14 ideas
| 13931 | By using aporiai as his start, Aristotle can defer to the wise, as well as to the many [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: The Aristotelian method of working form aporia allows one to use as starting points not only what is said by 'the many', but also what is said by 'the wise', including philosophers. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 1 n2) | |
| A reaction: [She mentions Nussbaum 1986:ch 7 for the opposing view] I like this thought a lot. Aristotle's democratic respect for widespread views can be a bit puzzling sometimes. |
| 13925 | Ontology disputes rest on more basic explanation disputes [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: Disputes over ontology derive from more fundamental disputes over forms of explanation. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 1) | |
| A reaction: It immediately strikes me that Haslanger has stolen my master idea, but unfortunately the dating suggests that she has priority. The tricky part is to combine this view with realism. |
| 13924 | The persistence of objects seems to be needed if the past is to explain the present [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: The notion that things persist through change is deeply embedded in ideas we have about explanation, and in particular, in the idea that the present is constrained by the past. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 1) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be both an important and an attractive idea. Deniers of persistence (4D-ists) will presumably have some ability to explain the present, but it is the idea of the present being 'constrained' by the past which is a challenge. |
| 13930 | Persistence makes change and its products intelligible [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: Persistence offers intelligibility: the possibility of understanding a change, and of understanding the products of it. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 8) | |
| A reaction: I think this is exactly right, and it is a powerful idea with wide implications for metaphysics. Haslanger claims that an understanding of 'substance' is needed, which leads towards my defence of essentialism. |
| 13927 | We must explain change amongst 'momentary entities', or else the world is inexplicable [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: If the world of time-slices is to be explicable, then it must be possible to provide explanations of change understood as a continual generation and destruction of these 'momentary entities'. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 7) | |
| A reaction: While fans of time-slices can offer some sort of explanation, in the process of explaining a 'worm', there don't seem to be the sort of causal chains that we traditionally rely on. Maybe there are no explanations of anything? |
| 13928 | If the things which exist prior to now are totally distinct, they need not have existed [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: How is the case in which A exists prior to B, but is distinct from B, different (especially from B's point of view) from the case in which nothing exists prior to B? | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 7) | |
| A reaction: I sympathise with her view, but this isn't persuasive. For A substitute 'Sally's mother' and for B substitute 'Sally'. A 4D-ist could bite the bullet and say that, indeed, previous parts of my 'worm' need not have existed. |
| 12314 | Audience-relative explanation, or metaphysical explanation based on information? [Stanford] |
| Full Idea: Rather than an 'interest-relative' notion of explanation (Putnam), it can be informational content which makes an explanation, which is an 'audience-invariant' contraint, which is not pragmatic, but mainly epistemological and also partly metaphysical. | |
| From: Michael Stanford (Explanation: the state of play [1991], p.172) | |
| A reaction: [compressed summary of Ruben 1990] Examples given are that Rome burning explains Nero fiddling, even if no one ever says so, and learning that George III had porphyria explains his madness. |
| 12313 | Explanation is for curiosity, control, understanding, to make meaningful, or to give authority [Stanford] |
| Full Idea: There are a number of reasons why we explain: out of sheer curiosity, to increase our control of a situation, to help understanding by simplifying or making familiar, to confer meaning or significance, and to give scientific authority to some statement. | |
| From: Michael Stanford (Explanation: the state of play [1991], p.172) |
| 13929 | Natural explanations give the causal interconnections [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: Natural explanations work by showing the systematic causal interconnections between things. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 7) | |
| A reaction: On the whole I love this sort of idea, but I am wondering if this one prevents mathematical or logical explanations from being natural. |
| 12315 | We can explain by showing constitution, as well as showing causes [Stanford] |
| Full Idea: The powerful engine of my car can be explained by an examination of each of its parts, but it is not caused by them. They do not cause the engine; they constitute it. | |
| From: Michael Stanford (Explanation: the state of play [1991], p.174) | |
| A reaction: [example from Ruben 1990:221] This could be challenged, since there is clearly a causal connection between the constitution and the whole. We distinguish engine parts which contribute to the power from those which do not. |
| 13926 | Best explanations, especially natural ones, need grounding, notably by persistent objects [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: I am not resting my ontology on a simple 'argument to the best explanation'. ..What I want to say is that there are general demands on a kind of explanation, in particular, natural explanation, which require that there are persisting things. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is a really nice idea - that best explanation is not just about specific cases, but also about best foundations for explanations in general, which brings in our metaphysics. I defend the role of essences in these best explanations. |
| 21236 | Instead of gravitational force, we now have a pervasive gravitational field [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: Physics replaced the notion that bodies exert gravitational force on each other by the more effective picture that the bodies in the universe give rise to a pervasive gravitational field which exerts a force on each particle. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
| A reaction: This still uses the word 'force'. I sometimes get the impression that gravity is the curvature of space, but gravity needs more. Which direction along the curvature are particles attracted? The bottom line is the power of the bodies. |
| 21235 | The Schrödinger waves are just the maths of transforming energy values to positions [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: Dirac showed that the Schrödinger waves were simply the mathematical quantities involved in transforming the description of a quantum based on its energy values to one based on possible values of its position. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
| A reaction: Does this eliminate actual physical 'waves' from the theory? |
| 21234 | Experiments show that fundamental particles of one type are identical [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: It is an established experimental fact ...that every single fundamental particle in the universe is the same and identical to all other particles of the same type. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 07) | |
| A reaction: A loud groan is heard from the tomb of Leibniz. I'm unclear how experiments can establish this. If electrons have internal structure (which is not ruled out) then uniformity is highly unlikely. |