25 ideas
| 17729 | Examining concepts can recover information obtained through the senses [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: My idea is that conceptual examination might be a way of recovering information previously obtained through the senses. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.8) | |
| A reaction: Now you're talking! This is really interesting conceptual analysis, rather than the sort of stamp-collecting approach to analsis practised by the duller sort of philosopher. But why bother with conceptual examination, when you have senses? |
| 17740 | Instead of correspondence of proposition to fact, look at correspondence of its parts [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Instead of considering only a proposition's 'correspondence to the facts', we should also consider the correspondence between parts of the proposition and parts of the world (a 'correspondence-as-congruence' view). | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Final - Branching) | |
| A reaction: This is something like Russell's Othello example (1912), except that the parts there, with relations seemed to add up to the whole proposition. For Jenkins, presumably parts might correspond, but the whole proposition fail to. |
| 17730 | Combining the concepts of negation and finiteness gives the concept of infinity [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: We might arrive to the concept of infinity by composing concepts of negation and finiteness. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Presumably lots of concepts can be arrived at by negating prior concepts (such as not-wet, not-tall, not-loud, not-straight). So not-infinite is perfectly plausible, and is a far better account than some a priori intuition of pure infinity. Love it. |
| 17719 | Arithmetic concepts are indispensable because they accurately map the world [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: The indispensability of arithmetical concepts is evidence that they do in fact accurately represent features of the independent world. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be by far the best account of the matter. So why is the world so arithmetical? Dunno, mate; ask someone else. |
| 17717 | Senses produce concepts that map the world, and arithmetic is known through these concepts [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: I propose that arithmetical truths are known through an examination of our own arithmetical concepts; that basic arithmetical concepts map the arithmetical structure of the world; that the map obtains in virtue of our normal sensory apparatus. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Pref) | |
| A reaction: She defends the nice but unusual position that arithmetical knowledge is both a priori and empirical (so that those two notions are not, as usually thought, opposed). I am a big Carrie Jenkins fan. |
| 17724 | It is not easy to show that Hume's Principle is analytic or definitive in the required sense [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: A problem for the neo-Fregeans is that it has not proved easy to establish that Hume's Principle is analytic or definitive in the required sense. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: It is also asked how we would know the principle, if it is indeed analytic or definitional (Jenkins p.119). |
| 17727 | We can learn about the world by studying the grounding of our concepts [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: What concept grounding does for us is ensure that our concepts, like the results of our empirical tests, can be treated as a source of information about the independent world. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably we learn our concepts hand-in-hand with experience, so learning our concepts is itself learning about the world. Later checking of concepts and their relations largely confirms what we already knew? |
| 17720 | There's essential, modal, explanatory, conceptual, metaphysical and constitutive dependence [Jenkins, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Dependence comes in essential, modal, explanatory, conceptual, metaphysical and constitutive forms. | |
| From: report of Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 1.2) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: You'll have to look up Jenkins for the details. |
| 17728 | The concepts we have to use for categorising are ones which map the real world well [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Concepts which are indispensably useful for categorising, understanding, explaining, and predicting our sensory input are likely to be ones which map the structure of that input well. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.6) | |
| A reaction: Anti-realists about classification seem to think that we just invent an array of concepts, and then start classifying with them. The truth seems to be that the actual classes of worldly thing have generated our concepts. |
| 17726 | Examining accurate, justified or grounded concepts brings understanding of the world [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Examining accurate concepts can help us acquire true beliefs about the world, examining justified concepts can help us acquire justified beliefs about the world, and examining grounded concepts can help us acquire knowledge of it. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This summarises Jenkins's empirical account of concepts, and I love it all to bits. I feel that contemporary philosophy is beginning to produce a coherent naturalistic worldview which can replace religion. Bar the rituals. We can have priests... |
| 17734 | It is not enough that intuition be reliable - we need to know why it is reliable [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: The mere reliability of intuition is not a satisfactory ground for saying it is a source of knowledge - we need to know why it is reliable to understand whether it can be a source of knowledge. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: My theory is that intuition is simply believing things for reasons which we have either forgotten, or (more likely) reasons which are too complex or subtle to be articulated. Intuition feels rational, because it is rational. Updated view of mind needed. |
| 23304 | The ancient Memorists said virtually all types of thinking could be done simply by memory [Sorabji] |
| Full Idea: The ancient medical Memorists said that ordinary thinking, inferring, reflecting, believing, assuming, examining, generalising and knowing can all be done simply on the basis of memory. | |
| From: Richard Sorabji (Rationality [1996], 'Inference') | |
| A reaction: The think there is a plausible theory that all neurons do is remember, and are mainly distinguished by the duration of their memories. We might explain these modes of thinking in terms of various combinations of the fast and the slow. |
| 23303 | Stoics say true memory needs reflection and assent, but animals only have perceptual recognition [Sorabji] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say memory proper involves reflection and assent. Animal memory, by contrast, is not memory proper, but mere perceptual recognition. The horse remembers the road when he is on it, but not when he is in the stable. | |
| From: Richard Sorabji (Rationality [1996], 'Other') | |
| A reaction: An interesting distinction. Do I remember something if I can never recall it, and yet recognise it when it reappears, such as a person I knew long ago? 'Memory' is ambiguous, between lodged in the mind, and recallable. Unfair to horses, this. |
| 17771 | How we evaluate evidence depends on our background beliefs [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: A claim that might be very plausible given one set of background beliefs might be highly implausible when evaluated in the light of a different set of background beliefs. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.7) |
| 17770 | Clifford's dictum seems to block our beliefs in morality, politics and philosophy [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: Endorsing Clifford's dictum threatens to undermine our right to hold many of our most cherished beliefs about morality, politics, and philosophy, for these are domains in which it is notoriously difficult to secure consensus. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: I would say that those beliefs are amenable to evidence, but the evidence is often highly generalised, which is what makes those subjects notoriously difficult. The existence of a convention is a sort of evidence. |
| 17723 | Knowledge is true belief which can be explained just by citing the proposition believed [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: I propose that knowledge is true belief which can be well explained .....just by citing the proposition believed. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: I don't find this appealing, and my reservation about Jenkins's book is her reliabilist, externalist epistemology. I would add an internalist coherentist epistemology to her very nice theory. 'I believe there are fairies at the bottom of my garden'? |
| 17766 | Physicalism correlates brain and mind, explains causation by thought, and makes nature continuous [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: The motivations for physicalism about the mind are that it accounts for correlations between states of the brain and states of thought, ...that it accounts for the causal role of thoughts, ...and that it does justice to the continuity of nature. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: [summary] That is a pretty good summary of why I am a physicalist about the mind. I take all other theories to be dead footnotes in the history of thought - unless someone can produce a really good new argument. Which they can't. |
| 17768 | Perception reveals what animals think, but humans can disengage thought from perception [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: One striking feature of human thought involves our ability to disengage the focus of thought from that of our perceptual attention. ...To get a fix on what an animal is thinking about, one need only determine the object of its perceptual attention. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: What happens when an animal closes its eyes, or stirs violently during sleep? I take the hallmark of human thought to be its multi-level character, and this offers nice evidence for that view. Doing philosophy while driving a car is very revealing. |
| 17769 | Some people centre space on themselves; others centre space on the earth [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: Egocentric conceptions of space employ a frame of reference that is focused on oneself; ...geocentric conceptions of space, by contrast, employ a frame of reference that is centred on the earth. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Famously, Europeans nearly always employ the egocentric conception, but many other cultures are geocentric. Thus the salt cellar is either 'to my left' or 'to the west'. In the latter view, everyone always knows their orientation (even indoors?). |
| 17767 | The alternative to a language of thought is map-like or diagram-like thought [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: One could think that the structure of thought has more in common with that of maps or diagrams, and is not particularly language-like. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: It seems unwise to be ensnared by analogies on this one, since the phenomenon is buried deep. You can no more infer what goes on underneath than you can infer electrons from looking at trees? |
| 17739 | The physical effect of world on brain explains the concepts we possess [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: I think the physical effects of the world on the brain explain our possessing the concepts we do. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 8.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice slogan for a thought which strikes me as exactly right. |
| 17718 | Grounded concepts are trustworthy maps of the world [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Grounded concepts are like trustworthy on-board maps of the independent world. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: You'll probably need more than one concept for it to qualify as a 'map', but I like this idea a lot. The world, rather than we ourselves, creates our concepts. The opposite of the view of Geach in 'Mental Acts'. |
| 17731 | Verificationism is better if it says meaningfulness needs concepts grounded in the senses [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: I find an updated verificationism plausible, in which we say something meaningful just in case we employ only concepts whose possession could be justified or disjustified by sensory input. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: Wow! This is the first time I have ever had the slightest sympathy for verificationism. It saves my favourite problem case - of wild but meaningful speculation, for example about the contents of another universe. A very nice idea. |
| 17732 | Success semantics explains representation in terms of success in action [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Success semantics is the attempt to understand mental representation by thinking about the ways in which representing the world can lead to success in action. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be what is also known as 'teleological semantics'. It sounds to me as if this might help to explain success in action, but isn't going to explain the representations that result in the success. |
| 17725 | 'Analytic' can be conceptual, or by meaning, or predicate inclusion, or definition... [Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: 'Analytic' might mean conceptually true, or true in virtue of meaning, or where the predicate is contained in the subject, or for sentences which define something, or where meaning is sufficient for the truth. | |
| From: Carrie Jenkins (Grounding Concepts [2008], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: The second one says meaning grounds the truth, where the last one says meaning entails the truth. |