34 ideas
| 5896 | Speak the truth, for this alone deifies man [Pythagoras, by Porphyry] |
| Full Idea: Pythagoras advised above all things to speak the truth, for this alone deifies man. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Porphyry - Life of Pythagoras §41 | |
| A reaction: Idea 4421 (of Nietzsche) stands in contrast to this. I am not quite sure why speaking the truth has such a high value. I am inclined to a minimalist view, which is just that philosophy is an attempt to speak the truth, as fishermen try to catch fish. |
| 3051 | Pythagoras discovered the numerical relation of sounds on a string [Pythagoras, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Pythagoras discovered the numerical relation of sounds on a string. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 08.1.11 |
| 7485 | For Pythagoreans 'one' is not a number, but the foundation of numbers [Pythagoras, by Watson] |
| Full Idea: For Pythagoreans, one, 1, is not a true number but the 'essence' of number, out of which the number system emerges. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE], Ch.8) by Peter Watson - Ideas Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: I think this is right! Counting and numbers only arise once the concept of individuality and identity have arisen. Counting to one is no more than observing the law of identity. 'Two' is the big adventure. |
| 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. |
| 14703 | Superficial necessity is true in all worlds; deep necessity is thus true, no matter which world is actual [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: If we have a 'fixedly' operator F, then a sentence is fixedly actually true if it is true no matter which world is designated as actual (which 'he actually won in 2008' fails to be). Maybe '□' is superficial necessity, and FA is 'deep' necessity. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.2.2) | |
| A reaction: Gareth Evans distinguishes 'deep' from 'superficial' necessity. Humberstone and others introduced 'F'. Presumably FA is deeper because it has to pass a tougher test. |
| 14714 | Contradictory claims about a necessary god both seem apriori coherent [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: It seems apriori coherent that there could be a necessarily existing god, and that there could be no such god - but they can't both be true. Other examples include unprovable mathematical necessities | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.3.4) |
| 14704 | 2D semantics gives us apriori knowledge of our own meanings [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Generalized 2D semantics is meant to vindicate the traditional idea that we have apriori access to our own meanings through armchair reflection. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: The idea is to split meaning in two, so that we know one part of it a priori. It is an unfashionably internalist view of meaning (which doesn't make it wrong!). |
| 14706 | Your view of water depends on whether you start from the actual Earth or its counterfactual Twin [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Your verdicts about whether the stuff on Twin Earth counts as water depends on whether you think of Twin Earth as a hypothesis about your actual environment or as a purely counterfactual possibility. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.2.3) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'two-dimensional semantics' approach to the Twin Earth problem, which splits meaning into two components. Whether you start from the actual world or from Twin Earth, you will rigidly designate the local wet stuff as 'water'. |
| 14711 | Rationalists say knowing an expression is identifying its extension using an internal cognitive state [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: In rationalist views of meaning, based on the 'golden triangle', to be competent with an expression is to be in an internal cognitive state that puts one in a position to identify its extension in any possible world based only on apriori reflection. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.3.1) | |
| A reaction: This looks like a proper fight-back against modern rampant externalism about meaning. All my intuitions are with internalism, which I think points to a more coherent overall philosophy. Well done, David Chalmers! Even if he is wrong. |
| 14717 | Internalist meaning is about understanding; externalist meaning is about embedding in a situation [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Internalists take the notion of meaning to capture an aspect of an individual's current state of understanding, while externalists take the notion of meaning to reflect how an individual is embedded within her social and physical environment. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.4.3) | |
| A reaction: This idea also occurs in discussions of concepts (filed here under 'Thought'). |
| 14720 | Semantic theory assigns meanings to expressions, and metasemantics explains how this works [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: A semantic theory assigns semantic values (meanings) to particular expressions of the language. In contrast, a metasemantic theory explains why expressions have those semantic values, appealing to facts about speakers and communities. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably some people only want the metasemantic version. I assume that the two are entangled, but I would vote for both. |
| 14695 | Semantic theories show how truth of sentences depends on rules for interpreting and joining their parts [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Semantic theories explain how the truth or falsity of whole sentences depends on the meanings of their parts by stating rules governing the interpretation of subsentential expressions and their modes of combination. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.1.1) | |
| A reaction: Somehow it looks as if the mystery of the whole business will still be missing if this project is ever successfully completed. Also one suspects that such a theory would be a fiction, rather than a description of actuality, which is too complex. |
| 14696 | Simple semantics assigns extensions to names and to predicates [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: The simplest semantic frameworks assign extensions as semantic values of particular expressions. The extension of a name is the thing, of 'cool' is the set of cool things, and sets of ordered pairs for 2-place predicates. The sentence has T or F. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.1.1) | |
| A reaction: The immediate well-known problem is different predicates with the same extensions, such as 'renate' and 'cordate'. Possible worlds semantics is supposed to be an improvement to cover this, and to give a semantics for modal talk as well. Sounds good. |
| 14697 | 'Federer' and 'best tennis player' can't mean the same, despite having the same extension [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: A simple extensional semantics will assign the same semantic value to 'Roger Federer' and 'world's best tennis player', but they clearly differ in meaning, and if events had unfolded differently they would pick out different people. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.1.1) | |
| A reaction: You would think that this would be too obvious to need pointing out, but it is clearly a view that had a lot of popularity before the arrival of possible worlds. |
| 14698 | Possible worlds semantics uses 'intensions' - functions which assign extensions at each world [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: In standard possible worlds semantics, the semantic value of an expression is an 'intension', a function that assigns an extension to the expression 'at' every possible world. ...It keeps track of the 'modal profiles' of objects, kinds and properties. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.1.1) | |
| A reaction: Personally I just don't buy a semantics which is entirely based on extensions, even if this has sorted out some more obvious problems of extensionality. When I say someone is 'my hero', I don't just mean to pick out a particular person. |
| 14699 | Possible worlds make 'I' and that person's name synonymous, but they have different meanings [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: In standard possible worlds semantics the semantic value of Hllary Clinton's utterance of 'I' will be the same as her utterance of 'Hillary Clinton'. But clearly the English word 'I' is not synonymous with the name 'Hillary Clinton'. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.1.1) | |
| A reaction: This problem was spotted by Kaplan, and it has been a chief motivator for the creation of two-dimensional semantics, which some people have then extended into a complete semantic theory. No purely extensional semantics can be right. |
| 14709 | Possible worlds semantics implies a constitutive connection between meanings and modal claims [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: In standard possible world semantics an expression's intension reflects the modal profile of an object, kind or property, which would establish an important constitutive connection between meanings and modal claims. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.3.1) | |
| A reaction: The central question becomes 'do you need to know a thing's modal profile in order to have a decent understanding of it?', but if you express it that way (my way), then what counts as 'decent' will be relative to all sorts of things. |
| 14719 | In the possible worlds account all necessary truths are same (because they all map to the True) [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: A problem for a standard possible worlds analysis is that all necessary truths have precisely the same content (the function mapping every world to the True). Hesperus=Phosphorus has the same content as Hesperus=Hesperus-and-2+2=4. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: If this is supposed to be a theory of meaning then it has gone very badly wrong indeed. Has modern semantics taken a wrong turning somewhere? Two-dimensionalism is meant to address some of these problems. |
| 14701 | Array worlds along the horizontal, and contexts (world,person,time) along the vertical [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: In a two-dimensional matrix we array possible circumstances of evaluation (worlds) along the horizontal axis, and possible contexts of utterance (world, person, time) along the vertical axis. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is due to Stalnaker 1978, and is clearest in operation when applied to an indexical such as 'I' in 'I am President'. 'I' is a rigid designator, but depends on context. The grid is filled in with T or F for each utterance in each world. |
| 14702 | If we introduce 'actually' into modal talk, we need possible worlds twice to express this [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: At first glance necessity and possibility can be fully expressed by quantifying over all possible worlds, but this cannot capture 'Possibly everything actually red is also shiny'. This needs a double-indexed framework, with worlds playing two roles. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 1.2.1) | |
| A reaction: She points out that this also applies to tense logic, for the notion of 'now'. The point is that we not only need a set of possible worlds, but we also need a procedure (the 'Actuality' operator A or @) for picking out one of the worlds as special. |
| 14705 | Do we know apriori how we refer to names and natural kinds, but their modal profiles only a posteriori? [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps our best way of understanding names and natural kind terms is that we have apriori access to currently associated reference-fixing criterion, but only a posteriori access to the associated modal profile. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'generalized' view of 2D semantics (covering everything, not just modals and indexicals). I know apriori what something is, but only study will reveal its possibilities. The actual world is easy to talk about, but possible worlds are harder. |
| 14715 | 2D fans defend it for conceptual analysis, for meaning, and for internalist reference [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Supporters of generalized two-dimensional semantics agree to defend apriori conceptual analysis in metaphysics, and that 2D captures meaning and not just belief-patterns, and it gives a broadly internalist approach to reference determination. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.3.4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure I can evaluate this, but I sort of like conceptual analysis, and the concept of meaning, and fairly internalist views of reference, so I am ripe for the picking. |
| 14716 | 2D semantics can't respond to contingent apriori claims, since there is no single proposition involved [Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: It is objected to 2D semantics that it cannot explain Kripke's cases of contingent apriori truths, for there is no single proposition (construed as a set of possible worlds) that is both apriori and contingent. | |
| From: Laura Schroeter (Two-Dimensional Semantics [2010], 2.4.2) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a rather large objection to the whole 2D plan, if it implies that when we say something there is no single proposition that is being expressed. |
| 3053 | Pythagoras taught that virtue is harmony, and health, and universal good, and God [Pythagoras, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Pythagoras taught that virtue is harmony, and health, and universal good, and God. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 08.1.19 | |
| A reaction: I like the link with health, because I consider that a bridge over the supposed fact-value gap. Very Pythagorean to think that virtue is harmony. Plato liked that thought. |
| 5244 | For Pythagoreans, justice is simply treating all people the same [Pythagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Some even think that what is just is simple reciprocity, as the Pythagoreans maintained, because they defined justice simply as having done to one what one has done to another. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE], 28) by Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics 1132b22 | |
| A reaction: One wonders what Pythagoreans made of slavery. Aristotle argues that officials, for example, have superior rights. The Pythagorean idea makes fairness the central aspect of justice, and that must at least be partly right. |
| 553 | Pythagoreans think mathematical principles are the principles of all of nature [Pythagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: The Pythagoreans thought that the principles of mathematical entities were the principles of all entities. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 985b |
| 554 | Pythagoreans say things imitate numbers, but Plato says things participate in numbers [Pythagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Pythagoreans said that entities existed by imitation of the numbers, whereas Plato said that it was by participation. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 987b |
| 375 | When musical harmony and rhythm were discovered, similar features were seen in bodily movement [Pythagoras, by Plato] |
| Full Idea: When our predecessors discovered musical scales, they also discovered similar features in bodily movement, which should also be measured numerically, and called 'tempos' and 'measures'. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Plato - Philebus 17d |
| 638 | Pythagoreans define timeliness, justice and marriage in terms of numbers [Pythagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: The Pythagoreans offered definitions of a limited range of things on the basis of numbers; examples are timeliness, justice and marriage. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1078b |
| 644 | For Pythagoreans the entire universe is made of numbers [Pythagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: For Pythagoreans the entire universe is constructed of numbers. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1080b |
| 7467 | The modern idea of an immortal soul was largely created by Pythagoras [Pythagoras, by Watson] |
| Full Idea: The modern concept of the immortal soul is a Greek idea, which owes much to Pythagoras. | |
| From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Peter Watson - Ideas Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: You can see why it caught on - it is a very appealing idea. Watson connects the 'modern' view with the ideas of heaven and hell. Obviously the idea of an afterlife goes a long way back (judging from the contents of ancient graves). |