30 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. |
| 16014 | It is controversial whether only 'numerical identity' allows two things to be counted as one [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: 'Numerical identity' implies the controversial view that it is the only identity relation in accordance with which we can properly count (or number) things: x and y are to be properly counted as one just in case they are numerically identical. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §1) | |
| A reaction: Noonan cites Geach, presumably to remind us of relative identity, where two things may be one or two, depending on what they are relative to. The one 'guard on the gate' may actually be two men. |
| 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? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 16024 | I could have died at five, but the summation of my adult stages could not [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: Persons have different modal properties from the summations of person-stages. …I might have died when I was five. But the maximal summation of person-stages which perdurantists say is me could not have had a temporal extent of a mere five years. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §5) | |
| A reaction: Thus the summation of stages seems to fail Leibniz's Law, since truths about a part are not true of the whole. But my foot might be amputated without me being amputated. The objection is the fallacy of composition? |
| 16023 | Stage theorists accept four-dimensionalism, but call each stage a whole object [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: Stage theorists, accepting the ontology of perdurance, modify the semantics to secure the result that fatness is a property of a cat. Every temporal part of a cat (such as Tabby-on-Monday) is a cat. …(but they pay a price over the counting of cats). | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §5) | |
| A reaction: [Noonan cites Hawley and Sider for this view. The final parenthesis compresses Noonan] I would take the difficulty over counting cats to be fatal to the view. It produces too many cats, or too few, or denies counting altogether. |
| 16015 | Problems about identity can't even be formulated without the concept of identity [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: If identity is problematic, it is difficult to see how the problem could be resolved, since it is difficult to see how a thinker could have the conceptual resources with which to explain the concept of identity whilst lacking that concept itself. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §1) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I accept this. We can comprehend the idea of a mind that didn't think in terms of identities (at least for objects). I suppose any relation of a mind to the world has to distinguish things in some way. Does the Parmenidean One have identity? |
| 16017 | Identity is usually defined as the equivalence relation satisfying Leibniz's Law [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: Numerical identity is usually defined as the equivalence relation (or: the reflexive relation) satisfying Leibniz's Law, the indiscernibility of identicals, where everything true of x is true of y. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §2) | |
| A reaction: Noonan says this must include 'is identical to x' among the truths, and so is circular |
| 16016 | Identity definitions (such as self-identity, or the smallest equivalence relation) are usually circular [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: Identity can be circularly defined, as 'the relation everything has to itself and to nothing else', …or as 'the smallest equivalence relation'. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §2) | |
| A reaction: The first one is circular because 'nothing else' implies identity. The second is circular because it has to quantify over all equivalence relations. (So says Noonan). |
| 16020 | Identity can only be characterised in a second-order language [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: There is no condition in a first-order language for a predicate to express identity, rather than indiscernibility within the resources of the language. Leibniz's Law is statable in a second-order language, so identity can be uniquely characterised. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §2) | |
| A reaction: The point is that first-order languages only refer to all objects, but you need to refer to all properties to include Leibniz's Law. Quine's 'Identity, Ostension and Hypostasis' is the source of this idea. |
| 16018 | Indiscernibility is basic to our understanding of identity and distinctness [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz's Law (the indiscernibility of identicals) appears to be crucial to our understanding of identity, and, more particularly, to our understanding of distinctness. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §2) | |
| A reaction: True, but indiscernibility concerns the epistemology, and identity concerns the ontology. |
| 16019 | Leibniz's Law must be kept separate from the substitutivity principle [Noonan] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz's Law must be clearly distinguished from the substitutivity principle, that if 'a' and 'b' are codesignators they are substitutable salva veritate. | |
| From: Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §2) | |
| A reaction: He gives a bunch of well-known problem cases for substitutivity. The Morning Star, Giorgione, and the number of planets won't work. Belief contexts, or facts about spelling, may not be substitutable. |
| 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'? |
| 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. |
| 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'. |
| 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. |