19 ideas
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. |
14596 | Call 'nominalism' the denial of numbers, properties, relations and sets [Dorr] |
Full Idea: Just as there are no numbers or properties, there are no relations (like 'being heavier than' or 'betweenness'), or sets. I will provisionally use 'nominalism' for the conjunction of these four claims. | |
From: Cian Dorr (There Are No Abstract Objects [2008], 1) | |
A reaction: If you are going to be a nominalist, do it properly! My starting point in metaphysics is strong sympathy with this view. Right now [Tues 22nd Nov 2011, 10:57 am GMT] I think it is correct. |
14597 | Natural Class Nominalism says there are primitive classes of things resembling in one respect [Dorr] |
Full Idea: Natural Class Nominalists take as primitive the notion of a 'natural' class - a class of things that all resemble one another in some one respect and resemble nothing else in that respect. | |
From: Cian Dorr (There Are No Abstract Objects [2008], 4) | |
A reaction: Dorr rejects this view because he doesn't believe in 'classes'. How committed to classes do you have to be before you are permitted to talk about them? All vocabulary (such as 'resemble') seems metaphysically tainted in this area. |
14598 | Abstracta imply non-logical brute necessities, so only nominalists can deny such things [Dorr] |
Full Idea: If there are abstract objects, there are necessary truths about these things that cannot be reduced to truths of logic. So only the nominalist, who denies that there are any such things, can adequately respect the idea that there are no brute necessities. | |
From: Cian Dorr (There Are No Abstract Objects [2008], 4) | |
A reaction: This is where two plates of my personal philosophy grind horribly against one another. I love nominalism, and I love natural necessities. They meet like a ring-species in evolution. I'll just call it a 'paradox', and move on (swiftly). |
5901 | Is 'productive of happiness' the definition of 'right', or the cause of it? [Ross on Bentham] |
Full Idea: Bentham has not made up his mind whether he thinks that 'right' means 'productive of the general happiness', or that being productive of the general happiness is what makes acts right (and he would have thought the difference unimportant). | |
From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by W. David Ross - The Right and the Good §I | |
A reaction: The issue is whether rightness exists as a concept separate from happiness. I take it Bentham would vote for the first reading, as he has no interest in what is right, apart from increasing happiness. |
5934 | Of Bentham's 'dimensions' of pleasure, only intensity and duration matter [Ross on Bentham] |
Full Idea: Most of Bentham's 'dimensions' of pleasure refer to further pleasures, or are irrelevant to the pleasure; we are left with intensity and duration as the characteristics on which depend the value of a pleasure qua pleasure, and there is nothing to add. | |
From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by W. David Ross - The Right and the Good §VI | |
A reaction: I agree. When Bentham produces his list he seems to be trying to add a bogus enrichment to what is really a rather crude and basic notion of the aim of life. Your simple hedonist appears to only desire high intensity and long duration. |
5271 | Prejudice apart, push-pin has equal value with music and poetry [Bentham] |
Full Idea: Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and science of music and poetry. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Constitutional Code I [1827], p.139), quoted by J.R. Dinwiddy - Bentham p.114 | |
A reaction: Mill quoted this with implied outrage, but Bentham was attacking public subsidies to the arts when he said it. It is a basic idea in the debate on pleasure - that pleasures are only distinguished by their intensity, not some other value. |
3777 | Pleasure and pain control all human desires and duties [Bentham] |
Full Idea: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], I.1) | |
A reaction: Ridiculous. Both halves are false. We pursue things for other reasons, and to deny this makes his idea a tautology. Deep ecology has nothing to do with human pleasure or pain. |
3554 | Bentham thinks happiness is feeling good, but why use morality to achieve that? [Annas on Bentham] |
Full Idea: It is easy to fall into Bentham's mindless assumption that happiness must be a specific state of feeling good about something, but it is mysterious why anyone would think morality a good strategy for achieving this. | |
From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 2.7 |
3781 | The value of pleasures and pains is their force [Bentham] |
Full Idea: It behoves the legislator to understand the force of pleasures and pains, which is their value. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], IV.1) |
20977 | Natural rights are nonsense, and unspecified natural rights is nonsense on stilts [Bentham] |
Full Idea: Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Anarchical Fallacies: on the Declaration of Rights [1796]) | |
A reaction: If you want your opinion to be remembered, express it memorably! I take natural rights to be the basic principles and values which are obvious to almost everyone when they come for formulate legal rights (which are the only true rights). |
3778 | The community's interest is a sum of individual interests [Bentham] |
Full Idea: The interest of the community is the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], I.4) |
21003 | Only laws can produce real rights; rights from 'law of nature' are imaginary [Bentham] |
Full Idea: Right, the substantive right, is the child of law; from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from 'law of nature' can come only imaginary rights. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Anarchical Fallacies: on the Declaration of Rights [1796], II.523), quoted by Amartya Sen - The Idea of Justice 17 'Ethics' | |
A reaction: I am coming to agree with this. What are called 'natural rights' are just self-evident good reasons why someone should be allowed a right. A right can, of course, come from an informal agreement. The question is: why award that particular legal right? |
20280 | Large mature animals are more rational than babies. But all that really matters is - can they suffer? [Bentham] |
Full Idea: A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational animal than an infant of a day, or even a month, old. But suppose they be otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], XVIII 1 n), quoted by Peter Singer - Practical Ethics 03 | |
A reaction: This is certainly an inspiring, and even shocking question, which never seems to have been so directly asked before in the entire history of European thought. Awesome. |
3779 | Unnatural, when it means anything, means infrequent [Bentham] |
Full Idea: Unnatural, when it means anything, means unfrequent. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], II.14 n8.9) |
3780 | We must judge a thing morally to know if it conforms to God's will [Bentham] |
Full Idea: It is necessary to know first whether a thing is right in order to know from thence whether it be conformable to the will of God. | |
From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], II.18) |