40 ideas
| 14480 | Maybe analytic truths do not require truth-makers, as they place no demands on the world [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: It is a venerable view that analytic claims do not require truth-makers, as they place no demands on the world, but this claim has often been challenged. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 03.4) | |
| A reaction: She offers two challenges (bottom p.68), but I would have thought that the best response is that the meanings of the words themselves constitute truthmakers - perhaps via the essence of each word, as Fine suggests. |
| 14471 | Analytical entailments arise from combinations of meanings and inference rules [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: 'Analytically entail' means entail in virtue of the meanings of the expressions involved and rules of inference. So 'Jones bought a house' analytically entails 'Jones bought a building'. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 01.2) | |
| A reaction: Quine wouldn't like this, but it sounds OK to me. Thomasson uses this as a key tool in her claim that common sense objects must exist. |
| 14493 | Existence might require playing a role in explanation, or in a causal story, or being composed in some way [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: A higher standard for saying that entities exist might require that they play an essential role in explanation, or must figure in any complete causal story, or exist according to some uniform and nonarbitrary principle of composition. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 11.2) | |
| A reaction: I am struck by the first of these three. If I am defending the notion that essence depends on Aristotle's account of explanation, then if we add that existence also depends on explanation, we get a criterion for the existence of essences. Yay. |
| 14491 | Rival ontological claims can both be true, if there are analytic relationships between them [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Where there are analytic interrelations among our claims, distinct ontological claims may be true without rivalry, redundancy, or reduction. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 10) | |
| A reaction: Thus we might, I suppose, that it is analytically necessary that a lump of clay has a shape, and that a statue be made of something. Interesting. |
| 14489 | Theories do not avoid commitment to entities by avoiding certain terms or concepts [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: A theory does not avoid commitment to any entities by avoiding use of certain terms or concepts. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 09.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a salutary warning to those who apply the notion of ontological commitment rather naively. |
| 14485 | Ordinary objects may be not indispensable, but they are nearly unavoidable [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: I do not argue that ordinary objects are indispensable, but rather that they are (nearly) unavoidable. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 09) | |
| A reaction: Disappointing, given the blurb and title of the book, but put in those terms it will be hard to disagree. Clearly ordinary objects figure in the most useful way for us to talk. I wonder whether we have a clear ontology of 'simples' in which they vanish. |
| 14487 | The simple existence conditions for objects are established by our practices, and are met [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: The existence conditions for ordinary objects are established by our practices, and they are quite minimal, so it is rather obvious that they are fulfilled, and so there are such things. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 09.3) | |
| A reaction: This is one of her main arguments. The same argument would have worked for witches or ghosts in certain cultures. |
| 21651 | It is analytic that if simples are arranged chair-wise, then there is a chair [Thomasson, by Hofweber] |
| Full Idea: Thomasson argues that the existence of ordinary objects follows analytically from the distribution of simples, assuming that there are any simples. It is an analytic truth that if there are simples arranged chair-wise, then there is a chair. | |
| From: report of Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007]) by Thomas Hofweber - Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics 07.3 | |
| A reaction: But how do you distinguish when simples are arranged nearly chair-wise from the point where they click into place as actually chair-wise? What is the criterion? |
| 14486 | Eliminativists haven't found existence conditions for chairs, beyond those of the word 'chair' [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: The eliminativist cannot claim to have 'discovered' some real existence conditions for chairs beyond those entailed by the semantic rules associated with ordinary use of the word 'chair'. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 09.3) | |
| A reaction: It is difficult to understand atoms arranged 'chairwise' or 'baseballwise' if you don't already know what a chair or a baseball are. |
| 14467 | Ordinary objects are rejected, to avoid contradictions, or for greater economy in thought [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Objections to ordinary objects are the Causal Redundancy claim (objects lack causal powers), the Anti-Colocation view (statues and lumps overlap), Sorites arguments, a more economical ontology, or a more scientific ontology. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [my summary of two paragraphs] The chief exponents of these views are Van Inwagen and Merricks. Before you glibly accept ordinary objects, you must focus on producing a really strict ontology. These arguments all have real force. |
| 14479 | To individuate people we need conventions, but conventions are made up by people [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: The conventionalist faces paradox if they hold that conventions are logically prior to people (since this plurality requires conventions of individuation), and people are logically prior to conventions (if they make up the conventions). | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: [Sidelle is the spokesman for conventionalism] The best defence would be to deny the second part, and say that conventions emerge from whatever is there, but only conventions can individuate the bits of what is there. |
| 14481 | Wherever an object exists, there are intrinsic properties instantiating every modal profile [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: In a 'modally plenitudinous' ontology, wherever there is an object at all, there are objects with intrinsic modal properties instantiating every consistent modal profile. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 03.5) | |
| A reaction: [She cites K.Bennett, Hawley, Rea, Sidelle] I love this. At last a label for the view I have been espousing. I am a Modal Plenitudinist. I must get a badge made. |
| 14482 | If the statue and the lump are two objects, they require separate properties, so we could add their masses [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: An objection to the idea that statues are not identical to material lumps of stuff is the proliferation of instances of properties shared by those objects. If the mass of the statue is 500kg, and the mass of the lump is 500kg, do we have 1000kg? | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 04.3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed; she cites Rea 1997 and Zimmerman 1995] To wriggle out of this we would have to understand 'object' rather differently, so that an independent mass is not intrinsic to it. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. |
| 14483 | Given the similarity of statue and lump, what could possibly ground their modal properties? [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: The 'grounding problem' is that given all that the statue and the lump have in common, what could possibly ground their different modal properties? | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 04.4) | |
| A reaction: Their modal properties are, of course, different, because only one of them could survive squashing. Thomasson suggests their difference of sort, but I'm not sure what that means, separately from what they actually are. |
| 14476 | Identity claims between objects are only well-formed if the categories are specified [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Identity claims are only well-formed and truth-evaluable if the terms flanking the statement are associated with a certain category of entity each is to refer to, which disambiguates the reference and identity-criteria. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 03) | |
| A reaction: The first of her two criteria for identity. She is buying the full Wiggins package. |
| 14477 | Identical entities must be of the same category, and meet the criteria for the category [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Identity claims are only true if the entities referred to are of the same category, and meet the criteria of identity appropriate for things of that category. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 03) | |
| A reaction: This may be a little too optimistic about having a set of clear-cut and reasonably objective categories to work with, but attempts at establishing metaphysical categories have not gone especially well. |
| 14478 | Modal Conventionalism says modality is analytic, not intrinsic to the world, and linguistic [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Modal Conventionalism has at least three theses: 1) modal truths are either analytic truths, or combine analytic and empirical truths, 2) modal properties are not intrinsic features of the world, 3) modal propositions depend on linguistic conventions. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Alan Sidelle 1989 for this view] I disagree mainly with number 2), since I take dispositions to be key intrinsic features of nature, and I interpret dispositions as modal properties. |
| 14466 | A chief task of philosophy is making reflective sense of our common sense worldview [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Showing how, reflectively, we can make sense of our unreflective common sense worldview is arguably one of the chief tasks of philosophy. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Maybe. The obvious problem is that when you look at weird and remote cultures like the Aztecs, what counts as 'common sense' might be a bit different. She is talking of ordinary objects, though, where her point is reasonable. |
| 14475 | How can causal theories of reference handle nonexistence claims? [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Pure causal theories of reference have problems in handling nonexistence claims | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 02.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a very sound reason for shifting from a direct causal baptism view to one in which the baptism takes place by a social consensus. So there is a consensus about 'unicorns', but obviously no baptism. See Evans's 'Madagascar' example. |
| 14474 | Pure causal theories of reference have the 'qua problem', of what sort of things is being referred to [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Pure causal theories of reference face the 'qua problem' - that it may be radically indeterminate what the term refers to unless there is some very basic concept of what sort of thing is being referred to. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 02.3) | |
| A reaction: She cites Dummett and Wiggins on this. There is an obvious problem that when I say 'look at that!' there are all sorts of conventions at work if my reference is to succeed. |
| 14488 | Analyticity is revealed through redundancy, as in 'He bought a house and a building' [Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: The analytic interrelations among elements of language become evident through redundancy. It is redundant to utter 'He bought a house and a building', since buying a house analytically entails that he bought a building. | |
| From: Amie L. Thomasson (Ordinary Objects [2007], 09.4) | |
| A reaction: This appears to concern necessary class membership. It is only linguistically redundant if the class membership is obvious. Houses are familiar, uranium samples are not. |
| 23928 | Good art produces exaltation and detachment [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: The contemplation of pure form leads to a state of extraordinary exaltation and complete detachment from the concerns of life. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.III) | |
| A reaction: The last part is what gets the arts a bad name with the people who do deal with the concerns of life (which won't go away, even for an artist!). However, being totally trapped in the concerns of life is probably a recipe for misery. |
| 23922 | The word 'beauty' leads to confusion, because it denotes distinct emotions [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: The word 'beauty' connotes objects of quite distinguishable emotions, and the term would land me in confusions and misunderstandings. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.I) | |
| A reaction: His main example is a comparison of beautiful women with beautiful art. Personally I don't think the word aspires to be precise, so there is no problem. Maths has beautiful solutions, golf has beautiful shots, cooking has beautiful results. Wow! |
| 23921 | Our feeling for natural beauty is different from the aesthetic emotion of art [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: It is not what I call an aesthetic emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty. …Most people feel a very different kind of emotion for birds, flowers and butterfly wings from that we feel for pictures, pots, temples and statues. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.I) | |
| A reaction: Not convinced. I think the main difference is our awareness that art is a human production, the result of choice, whereas nature is a given. Beethoven 9 and a good sunset don't seem to me far apart in our responses. |
| 23929 | We only see landscapes as artistic if we ignore their instrumental value [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: It is only when we cease to regard the objects in a landscape as means to anything that we can feel the landscape artistically. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], II.I) | |
| A reaction: This sounds as if only the exploitative attitude blocks the artistic view, but I would expect the scientific view (of an ecologist, for example) to do the same. |
| 23923 | Visual form can create a sublime mental state [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: Pure visual form transports me to an infinitely sublime state of mind. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.I) | |
| A reaction: Unusual for anyone to use to term 'sublime' for works of art, and I suspect that Bell was the last to do so. Bell offers a quasi-religious role for art. I accept that being struck by something exceptionally good in art is a very distinctive experience. |
| 23932 | Art is the expression of an emotion for ultimate reality [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: My hypothesis is that art is the expression of an emotion for ultimate reality. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], II.II) | |
| A reaction: So later in his discussion the word 'ultimate' has crept in, after a chapter about the close relation between religious and artistic attitudes. He also sees good art as deeply 'spiritual'. It seems that religious belief is essential to his theory of art. |
| 23927 | Aestheticism invites artist to create beauty, but with no indication of how to do it [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: The danger of aestheticism is that the artist who has got nothing to do but make something beautiful hardly knows where to begin or where to end | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.III) | |
| A reaction: Aestheticism strikes me as the main motivation for art nouveau artifacts, which I love. You start with beautiful lines, and then find ways to implement them. Bell has a point, though! |
| 8115 | Only artists can discern significant form; other people must look to art to find it [Bell,C, by Gardner] |
| Full Idea: Bell thinks that only artists can discern significant form directly in the natural world, and that all others must look to art for significant form. | |
| From: report of Clive Bell (Art [1913]) by Sebastian Gardner - Aesthetics 3.3 | |
| A reaction: I have a horrible feeling that 'significant' form will turn out to be the sort of form that artists can see. Presumably the form spotted by geologists won't be quite so 'significant'. Not a promising theory. |
| 23924 | Maybe significant form gives us a feeling for ultimate reality [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: When we strip things of all associations and significance, what is left is 'the thing in itself', or 'ultimate reality'. …Artists can express an emotion felt for reality through line and colour. …So through 'significant form' we sense ultimate reality. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.III) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The thing in itself is a Kantian idea. He offers this as a speculation, rather than a fact. Maybe quantum physics gets us closer to the thing in itself? Bell knows that his faith in significant form needs more justification than an emotion. |
| 23931 | Significant form is the essence of art, which I believe expresses an emotion about reality [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: My view that the essential quality in work of art is significant form was based on experience I am sure about. Of my view that significant form is the expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality I am far from confident. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], II.II) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to understand the idea of 'significant' form without a clear proposal for the nature of the significance. A detective doesn't stop at the point where evidence is seen as significant. Why should a 'peculiar' emotion matter? |
| 20434 | 'Form' is visual relations, and it is 'significant' if it moves us aesthetically; art needs both [Bell,C, by Feagin] |
| Full Idea: By 'form' Bell means the relations of lines, colours and shapes. Forms are 'significant' when the relationships of lines and so on move us aesthetically. If something is art it must have, to at least a minimum extent, significant form. | |
| From: report of Clive Bell (Art [1913], p.17) by Susan Feagin - Roger Fry and Clive Bell 3 | |
| A reaction: So art has two necessary conditions - that it move us aesthetically, and that it does so by means of its form. The obvious problem is to explain which forms are 'significant' without mentioning the aesthetic feeling they have to invoke. |
| 23934 | The only expression art could have is the emotion resulting from pure form [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: If art expresses anything, it expresses an emotion felt for pure form and that which gives pure form its extraordinary significance. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], III.I) | |
| A reaction: I don't think 'expresses' is the right word here. Artists express, but works just transmit. I personally doubt whether anything can have 'extraordinary significance' simply because it expresses one particular emotion. Why art, but not geometry? |
| 23925 | Mere copies of pictures are not significant - unless the copies are very exact [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: A literal copy is seldom reckoned even by its owner a work of art. Its forms are not significant. Yet if it were an absolutely exact copy, clearly it would be as moving as the original, and a photographic reproduction of a drawing often is. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.III) | |
| A reaction: What if the original artist made the copy? In 1913, Bell begins to spot this modern problem. He undermines his own theory of significant form here, if the form only becomes significant once we have checked it is an original. |
| 23926 | Art is distinguished by its aesthetic emotion, which produces appropriate form [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: The characteristic of a work of art is its power of provoking aesthetic emotion; the expression of emotion is what gives it its power. ...Rightness of form is invariably a consequence of rightness of emotion. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], I.III) | |
| A reaction: Bell doesn't dig very deep, because the obvious next question, not really addressed, is what makes the emotion 'right'. He suggests that significant form reveals reality, but why would an emotion do that? Does each work have a distinct emotion? |
| 23933 | Aesthetic contemplation is the best and most intense mental state [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: Art is not only a means to good states of mind, but, perhaps, the best and most potent that we possess; …there is no state of mind more excellent or more intense than the state of aesthetic contemplation. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], II.III) | |
| A reaction: Why does intensity make it good? It is pretty intense being involved in a road accident, but that doesn't make it good. There are many states of mind we enjoy or value highly, but we need more than that to prove them objectively 'excellent'. |
| 23935 | Aesthetic experience is an exaltation which increases the possibilities of life [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: Those who have been thrilled by the pure aesthetic significance of a work of art …carry a state of excitement and exaltation making them more sensitive to all that is going forward about them. Thus they realise …the significance and possibility of life. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], IV.III) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a bit of an afterthought, because he struggles to explain why his 'significant form' is so important. He shifts between it being an end - an intrinsic value - or a moral state, or now an increaser of life potential. |
| 22691 | Only artistic qualities matter in art, because they also have the highest moral value [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: The only relevant qualities in art are artistic qualities: judged as a means to good, no other qualities are worth considering; for there are no qualities of greater moral value than artistic qualities, since there is no greater means to good than art. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], II.III) | |
| A reaction: Wishful thinking, I suspect. I can't see anyone acquiring a moral education just by looking a Cezannes. This seems to be a late manifesto for the aesthetic movement. |
| 22457 | If the aim is good outcomes, why are killings worse than deaths? [Scheffler, by Foot] |
| Full Idea: It is not clear why, in the measurement of the goodness of states of affairs or total outcomes, killings for instance should count so much more heavily than deaths. | |
| From: report of Samuel Scheffler (The Rejection of Consequentialism [1982], pp.108-12) by Philippa Foot - Utilitarianism and the Virtues p.61 | |
| A reaction: Or drunken drivers worse than careless drivers. Or stolen bracelets than lost bracelets. The point is that morality is about the behaviour of people, and not about consequences. |
| 23930 | Religion sees infinite value in some things, and irrelevance in the rest [Bell,C] |
| Full Idea: The essence of religion is a conviction that because some things are of infinite value most are profoundly unimportant. | |
| From: Clive Bell (Art [1913], II.I) | |
| A reaction: The aspect of religion which most worries atheists like Nietzsche. You can end up with a rather cool and detached view of genocide, if you really believe that worldly matters are unimportant. Do souls in heaven worry about the next life after that? |