10 ideas
| 20100 | Classical liberalism seeks freedom of opinion, of private life, of expression, and of property [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| Full Idea: The classical liberals agreed on a basic list of freedoms: of opinion (including religion), of private life, of expression, and of property | |
| From: Micklethwait,J/Wooldridge,A (The Fourth Revolution [2014], 9) | |
| A reaction: Mill is main articulator of this. Modern neo-liberals focus on economic freedom. Neither of them seem to make freedom of opportunity central, though I suspect our modern Liberal Party would. |
| 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. |
| 9141 | Abstraction theories build mathematics out of second-order equivalence principles [Cook/Ebert] |
| Full Idea: A theory of abstraction is any account that reconstructs mathematical theories using second-order abstraction principles of the form: §xFx = §xGx iff E(F,G). We ignore first-order abstraction principles such as Frege's direction abstraction. | |
| From: R Cook / P Ebert (Notice of Fine's 'Limits of Abstraction' [2004], 1) | |
| A reaction: Presumably part of the neo-logicist programme, which also uses such principles. The function § (extension operator) 'provides objects corresponding to the argument concepts'. The aim is to build mathematics, rather than the concept of a 'rabbit'. |
| 20097 | The welfare state aims at freedom from want, and equality of opportunity [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| Full Idea: In the classical liberal tradition freedom meant freedom from external control, and equality meant equality before the law. In the welfare state (of Beatrice Webb) freedom was reinterpreted as freedom from want, and equality as equality of opportunity. | |
| From: Micklethwait,J/Wooldridge,A (The Fourth Revolution [2014], 3) | |
| A reaction: The authors call this the 'third revolution' in government, after 17th century centralisation and early 19th century accountability. Tawney 1931 is the key text. |
| 20099 | For communists history is driven by the proletariat [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| Full Idea: For the communists the proletariat rather than the state was the locomotive of history. | |
| From: Micklethwait,J/Wooldridge,A (The Fourth Revolution [2014], 3) | |
| A reaction: I feel increasingly reluctant to support any party which appears to mainly represent the interests of a single social class, no matter how large that class may be. An attraction of liberalism is that it makes no reference to class. |
| 20098 | Fans of economic freedom claim that capitalism is self-correcting [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| Full Idea: The central laissez-faire conceit is that capitalism is a self-correcting mechanism. | |
| From: Micklethwait,J/Wooldridge,A (The Fourth Revolution [2014], 3) | |
| A reaction: This was Keynes's rather left-wing criticism of standard capitalist views. These resurfaced in the 1980s with mantras about the virtues of 'market forces'. |
| 20096 | Roman law entrenched property rights [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| Full Idea: Roman law entrenched property rights. | |
| From: Micklethwait,J/Wooldridge,A (The Fourth Revolution [2014], 1 Intro) | |
| A reaction: Normally attributed to Locke, so this is a good corrective. Was the principle gradually forgotten before Locke? |