21 ideas
17729 | Examining concepts can recover information obtained through the senses [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: My idea is that conceptual examination might be a way of recovering information previously obtained through the senses. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.8) | |
A reaction: Now you're talking! This is really interesting conceptual analysis, rather than the sort of stamp-collecting approach to analsis practised by the duller sort of philosopher. But why bother with conceptual examination, when you have senses? |
17740 | Instead of correspondence of proposition to fact, look at correspondence of its parts [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: Instead of considering only a proposition's 'correspondence to the facts', we should also consider the correspondence between parts of the proposition and parts of the world (a 'correspondence-as-congruence' view). | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Final - Branching) | |
A reaction: This is something like Russell's Othello example (1912), except that the parts there, with relations seemed to add up to the whole proposition. For Jenkins, presumably parts might correspond, but the whole proposition fail to. |
17730 | Combining the concepts of negation and finiteness gives the concept of infinity [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: We might arrive to the concept of infinity by composing concepts of negation and finiteness. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 5.3) | |
A reaction: Presumably lots of concepts can be arrived at by negating prior concepts (such as not-wet, not-tall, not-loud, not-straight). So not-infinite is perfectly plausible, and is a far better account than some a priori intuition of pure infinity. Love it. |
17719 | Arithmetic concepts are indispensable because they accurately map the world [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: The indispensability of arithmetical concepts is evidence that they do in fact accurately represent features of the independent world. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Intro) | |
A reaction: This seems to me to be by far the best account of the matter. So why is the world so arithmetical? Dunno, mate; ask someone else. |
17717 | Senses produce concepts that map the world, and arithmetic is known through these concepts [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: I propose that arithmetical truths are known through an examination of our own arithmetical concepts; that basic arithmetical concepts map the arithmetical structure of the world; that the map obtains in virtue of our normal sensory apparatus. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Pref) | |
A reaction: She defends the nice but unusual position that arithmetical knowledge is both a priori and empirical (so that those two notions are not, as usually thought, opposed). I am a big Carrie Jenkins fan. |
17724 | It is not easy to show that Hume's Principle is analytic or definitive in the required sense [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: A problem for the neo-Fregeans is that it has not proved easy to establish that Hume's Principle is analytic or definitive in the required sense. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.3) | |
A reaction: It is also asked how we would know the principle, if it is indeed analytic or definitional (Jenkins p.119). |
17727 | We can learn about the world by studying the grounding of our concepts [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: What concept grounding does for us is ensure that our concepts, like the results of our empirical tests, can be treated as a source of information about the independent world. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.4) | |
A reaction: Presumably we learn our concepts hand-in-hand with experience, so learning our concepts is itself learning about the world. Later checking of concepts and their relations largely confirms what we already knew? |
17720 | There's essential, modal, explanatory, conceptual, metaphysical and constitutive dependence [Jenkins, by PG] |
Full Idea: Dependence comes in essential, modal, explanatory, conceptual, metaphysical and constitutive forms. | |
From: report of Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 1.2) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
A reaction: You'll have to look up Jenkins for the details. |
17728 | The concepts we have to use for categorising are ones which map the real world well [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: Concepts which are indispensably useful for categorising, understanding, explaining, and predicting our sensory input are likely to be ones which map the structure of that input well. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.6) | |
A reaction: Anti-realists about classification seem to think that we just invent an array of concepts, and then start classifying with them. The truth seems to be that the actual classes of worldly thing have generated our concepts. |
12750 | The question is whether force is self-sufficient in bodies, and essential, or dependent on something [Lenfant] |
Full Idea: The whole question is to know if the force to act in bodies is in matter something distinct and independent of everything else that one conceives there. Without that, this force cannot be its essence, and will remain the result of some primitive quality. | |
From: Jacques Lenfant (Letters to Leibniz [1693], 1693.11.07), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 8 | |
A reaction: This challenge to Leibniz highlights the drama of trying to simultaneously arrive at explanations of things, and to decide the nature of essence. Leibniz replied that force is primitive, because it is the 'principle' of behaviour and dispositions. |
17726 | Examining accurate, justified or grounded concepts brings understanding of the world [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: Examining accurate concepts can help us acquire true beliefs about the world, examining justified concepts can help us acquire justified beliefs about the world, and examining grounded concepts can help us acquire knowledge of it. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.4) | |
A reaction: This summarises Jenkins's empirical account of concepts, and I love it all to bits. I feel that contemporary philosophy is beginning to produce a coherent naturalistic worldview which can replace religion. Bar the rituals. We can have priests... |
17734 | It is not enough that intuition be reliable - we need to know why it is reliable [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: The mere reliability of intuition is not a satisfactory ground for saying it is a source of knowledge - we need to know why it is reliable to understand whether it can be a source of knowledge. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 6.5) | |
A reaction: My theory is that intuition is simply believing things for reasons which we have either forgotten, or (more likely) reasons which are too complex or subtle to be articulated. Intuition feels rational, because it is rational. Updated view of mind needed. |
17723 | Knowledge is true belief which can be explained just by citing the proposition believed [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: I propose that knowledge is true belief which can be well explained .....just by citing the proposition believed. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 3.1) | |
A reaction: I don't find this appealing, and my reservation about Jenkins's book is her reliabilist, externalist epistemology. I would add an internalist coherentist epistemology to her very nice theory. 'I believe there are fairies at the bottom of my garden'? |
17718 | Grounded concepts are trustworthy maps of the world [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: Grounded concepts are like trustworthy on-board maps of the independent world. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Intro) | |
A reaction: You'll probably need more than one concept for it to qualify as a 'map', but I like this idea a lot. The world, rather than we ourselves, creates our concepts. The opposite of the view of Geach in 'Mental Acts'. |
17739 | The physical effect of world on brain explains the concepts we possess [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: I think the physical effects of the world on the brain explain our possessing the concepts we do. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 8.2) | |
A reaction: A nice slogan for a thought which strikes me as exactly right. |
17731 | Verificationism is better if it says meaningfulness needs concepts grounded in the senses [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: I find an updated verificationism plausible, in which we say something meaningful just in case we employ only concepts whose possession could be justified or disjustified by sensory input. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 5.6) | |
A reaction: Wow! This is the first time I have ever had the slightest sympathy for verificationism. It saves my favourite problem case - of wild but meaningful speculation, for example about the contents of another universe. A very nice idea. |
17732 | Success semantics explains representation in terms of success in action [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: Success semantics is the attempt to understand mental representation by thinking about the ways in which representing the world can lead to success in action. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 6.3) | |
A reaction: I take this to be what is also known as 'teleological semantics'. It sounds to me as if this might help to explain success in action, but isn't going to explain the representations that result in the success. |
17725 | 'Analytic' can be conceptual, or by meaning, or predicate inclusion, or definition... [Jenkins] |
Full Idea: 'Analytic' might mean conceptually true, or true in virtue of meaning, or where the predicate is contained in the subject, or for sentences which define something, or where meaning is sufficient for the truth. | |
From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.3) | |
A reaction: The second one says meaning grounds the truth, where the last one says meaning entails the truth. |
21236 | Instead of gravitational force, we now have a pervasive gravitational field [Farmelo] |
Full Idea: Physics replaced the notion that bodies exert gravitational force on each other by the more effective picture that the bodies in the universe give rise to a pervasive gravitational field which exerts a force on each particle. | |
From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
A reaction: This still uses the word 'force'. I sometimes get the impression that gravity is the curvature of space, but gravity needs more. Which direction along the curvature are particles attracted? The bottom line is the power of the bodies. |
21235 | The Schrödinger waves are just the maths of transforming energy values to positions [Farmelo] |
Full Idea: Dirac showed that the Schrödinger waves were simply the mathematical quantities involved in transforming the description of a quantum based on its energy values to one based on possible values of its position. | |
From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
A reaction: Does this eliminate actual physical 'waves' from the theory? |
21234 | Experiments show that fundamental particles of one type are identical [Farmelo] |
Full Idea: It is an established experimental fact ...that every single fundamental particle in the universe is the same and identical to all other particles of the same type. | |
From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 07) | |
A reaction: A loud groan is heard from the tomb of Leibniz. I'm unclear how experiments can establish this. If electrons have internal structure (which is not ruled out) then uniformity is highly unlikely. |