12 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. |
4483 | If abstract terms are sets of tropes, 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' turn out identical [Loux] |
Full Idea: If trope theorists say abstract singular terms name sets of tropes, what is the referent of 'is a unicorn'? The only candidate is the null set (with no members), but there is just one null set, so 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' will be identical. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.86) | |
A reaction: Not crucial, I would think, given that a unicorn is just a horse with a horn. Hume explains how we do that, combining ideas which arose from actual tropes. |
4477 | Universals come in hierarchies of generality [Loux] |
Full Idea: Universals come in hierarchies of generality. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.24) | |
A reaction: If it is possible to state facts about universals, this obviously encourages a rather Platonic approach to them, as existent things with properties. But maybe the hierarchies are conventional, not natural. |
4481 | Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability [Loux] |
Full Idea: Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.60) | |
A reaction: Plato's view seems to be that we don't identify universals independently. We ascend The Line, or think about the shadows in The Cave, and infer the universals from an array of particulars (by dialectic). |
4482 | Austere nominalism has to take a host of things (like being red, or human) as primitive [Loux] |
Full Idea: In return for a one-category ontology (with particulars but no universals), the austere nominalist is forced to take a whole host of things (like being red, or triangular, or human) as unanalysable or primitive. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.68) | |
A reaction: I see that 'red' might have to be primitive, but being human can just be a collection of particulars. It is no ontologically worse to call them 'primitive' than to say they exist. |
4478 | Nominalism needs to account for abstract singular terms like 'circularity'. [Loux] |
Full Idea: Nominalists have been very concerned to provide an account of the role of abstract singular terms (such as 'circularity'). | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.34) | |
A reaction: Whether this is a big problem depends on our view of abstraction. If it only consists of selecting one property of an object and reifying it, then we can give a nominalist account of properties, and the problem is solved. |
4480 | Times and places are identified by objects, so cannot be used in a theory of object-identity [Loux] |
Full Idea: Any account of the identity of material objects which turns on the identity of places and times must face the objection that the identity of places and times depends, in turn, on the identities of the objects located at them. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.56) | |
A reaction: This may be a benign circle, in which we concede that there are two basic interdependent concepts of objects and space-time. If you want to define identity - in terms of what? |
1868 | The world was made as much for animals as for man [Celsus] |
Full Idea: The world was made as much for the irrational animals as for men. | |
From: Celsus (On the True Doctrine (Against Christians) [c.178], §V) | |
A reaction: A good remark. It seems to be a classic distortion of European Christianity that the world is made for us, and that animals only exist to fill our sandwiches. |
1867 | Christians presented Jesus as a new kind of logos to oppose that of the philosophers [Celsus] |
Full Idea: Christians put forth this Jesus not only as the son of God, but as the very Logos - not the pure and holy Logos known to the philosophers, but a new kind of Logos. | |
From: Celsus (On the True Doctrine (Against Christians) [c.178], III) |