18 ideas
| 21943 | Since Kant, self-criticism has been part of philosophy [Gutting] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy after Kant has involved a continuing critique of its own project. | |
| From: Gary Gutting (Foucault: a very short introduction [2005], 6) | |
| A reaction: I'm struck by many modern philosophers in the analytic tradition who write as if Kant had never existed. I don't know if that is a conscious decision, but it may be a good one. |
| 21944 | Structuralism describes human phenomena in terms of unconscious structures [Gutting] |
| Full Idea: Structuralism in the 1960s was a set of theories which explained human phenomena in terms of underlying unconscious structures, rather than the lived experience described by Phenomenology. | |
| From: Gary Gutting (Foucault: a very short introduction [2005], 6) | |
| A reaction: Hence the interest in Freud and Marx, and Foucault's interest in history, each offering to unmask what is hidden in consciousness. The unmasking is a basically Kantian project. Cf. Frege's hatred of 'psychologism'. |
| 17292 | Avoid 'in virtue of' for grounding, since it might imply a reflexive relation such as identity [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: We should not use 'in virtue of' where it might express a reflexive relation, such as identity. Since grounding is a relation of determination, and closely linked to the concept of explanation, it is irreflexive and asymmetric. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: E.g. he says someone isn't a bachelor in virtue of being an unmarried man, since a bachelor just is an unmarried man. I can't disagree. 'Determination' looks like the magic word, even if we don't know how it cashes out. |
| 17295 | Ground relations depend on the properties [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: On my view, grounding relations depend on the natures of the properties involved in them. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm cautious about this if we don't find out more exactly what properties are (and they had better not just be predicates). Maybe properties are the only apparatus we have here, though I prefer 'powers' for the fundamentals. |
| 17297 | A ball's being spherical non-causally determines its power to roll [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The fact that a given thing is spherical non-causally determines the fact that it has the power to roll. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Quine won't accept this, because you have added something called a 'power' to the ball (intrinsically, it seems), over and above its observable sphericity. Does being a ball 'determine' that it can't be in two places at once? Order of explanation? |
| 17302 | Ground is irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, non-monotonic etc. [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The logical principles about grounding include irreflexivity, asymmetry, transitivity, non-monotonicity, and so forth. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.8) | |
| A reaction: [It can't ground itself, there is no mutual grounding, grounds of grounds ground, and grounding judgements are not fixed] |
| 17303 | The best critique of grounding says it is actually either identity or elimination [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: I think the most promising skeptical strategy is to insist on either identity or elimination wherever grounding is alleged to hold. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.9) | |
| A reaction: This comes after an assessment of the critiques of grounding by Oliver, Hofweber and Daly. So we don't say chemistry grounds biology, we either say biology is chemistry, or that there is no biology. Everything is just simples. Not for me. |
| 17294 | Grounding is a singular relation between worldly facts [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: On my view, grounding is a singular relation between facts. ...Facts, on this view, are obtaining states of affairs. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: He rest this claim on his 'worldly' view of facts, Idea 17293. I seem to be agreeing with him. Note that it is not between types of fact, even if there are such general truths, such as in chemistry. |
| 17300 | If grounding relates facts, properties must be included, as well as objects [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: Taking facts to be the relata of grounding has the interesting consequence that it does not relate ordinary particulars, objects, considered apart from their properties. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: It will depend on what you mean by properties, and it seems to me that something like 'powers' must be invoked, to get the active character that seems to be involved in grounding. |
| 17296 | We must accept grounding, for our important explanations [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The reason we must countenance grounding is that it is indispensible to certain important explanations. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: I like this a lot. The first given of all philosophy is the drive to exlain. However, we mustn't go inventing features of the world, simply to give us the possibility of explaining it. The objective fact seems to be the without-which-not relation. |
| 17301 | Reduction is just identity, so the two things are the same fact, so reduction isn't grounding [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: I deny that when p grounds q, q thereby reduces to p, and I deny that if q reduces to p, then p grounds q. ...On my view, reduction is nothing other than identity, so p is the same fact as q. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: Very good. I can't disagree with any of it, and it is crystal clear. Philosophical heaven. |
| 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. |
| 17293 | Worldly facts are obtaining states of affairs, with constituents; conceptual facts also depend on concepts [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The 'worldly' view of facts says they are obtaining states of affairs, individuated by their constituents and their combination. On the 'conceptual' view, facts will differ if they pick out an object or property via different concepts. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Might it be that conceptual differences between facts are supervenient on worldly differences (with the worldly facts in charge)? |
| 17298 | Two things being identical (like water and H2O) is not an explanation [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: If there is identity between water and H2O, we have neither the asymmetry nor the irreflexivity that explanations require. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Once you realise it is H2O, you understand its deeper features, which will open up new explanations. He's right, though. |
| 17299 | There are plenty of examples of non-causal explanation [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: There are a number of explanations where it seems clear that causation is not involved at all: normative grounded in non-normative, disposition grounded in categorical, aesthetic grounded in non-aesthetic, semantic in social and psychological. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Apart from dispositions, perhaps, these all seem to be experienced phenomena grounded in the physical world. 'Determination' is the preferred term for non-causal grounding. |