought; only in the context of a judgment can they be distinguished, when we think of both together. | |
From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.168) | |
A reaction: Geach seems to have a strange notion that judgements are pure events which can precede all experience, and are the only ways we can come to understand experience. He needs to start from animals (or 'brutes', as he still calls them!). |
18992 | Sentence-meaning is the truth-conditions - plus factors responsible for them [Yablo] |
Full Idea: A sentence's meaning is to do with its truth-value in various possible scenarios, AND the factors responsible for that truth-value. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
A reaction: The thesis of his book, which I welcome. I'm increasingly struck by the way in which much modern philosophy settles for a theory being complete, when actually further explanation is possible. Exhibit A is functional explanations. Why that function? |
18994 | The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content [Yablo] |
Full Idea: Assertive content - what a sentence is heard as saying - can be at quite a distance from compositional content. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
A reaction: This is the obvious reason why semantics cannot be entirely compositional, since there is nearly always a contextual component which then has to be added. In the case of irony, the compositional content is entirely reversed. |
18997 | Truth-conditions as subject-matter has problems of relevance, short cut, and reversal [Yablo] |
Full Idea: If the subject-matter of S is how it is true, we get three unfortunate results: S has truth-value in worlds where its subject-matter draws a blank; learning what S is about tells you its truth-value; negating S changes what it's about. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 02.8) | |
A reaction: Together these make fairly devastating objections to the truth-conditions (in possible worlds) theory of meaning. The first-objection concerns when S is false |
19005 | Not-A is too strong to just erase an improper assertion, because it actually reverses A [Yablo] |
Full Idea: The idea that negation is, or can be, a cancellation device raises an interesting question. What does one do to wipe the slate clean after an improper assertion? Not-A is too strong; it reverses our stand on A rather than nullifying it. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 09.8) | |
A reaction: [He is discussing a remark of Strawson 1952] It seems that 'not' has two meanings or uses: a weak use of 'nullifying' an assertion, and a strong use of 'reversing' an assertion. One could do both: 'that's not right; in fact, it's just the opposite'. |
8861 | Hardly a word in the language is devoid of metaphorical potential [Yablo] |
Full Idea: There is hardly a word in the language - be it an adverb, preposition, conjunction, or what have you - that is devoid of metaphorical potential. | |
From: Stephen Yablo (Apriority and Existence [2000], §12) | |
A reaction: Yablo goes on to claim that metaphor is at the heart of all of our abstract thinking. 'Dead metaphors' (like the "mouth" of a river) sink totally into literal language. I think Yablo is on the right lines. |
22489 | 'Good' is an attributive adjective like 'large', not predicative like 'red' [Geach, by Foot] |
Full Idea: Geach puts 'good' in the class of attributive adjectives, such as 'large' and 'small', contrasting such adjectives with 'predicative' adjectives such as 'red'. | |
From: report of Peter Geach (Good and Evil [1956]) by Philippa Foot - Natural Goodness Intro | |
A reaction: [In Analysis 17, and 'Theories of Ethics' ed Foot] Thus any object can simply be red, but something can only be large or small 'for a rat' or 'for a car'. Hence nothing is just good, but always a good so-and-so. This is Aristotelian, and Foot loves it. |
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) |