25 ideas
20435 | If philosophy could be summarised it would be pointless [Adorno] |
Full Idea: Philosophy is in essence not summarisable. Otherwise it would be superfluous; that most of it allows its to be summarised speaks against it. | |
From: Theodor W. Adorno (Negative Dialectics [1966], p.34), quoted by Gerhard Richter - Benjamin and Adorno 3 | |
A reaction: This seems contradict the Cicero quotation which I take to be the epigraph of my collection of ideas. Adorno has a very 'continental' view, placing philosophy much closer to poetry (Heidegger's later view) than to science. Not like advocacy either. |
9786 | Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: The notion that philosophy can be done cooperatively, in the manner of scientists or engineers engaged in a research project, seems to me absurd. And yet few philosophers can survive in isolation. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xxi) | |
A reaction: This why Nietzsche said that philosophers were 'rare plants'. |
9784 | A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: You do not improve the truth value of a false proposition by calling attention to a coherent system of propositions of which it is one. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xi) | |
A reaction: We need to disentangle the truth-value from the justification here. If it is false, then we can safely assume that is false, but we are struggling to decide whether it is false, and we want all the evidence we can get. Falsehood tends towards incoherence. |
13941 | Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: What is it that is susceptible of truth or falsity? The answers suggested constitute a bewildering variety: sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgments, propositions, statements. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 01) | |
A reaction: Carwright's answer is 'statements', which seem to be the same as propositions. |
13942 | Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: The current fashion among logicians of taking sentences to be the bearers of truth and falsity indicates less an agreement on philosophical theory than a desire for rigor and smoothness in calculative practice. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 01) | |
A reaction: A remark close to my heart. Propositions are rejected first because language offers hope of answers, then because they seem metaphysically odd, and finally because you can't pin them down rigorously. But the blighters won't lie down and die. |
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. |
9783 | While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Attributes and classes are said to be distinguished by the fact that whereas no two classes coincide in membership, there are supposed to be distinct but coextensive attributes. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Classes and Attributes [1967], §2) | |
A reaction: This spells out the standard problem of renates and cordates, that creatures with hearts and with kidneys are precisely coextensive, but that these properties are different. Cartwright then attacks the distinction. |
14962 | Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: If a branch falls from a tree, the tree does not thereby become scattered, and a human body does not become scattered upon loss of a bit of fingernail. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Scattered Objects [1974], p.184) | |
A reaction: This sort of observation draws me towards essentialism. A body is scattered if you divide it in a major way, but not if you separate off a minor part. It isn't just a matter of size, or even function. We have broader idea of what is essential. |
14961 | Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: There is at the moment a pipe on my desk. Its stem has been removed but it remains a pipe for all that; otherwise no pipe could survive a thorough cleaning. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Scattered Objects [1974], p.175) | |
A reaction: To say that the pipe survives dismantling is not to say that it is fully a pipe during its dismantled phase. He gives a further example of a book in two volumes. |
13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Essentialism, as I shall understand it, is the doctrine that among the attributes of a thing some are essential, others merely accidental. Its essential attributes are those it has necessarily, those it could not have lacked. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.149) | |
A reaction: The problem with this, which Cartwright does not address, is that trivial and gerrymandered properties (such as having self-identity, or being 'such that 2+2=4') seem to be necessarily, but don't seem to constitute the essence of a thing. |
13954 | The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: I see no reason for thinking essentialism unintelligible, but a chief perplexity is the obscurity of the grounds on which ratings of attributes as essential or accidental are to be made. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
A reaction: In that case some of us younger philosophers will have to roll up our sleeves and tease out the grounds for essentialism, starting with Aristotle and Leibniz, and ending with the successes of modern science. |
13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Apparently those who think essentialism unintelligible see support for their position in the doctrine that necessary truths are all analytic. Only relative to some mode of designation does it make sense to speak of an object as necessarily this or that. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
A reaction: He has in mind Quine and his mathematician-cyclist (Idea 8482). Personally I have no problems with the example. No one is essentially a cyclist - that isn't what essence is. Two-legged people can be cyclists. |
13953 | An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: For an ostension to be successful it is surely not necessary that I gather what sort of object it is you have indicated, such as being a horse or a zebra. I may even gather which thing you have indicated without knowing that it is a mammal or even alive. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.157) | |
A reaction: This nicely articulates the objection I have always felt to Geach's relative identity. 'Oh my God, what the hell is THAT???' is probably going to be a successful act of verbal reference, even while explicitly denying all knowledge of sortals. |
13945 | A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: We cannot take a token of a word to be an occurrence of it. Suppose there is exactly one occurrence of the word 'etherized' in the whole of English poetry? Exactly one 'token'? This sort of occurrence is like the occurrence of a number in a sequence. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], Add 2) | |
A reaction: This remark is in an addendum to his paper, criticising his own lax use of the idea of 'token' in the actual paper. The example nicely shows that the type/token distinction isn't neat and tidy - though I consider it very useful. |
13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: No one ever asserts the meaning of the words he utters. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12) | |
A reaction: Cartwright is using this point to drive a wedge between sentence meaning and the assertion made by the utterance. Hence he defends propositions. Presumably people utilise word-meanings, rather than asserting them. Meanings (not words) are tools. |
13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: It does have to be acknowledged, I think, that every statement whatever is such that there is no one meaning which any sentence used to assert it must have. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 11) | |
A reaction: This feels to me like a Gricean move - that what we are really interested in is communicating one mental state to another mental state, and there are all sorts of tools that can do that one job. |
13944 | We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: We need to distinguish 1) what is asserted, 2) that assertion, 3) asserting something, 4) what is predicated, 5) what is uttered, 6) that utterance, 7) uttering something, 8) the utterance token, and 9) the meaning. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 05-06) | |
A reaction: [summary of his overall analysis in the paper] It is amazingly hard to offer a critical assessment of this sort of analysis, but it gives you a foot in the door for thinking about the issues with increasing clarity. |
13947 | 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: A person who utters 'It's raining' one day does not normally make the same statement as one who utters it the next. But these variations are not accompanied by corresponding changes of meaning. The words 'It's raining' retain the same meaning throughout. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 10) | |
A reaction: This is important, because it shows that a proposition is not just the mental shadow behind a sentence, or a mental shadow awaiting a sentence. Unlike a sentence, a proposition can (and possibly must) include its own context. Very interesting! |
13943 | We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: We do sometimes say of something to which we have referred that it is true (or false). Are we not ordinarily doing just this when we utter such sentences as 'That's true' and 'What he said was false'? | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 03) | |
A reaction: This supports propositions, but doesn't clinch the matter. One could interpret this phenomenon as always being (implicitly) the reference of one sentence to another. However, I remember what he said, but I can't remember how he said it. |
13946 | To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: In order to assert that p it is not necessary to utter exactly those words. ...Clearly, also, in order to assert that p, it is not sufficient to utter the words that were actually uttered. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 07) | |
A reaction: I take the first point to be completely obvious (you can assert one thing with various wordings), and the second seems right after a little thought (the words could be vague, ambiguous, inaccurate, contextual) |
13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Whereas what is asserted can be said to be accurate, exaggerated, unfounded, overdrawn, probable, improbable, plausible, true, or false, none of these can be said of the meaning of a sentence. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12) | |
A reaction: That fairly firmly kicks into touch the idea that the assertion is the same as the meaning of the sentence. |
15664 | Ideology is 'socially necessary illusion' or 'socially necessary false-consciousness' [Adorno, by Finlayson] |
Full Idea: Adorno defines ideology as 'socially necessary illusion' or 'socially necessary false-consciousness' (and the young Habermas accepted something like this definition). | |
From: report of Theodor W. Adorno (works [1955]) by James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas Ch.1:11 | |
A reaction: The marxism seems to reside in the view that such things are always 'false'. If they gradually became 'true', would they cease to be ideology? Is it impossible for widespread beliefs to be 'true'? |