25 ideas
3745 | Must sentences make statements to qualify for truth? [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: Maybe a sentence is not a candidate for truth until it is used to make a statement. | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], Ch.6) |
3742 | Beliefs must match facts, but also words must match beliefs [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: Our beliefs must claim a correspondence with facts, and then the verbal expression of the belief must correspond to the belief itself. | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], Ch.4) |
3744 | The semantic theory requires sentences as truth-bearers, not propositions [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: The Semantic Theory of truth requires that sentences are truth-bearers (rather than statements, or propositions). | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], Ch.6) |
3749 | What does 'true in English' mean? [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: We do not seem to have any use in ordinary discourse for phrases like 'true in English', 'false in German'. | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], II.1) |
3746 | Logic seems to work for unasserted sentences [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: If sentences can have truth-values only when they occur as asserted, it would be impossible to have a truth-functional basis to logic. | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], Ch.6) |
16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Activities can be identified spatiotemporally, and individuated by rate, duration, and types of entity and property that engage in them. They also have modes of operation, directionality, polarity, energy requirements and a range. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: This is their attempt at making 'activity' one of the two central concepts of ontology, along with 'entity'. A helpful analysis. It just seems to be one way of slicing the cake. |
3747 | Events are fast changes which are of interest to us [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: The standard cases of events are physical changes which happen sufficiently fast to be observed as changes, and which are of sufficient interest to us to be noticed or commented on. | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], Ch.7) |
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. |
16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is not the penicillin that causes the pneumonia to disappear, but what the penicillin does. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.1) | |
A reaction: This is a very neat example for illustrating how we slip into 'entity' talk, when the reality we are addressing actually concerns processes. Without the 'what it does', penicillin can't participate in causation at all. |
16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: In other words, we understand complex things by reducing them to things we do understand. It would, though, be illuminating to see a nest of interconnected activities, even if we understood none of them. |
3743 | We can't contemplate our beliefs until we have expressed them [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: It is only when beliefs are given some symbolic expression that they acquire the precision and stability that enables us to entertain them. | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], Ch.5) |
3748 | Without language our beliefs are particular and present [O'Connor] |
Full Idea: Without language we would be restricted to particular beliefs about the here and now. | |
From: D.J. O'Connor (The Correspondence Theory of Truth [1975], Ch.8) |
16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is not regularities that explain but the activities that sustain the regularities. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: Good, but we had better not characterise the 'activities' in terms of regularities. |
16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is common to speak of functions as properties 'had by' entities, …but they should rather be understood in terms of the activities by virtue of which entities contribute to the workings of a mechanism. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: I'm certainly quite passionately in favour of cutting down on describing the world almost entirely in terms of entities which have properties. An 'activity', though, is a bit of an elusive concept. |
16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: The difficulty seems to be that you could broaden the concept of 'mechanism' indefinitely, so that it covered history, mathematics, populations, cultural change, and even mathematics. Where to stop? |
16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular change from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: This is their initial formal definition of a mechanism. Note that a mere 'activity' can be included. Presumably the mechanism might have an outcome that was not the intended outcome. Does a random element disqualify it? Are hands mechanisms? |
16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: To give a description of a mechanism for a phenomenon is to explain that phenomenon, i.e. to explain how it was produced. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: To 'show how' something happens needs a bit of precisification. It is probably analytic that 'showing how' means 'revealing the mechanism', though 'mechanism' then becomes the tricky concept. |
16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: We emphasise the activities in mechanisms. This is explicitly dualist. Substantivalists speak of entities with dispositions to act. Process ontologists reify activities and try to reduce entities to processes. We try to capture both intuitions. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: [A quotation of selected fragments] The problem here seems to be the raising of an 'activity' to a central role in ontology, when it doesn't seem to be primitive, and will typically be analysed in a variety of ways. |
16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Nested hierachical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. …Bottoming out is relative …the explanation comes to an end, and description of lower-level mechanisms would be irrelevant. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to me exactly the right story about mechanism, and it is a story I am associating with essentialism. The relevance is ties to understanding. The lower level is either fully understood, or totally baffling. |
16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: There are four bottom-out kinds of activities: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic. These are abstract means of production that can be fruitfully applied in particular cases to explain phenomena. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: I like that. It gives a nice core for a metaphysics for physicalists. I suspect that 'mechanical' can be reduced to something else, and that 'energetic' will disappear in the final story. |
16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Abstractions may be constructed by taking an exemplary case or instance and removing detail. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.3) | |
A reaction: I love 'removing detail'. That's it. Simple. I think this process is the basis of our whole capacity to formulate abstract concepts. Forget Frege - he's just describing the results of the process. How do we decide what is 'detail'? Essentialism! |
16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2) | |
A reaction: This is a simple and self-evident fact, and bad news for anyone who want to build their entire ontology around laws of nature. I take such a notion to be fairly empty, except as a convenient heuristic device. |