31 ideas
| 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. |
| 7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Good reductionism (also called 'hierarchical reductionism') consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another, but of connecting or unifying them. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: A nice simple clarification. In this sense I am definitely a reductionist about mind (indeed, about everything). There is nothing threatening to even 'spiritual' understanding by saying that it is connected to the brain. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Connectionists do not, of course, believe that the mind is a blank slate, but they do believe in the closest mechanistic equivalent, a general purpose learning device. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This shows the closeness of connectionism to Hume's associationism (Idea 2189), which was just a minimal step away from Locke's mind as 'white paper' (Idea 7507). Pinker is defending 'human nature', but connectionism has a point. |
| 7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Are memories stored in protein sequences, in new neurons or synapses, or in changes in the strength of existing synapses? | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a neat summary of current neuroscientific thinking about memory. If you are thinking that memory couldn't possibly be so physical, don't forget the mind-boggling number of events involved in each tiny memory. See Idea 6668. |
| 14644 | If my conception of pain derives from me, it is a contradiction to speak of another's pain [Malcolm] |
| Full Idea: If I obtain my conception of pain from pain that I experience, then it will be a part of my conception of pain that I am the only being that can experience it. For me it will be contradiction to speak of another's pain. | |
| From: Norman Malcolm (Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' [1954]), quoted by Alvin Plantinga - De Re and De Dicto p.44 | |
| A reaction: This obviously has the private language argument in the background. It seems to point towards a behaviourist view, that I derive pain from external behaviour in the first instance. So how do I connect the behaviour to the feeling? |
| 7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The roundworm only has 959 cells, and 302 neurons in a fixed wiring diagram; it eats, mates, approaches and avoids certain smells, and that's about it. This makes it obvious that human 'free' behaviour comes from our complex biological makeup. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: I find this a persuasive example. Three hundred trillion neurons cannot possibly produce behaviour which is more than broadly predictable, and then it is the environment and culture that make it predictable, not the biology. |
| 7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The appeal of neural networks is that they automatically generalize their training to similar new items. If one has been trained to think tigers eat frosted flakes, it will generalise that lions do too, because it knows tigers as sets of features. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This certainly is appealing, because it offers a mechanistic account of abstraction and universals, which everyone agrees are central to proper thinking. |
| 7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Connectionist networks have difficulty with the kind/individual distinction (ducks/this duck), with compositionality (relations), with quantification (reference of 'all'), with recursion (embedded thoughts), and the categorical reasoning (exceptions). | |
| From: report of Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: [Read Pinker p.80!] These are essentially all the more sophisticated aspects of logical reasoning that Pinker can think of. Personally I would be reluctant to say a priori that connectionism couldn't cope with these things, just because they seem tough. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Pref) | |
| A reaction: The point is that modern liberal thinking says everything is nurture (which can be changed), not nature (which can't). Virtue theory, of which I am a fan, requires a concept of human nature, as the thing which can attain excellence in its function. |
| 7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler showed [by synthesising urea in the laboratory] that the stuff of life is not a magical, pulsating gel, but ordinary compounds following the laws of chemistry. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Wöhler synthesised urea in the laboratory. |
| 7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The overwhelming evidence is that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This is why opponents should reject evolution totally, rather than compromise with it. Stick to a 6000-year-old world, fossils sent to test our faith, and species created in a flash (with no pain or waste). |
| 7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The originator of 'intelligent design' (the biochemist Michael Behe) takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out, and chalks it up to design by default. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to summarise the strategy very nicely. The theory essentially exploits the 'wow!' factor. The bigger the wow! the more likely it is that it was created by God. But research has been eroding our wows steadily for four hundred years. |
| 1422 | God's existence is either necessary or impossible, and no one has shown that the concept of God is contradictory [Malcolm] |
| Full Idea: God's existence is either impossible or necessary. It can be the former only if the concept of such a being is self-contradictory or in some way logically absurd. Assuming that this is not so, it follows that He necessarily exists. | |
| From: Norman Malcolm (Anselm's Argument [1959], §2) | |
| A reaction: The concept of God suggests paradoxes of omniscience, omnipotence and free will, so self-contradiction seems possible. How should we respond if the argument suggests God is necessary, but evidence suggests God is highly unlikely? |