16 ideas
| 17950 | The logos enables us to track one particular among a network of objects [Nehamas] |
| Full Idea: The logos (the definition) is a summary statement of the path within a network of objects that one will have to follow in order to locate a particular member of that network. | |
| From: Alexander Nehamas (Episteme and Logos in later Plato [1984], p.234) | |
| A reaction: I like this because it confirms that Plato (as well as Aristotle) was interested in the particulars rather than in the kinds (which I take to be general truths about particulars). |
| 17951 | A logos may be short, but it contains reference to the whole domain of the object [Nehamas] |
| Full Idea: A thing's logos, apparently short as it may be, is implicitly a very rich statement since it ultimately involves familiarity with the whole domain to which that particular object belongs. | |
| From: Alexander Nehamas (Episteme and Logos in later Plato [1984], p.234) | |
| A reaction: He may be wrong that the logos is short, since Aristotle (Idea 12292) says a definition can contain many assertions. |
| 18369 | There are at least fourteen candidates for truth-bearers [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: Among the candidates [for truthbearers] are beliefs, propositions, judgments, assertions, statements, theories, remarks, ideas, acts of thought, utterances, sentence tokens, sentence types, sentences (unspecified), and speech acts. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: I vote for propositions, but only in the sense of the thoughts underlying language, not the Russellian things which are supposed to exist independently from thinkers. |
| 19318 | A 'sequence' of objects is an order set of them [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: A 'sequence' of objects is like a set of objects, except that, unlike a set, the order of the objects is important when dealing with sequences. ...An infinite sequence satisfies 'x2 is purple' if and only if the second member of the sequence is purple. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This explains why Tarski needed set theory in his metalanguage. |
| 19319 | If one sequence satisfies a sentence, they all do [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: If one sequence satisfies a sentence, they all do. ...Thus it matters not whether we define truth as satisfaction by some sequence or as satisfaction by all sequences. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: So if the striker scores a goal, the team has scored a goal. |
| 19320 | If we define truth by listing the satisfactions, the supply of predicates must be finite [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: Because the definition of satisfaction must have a separate clause for each predicate, Tarski's method only works for languages with a finite number of predicates, ...but natural languages have an infinite number of predicates. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: He suggest predicates containing natural numbers, as examples of infinite predicates. Davidson tried to extend the theory to natural languages, by (I think) applying it to adverbs, which could generate the infinite predicates. Maths has finite predicates. |
| 19315 | In quantified language the components of complex sentences may not be sentences [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: In a quantified language it is possible to build new sentences by combining two expressions neither of which is itself a sentence. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: In propositional logic the components are other sentences, so the truth value can be given by their separate truth-values, through truth tables. Kirkham is explaining the task which Tarski faced. Truth-values are not just compositional. |
| 19317 | An open sentence is satisfied if the object possess that property [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: An object satisfies an open sentence if and only if it possesses the property expressed by the predicate of the open sentence. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This applies to atomic sentence, of the form Fx or Fa (that is, some variable is F, or some object is F). So strictly, only the world can decide whether some open sentence is satisfied. And it all depends on things called 'properties'. |
| 16062 | A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: It seems unavoidable that the facts about logically necessary relations between levels of facts are themselves logically distinct further facts, irreducible to the microphysical facts. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
| A reaction: I'm beginning to think that rejecting every theory of reality that is proposed by carefully exposing some infinite regress hidden in it is a rather lazy way to do philosophy. Almost as bad as rejecting anything if it can't be defined. |
| 16061 | If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: Logical supervenience, restricted to individuals, seems to imply strong reduction. It is said that where the B-facts logically supervene on the A-facts, the B-facts simply re-describe what the A-facts describe, and the B-facts come along 'for free'. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be taking 'logically' to mean 'analytically'. Presumably an entailment is logically supervenient on its premisses, and may therefore be very revealing, even if some people think such things are analytic. |
| 16060 | Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism. |
| 16064 | The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11) | |
| A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream. |
| 19322 | Why can there not be disjunctive, conditional and negative facts? [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: It has been said that there are no disjunctive facts, conditional facts, or negative facts. ...but it is not at all clear why there cannot be facts of this sort. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: I love these sorts of facts, and offer them as a naturalistic basis for logic. You probably need the world to have modal features, but I have those in the form of powers and dispositions. |
| 17945 | Forms are not a theory of universals, but an attempt to explain how predication is possible [Nehamas] |
| Full Idea: The theory of Forms is not a theory of universals but a first attempt to explain how predication, the application of a single term to many objects - now considered one of the most elementary operations of language - is possible. | |
| From: Alexander Nehamas (Introduction to 'Virtues of Authenticity' [1999], p.xxvii) |
| 17946 | Only Tallness really is tall, and other inferior tall things merely participate in the tallness [Nehamas] |
| Full Idea: Only Tallness and nothing else really is tall; everything else merely participates in the Forms and, being excluded from the realm of Being, belongs to the inferior world of Becoming. | |
| From: Alexander Nehamas (Introduction to 'Virtues of Authenticity' [1999], p.xxviii) | |
| A reaction: This is just as weird as the normal view (and puzzle of participation), but at least it makes more sense of 'metachein' (partaking). |
| 17944 | 'Episteme' is better translated as 'understanding' than as 'knowledge' [Nehamas] |
| Full Idea: The Greek 'episteme' is usually translated as 'knowledge' but, I argue, closer to our notion of understanding. | |
| From: Alexander Nehamas (Introduction to 'Virtues of Authenticity' [1999], p.xvi) | |
| A reaction: He agrees with Julia Annas on this. I take it to be crucial. See the first sentence of Aristotle's 'Metaphysics'. It is explanation which leads to understanding. |