40 ideas
| 18369 | There are at least fourteen candidates for truth-bearers [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: Among the candidates [for truthbearers] are beliefs, propositions, judgments, assertions, statements, theories, remarks, ideas, acts of thought, utterances, sentence tokens, sentence types, sentences (unspecified), and speech acts. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: I vote for propositions, but only in the sense of the thoughts underlying language, not the Russellian things which are supposed to exist independently from thinkers. |
| 19319 | If one sequence satisfies a sentence, they all do [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: If one sequence satisfies a sentence, they all do. ...Thus it matters not whether we define truth as satisfaction by some sequence or as satisfaction by all sequences. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: So if the striker scores a goal, the team has scored a goal. |
| 19318 | A 'sequence' of objects is an order set of them [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: A 'sequence' of objects is like a set of objects, except that, unlike a set, the order of the objects is important when dealing with sequences. ...An infinite sequence satisfies 'x2 is purple' if and only if the second member of the sequence is purple. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This explains why Tarski needed set theory in his metalanguage. |
| 19320 | If we define truth by listing the satisfactions, the supply of predicates must be finite [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: Because the definition of satisfaction must have a separate clause for each predicate, Tarski's method only works for languages with a finite number of predicates, ...but natural languages have an infinite number of predicates. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: He suggest predicates containing natural numbers, as examples of infinite predicates. Davidson tried to extend the theory to natural languages, by (I think) applying it to adverbs, which could generate the infinite predicates. Maths has finite predicates. |
| 19315 | In quantified language the components of complex sentences may not be sentences [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: In a quantified language it is possible to build new sentences by combining two expressions neither of which is itself a sentence. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: In propositional logic the components are other sentences, so the truth value can be given by their separate truth-values, through truth tables. Kirkham is explaining the task which Tarski faced. Truth-values are not just compositional. |
| 15105 | F(x) walked into a bar. The barman said.. [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: F(x) walked into a bar. The barman said, 'Sorry, we don't cater for functions'. | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 19317 | An open sentence is satisfied if the object possess that property [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: An object satisfies an open sentence if and only if it possesses the property expressed by the predicate of the open sentence. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This applies to atomic sentence, of the form Fx or Fa (that is, some variable is F, or some object is F). So strictly, only the world can decide whether some open sentence is satisfied. And it all depends on things called 'properties'. |
| 12408 | Sartre to Waitress: Coffee with no cream, please... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: Sartre to Waitress: Coffee with no cream, please. Waitress: Sorry, we're out of cream; would no milk do? | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
| 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. |
| 12397 | Said Plato: 'The things that we feel... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: Said Plato: 'The things that we feel/ Are not ontologically real,/ But just the excrescence/ Of numinous essence/ Our senses can never reveal.' [Basil Ransome-Davis] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 19322 | Why can there not be disjunctive, conditional and negative facts? [Kirkham] |
| Full Idea: It has been said that there are no disjunctive facts, conditional facts, or negative facts. ...but it is not at all clear why there cannot be facts of this sort. | |
| From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: I love these sorts of facts, and offer them as a naturalistic basis for logic. You probably need the world to have modal features, but I have those in the form of powers and dispositions. |
| 16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: It is not the penicillin that causes the pneumonia to disappear, but what the penicillin does. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a very neat example for illustrating how we slip into 'entity' talk, when the reality we are addressing actually concerns processes. Without the 'what it does', penicillin can't participate in causation at all. |
| 16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
| 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. |
| 12399 | There was a young student called Fred... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: There was a young student called Fred,/ Who was questioned on Descartes and said:/ 'It's perfectly clear/ That I'm not really here,/ For I haven't a thought in my head.' [V.R. Ormerod] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12407 | Barman to Descartes: Would you like another drink?... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: Barman to Descartes: Would you like another drink? Descartes: I think not (...and promptly vanishes) | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 20963 | A philosopher and his wife are out for a drive... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: A philosopher and his wife are out for a drive in the country. 'Oh look!' she says, 'Those sheep have been shorn.' 'Yes', says the philosopher, 'on this side'. | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12404 | Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd.... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: (reply to 12403) Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd:/ I am always about in the Quad./ And that's why the tree/ Will continue to be,/ Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.' [anon] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12403 | There once was a man who said: 'God... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: There once was a man who said: 'God/ Must think it exceedingly odd/ If he finds that this tree/ Continues to be,/ When there's no-one about in the Quad.' [Ronald Knox] (reply in 12404) | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12402 | ..But if he's a student of Berkeley... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: (continued from 12401) ..But if he's a student of Berkeley,/ One thing will emerge, rather starkly,/ That he ought to believe/ What his senses perceive,/ No matter how dimly or darkly. [Leslie Johnson] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12409 | The philosopher Berkeley once said.. [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher Berkeley once said/ In the dark to a maid in his bed:/ 'No perception, my dear,/ Means I'm not really here,/ But only a thought in your head.' [P.W.R. Foot] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 14694 | "My dog's got synaesthesia." How does he smell? ..... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: "My dog's got synaesthesia." How does he smell? "Purple." | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12401 | A toper who spies in the distance... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: A toper who spies in the distance,/ Striped tigers, will get some assistance/ From reading Descartes,/ Who holds that it's part/ Of his duty to doubt their existence. ... [Leslie Johnson] - (continued in 12402) | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: It is not regularities that explain but the activities that sustain the regularities. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
| A reaction: Good, but we had better not characterise the 'activities' in terms of regularities. |
| 16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
| 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. |
| 16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
| 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? |
| 16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular change from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is their initial formal definition of a mechanism. Note that a mere 'activity' can be included. Presumably the mechanism might have an outcome that was not the intended outcome. Does a random element disqualify it? Are hands mechanisms? |
| 16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: To give a description of a mechanism for a phenomenon is to explain that phenomenon, i.e. to explain how it was produced. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
| A reaction: To 'show how' something happens needs a bit of precisification. It is probably analytic that 'showing how' means 'revealing the mechanism', though 'mechanism' then becomes the tricky concept. |
| 16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
| 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. |
| 16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1) | |
| 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. |
| 16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
| 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. |
| 16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: Abstractions may be constructed by taking an exemplary case or instance and removing detail. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: I love 'removing detail'. That's it. Simple. I think this process is the basis of our whole capacity to formulate abstract concepts. Forget Frege - he's just describing the results of the process. How do we decide what is 'detail'? Essentialism! |
| 12410 | There once was a man who said 'Damn!... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: There once was a man who said 'Damn!/ It is borne in upon me I am/ An engine that moves/ In predestinate grooves:/ I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.' [M.E. Hare] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 9392 | How do behaviourists greet each other? [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: How do behaviourists greet each other? Hi - you're fine, how am I? | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12405 | 'If you're aristocratic,' said Nietzsche... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: 'If you're aristocratic,' said Nietzsche,/ 'It's thumbs up, you're OK. Pleased to mietzsche./ If you're working-class bores,/ It's thumbs down and up yours!/ If you don't know your place, then I'll tietzsche.' [Gerry Hamill] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 9391 | Why do anarchists drink herbal tea? [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: Why do anarchists drink herbal tea? Because proper tea is theft. | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 12400 | Cries the maid: 'You must marry me Hume!'... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: Cries the maid: 'You must marry me Hume!'/ A statement that made David fume./ He said: 'In cause and effect,/ There is a defect;/ That it's mine you can only assume.' [P.W.R. Foot] | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 16527 | Causation - we all thought we knew it/ Till Hume came along and saw through it/…. [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: Causation - we all thought we knew it / Till Hume came along and saw through it / We notice that A / Follows B every day / And frankly that's all there is to it. | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2) | |
| 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. |
| 17592 | The barman called 'Time!', and Augustine said..... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: The barman called 'Time!'. Augustine: 'I don't know what you mean, though I did before you said that'. | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |
| 15208 | The past, present and future walked into a bar.... [Sommers,W] |
| Full Idea: The past, present and future walked into a bar. It was tense. | |
| From: Will Sommers (talk [2019]) |