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18904
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'Predicable' terms come in charged pairs, with one the negation of the other [Sommers, by Engelbretsen]
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Full Idea:
Sommers took the 'predicable' terms of any language to come in logically charged pairs. Examples might be red/nonred, massive/massless, tied/untied, in the house/not in the house. The idea that terms can be negated was essential for such pairing.
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From:
report of Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005]) by George Engelbretsen - Trees, Terms and Truth 2
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A reaction:
If, as Rumfitt says, we learn affirmation and negation as a single linguistic operation, this would fit well with it, though Rumfitt doubtless (as a fan of classical logic) prefers to negation sentences.
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18895
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Logic which maps ordinary reasoning must be transparent, and free of variables [Sommers]
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Full Idea:
What would a 'laws of thought' logic that cast light on natural language deductive thinking be like? Such a logic must be variable-free, conforming to normal syntax, and its modes of reasoning must be transparent, to make them virtually instantaneous.
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From:
Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'How We')
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A reaction:
This is the main motivation for Fred Sommers's creation of modern term logic. Even if you are up to your neck in modern symbolic logic (which I'm not), you have to find this idea appealing. You can't leave it to the psychologists.
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18893
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Translating into quantificational idiom offers no clues as to how ordinary thinkers reason [Sommers]
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Full Idea:
Modern predicate logic's methods of justification, which involve translation into an artificial quantificational idiom, offer no clues to how the average person, knowing no logic and adhering to the vernacular, is so logically adept.
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From:
Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], Intro)
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A reaction:
Of course, people are very logically adept when the argument is simple (because, I guess, they can test it against the world), but not at all good when the reasoning becomes more complex. We do, though, reason in ordinary natural language.
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18903
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Sommers promotes the old idea that negation basically refers to terms [Sommers, by Engelbretsen]
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Full Idea:
If there is one idea that is the keystone of the edifice that constitutes Sommers's united philosophy it is that terms are the linguistic entities subject to negation in the most basic sense. It is a very old idea, tending to be rejected in modern times.
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From:
report of Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005]) by George Engelbretsen - Trees, Terms and Truth 2
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A reaction:
Negation in modern logic is an operator applied to sentences, typically writing '¬Fa', which denies that F is predicated of a, with Fa being an atomic sentence. Do we say 'not(Stan is happy)', or 'not-Stan is happy', or 'Stan is not-happy'? Third one?
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18894
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Predicates form a hierarchy, from the most general, down to names at the bottom [Sommers]
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Full Idea:
We organise our concepts of predicability on a hierarchical tree. At the top are terms like 'interesting', 'exists', 'talked about', which are predicable of anything. At the bottom are names, and in between are predicables of some things and not others.
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From:
Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Category')
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A reaction:
The heirarchy seem be arranged simply by the scope of the predicate. 'Tallest' is predicable of anything in principle, but only of a few things in practice. Is 'John Doe' a name? What is 'cosmic' predicable of? Challenging!
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16554
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Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
Activities can be identified spatiotemporally, and individuated by rate, duration, and types of entity and property that engage in them. They also have modes of operation, directionality, polarity, energy requirements and a range.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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A reaction:
This is their attempt at making 'activity' one of the two central concepts of ontology, along with 'entity'. A helpful analysis. It just seems to be one way of slicing the cake.
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13127
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Categories can't overlap; they are either disjoint, or inclusive [Sommers, by Westerhoff]
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Full Idea:
Fred Sommers, in his treatment of types, says that two ontological categories cannot overlap; they are either disjoint, or one properly includes the other. This is sometimes referred to as Sommers' Law.
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From:
report of Fred Sommers (Types and Ontology [1963], p.355) by Jan Westerhoff - Ontological Categories §24
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A reaction:
The 'types', of course, go back to Bertrand Russell's theory of types, which is important in discussions of ontological categories. Carnap pursued it, trying to derive ontological categories from grammatical categories. 85% agree with Sommers.
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16973
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Explain logical necessity by logical consequence, or the other way around? [Correia]
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Full Idea:
One view is that logical consequence is to be understood in terms of logical necessity (some proposition holds necessarily, if some group of other propositions holds). Alternatively, logical necessity is a logical consequence of the empty set.
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From:
Fabrice Correia (On the Reduction of Necessity to Essence [2012], 3)
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A reaction:
I think my Finean preference is for all necessities to have a 'necessitator', so logical necessity results from logic in some way, perhaps from logical consequence, or from the essences of the connectives and operators.
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16562
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We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
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A reaction:
In other words, we understand complex things by reducing them to things we do understand. It would, though, be illuminating to see a nest of interconnected activities, even if we understood none of them.
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16555
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Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
It is common to speak of functions as properties 'had by' entities, …but they should rather be understood in terms of the activities by virtue of which entities contribute to the workings of a mechanism.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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A reaction:
I'm certainly quite passionately in favour of cutting down on describing the world almost entirely in terms of entities which have properties. An 'activity', though, is a bit of an elusive concept.
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16528
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Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
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A reaction:
The difficulty seems to be that you could broaden the concept of 'mechanism' indefinitely, so that it covered history, mathematics, populations, cultural change, and even mathematics. Where to stop?
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16553
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Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
We emphasise the activities in mechanisms. This is explicitly dualist. Substantivalists speak of entities with dispositions to act. Process ontologists reify activities and try to reduce entities to processes. We try to capture both intuitions.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
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A reaction:
[A quotation of selected fragments] The problem here seems to be the raising of an 'activity' to a central role in ontology, when it doesn't seem to be primitive, and will typically be analysed in a variety of ways.
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16559
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Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
Nested hierachical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. …Bottoming out is relative …the explanation comes to an end, and description of lower-level mechanisms would be irrelevant.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1)
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A reaction:
This seems to me exactly the right story about mechanism, and it is a story I am associating with essentialism. The relevance is ties to understanding. The lower level is either fully understood, or totally baffling.
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16564
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There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
There are four bottom-out kinds of activities: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic. These are abstract means of production that can be fruitfully applied in particular cases to explain phenomena.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
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A reaction:
I like that. It gives a nice core for a metaphysics for physicalists. I suspect that 'mechanical' can be reduced to something else, and that 'energetic' will disappear in the final story.
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16558
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Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
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Full Idea:
The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology.
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From:
Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2)
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A reaction:
This is a simple and self-evident fact, and bad news for anyone who want to build their entire ontology around laws of nature. I take such a notion to be fairly empty, except as a convenient heuristic device.
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