25 ideas
| 21829 | Philosophy aims to understand how things (broadly understood) hang together (broadly understood) [Sellars] |
| 14611 | Metaphysics should avoid talk of past, present or future [Smart] |
| 17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
| 17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
| 6550 | Reduction requires that an object's properties consist of its constituents' properties and relations [Sellars] |
| 17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
| 8793 | If observation is knowledge, it is not just an experience; it is a justification in the space of reasons [Sellars] |
| 8792 | Observations like 'this is green' presuppose truths about what is a reliable symptom of what [Sellars] |
| 17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
| 17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
| 17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
| 17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
| 17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
| 17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
| 17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
| 17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
| 6382 | The 'grain problem' says physical objects are granular, where sensations appear not to be [Sellars, by Polger] |
| 8791 | The concept of 'green' involves a battery of other concepts [Sellars] |
| 22405 | Negative utilitarianism implies that the world should be destroyed, to avoid future misery [Smart] |
| 22404 | Any group interested in ethics must surely have a sentiment of generalised benevolence [Smart] |
| 21432 | Culture is the struggle to agree what is normal [Gibson,A] |
| 14613 | Special relativity won't determine a preferred frame, but we can pick one externally [Smart] |
| 17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |
| 14615 | If time flows, then 'how fast does it flow?' is a tricky question [Smart] |
| 14614 | The past, present, future and tenses of A-theory are too weird, and should be analysed indexically [Smart] |