70 ideas
23000 | Vicious regresses force you to another level; non-vicious imply another level [Baron/Miller] |
18996 | A statement S is 'partly true' if it has some wholly true parts [Yablo] |
19006 | An 'enthymeme' is an argument with an indispensable unstated assumption [Yablo] |
8859 | The main modal logics disagree over three key formulae [Yablo] |
18999 | y is only a proper part of x if there is a z which 'makes up the difference' between them [Yablo] |
19001 | 'Pegasus doesn't exist' is false without Pegasus, yet the absence of Pegasus is its truthmaker [Yablo] |
9138 | An infinite series of sentences asserting falsehood produces the paradox without self-reference [Yablo, by Sorensen] |
23024 | A traveller takes a copy of a picture into the past, gives it the artist, who then creates the original! [Baron/Miller] |
8865 | If 'the number of Democrats is on the rise', does that mean that 50 million is on the rise? [Yablo] |
19002 | A nominalist can assert statements about mathematical objects, as being partly true [Yablo] |
8863 | We must treat numbers as existing in order to express ourselves about the arrangement of planets [Yablo] |
10580 | Mathematics is both necessary and a priori because it really consists of logical truths [Yablo] |
8862 | Platonic objects are really created as existential metaphors [Yablo] |
10579 | Putting numbers in quantifiable position (rather than many quantifiers) makes expression easier [Yablo] |
23008 | Grounding is intended as a relation that fits dependences between things [Baron/Miller] |
10577 | Concrete objects have few essential properties, but properties of abstractions are mostly essential [Yablo] |
10578 | We are thought to know concreta a posteriori, and many abstracta a priori [Yablo] |
19489 | For me, fictions are internally true, without a significant internal or external truth-value [Yablo] |
19490 | Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures [Yablo] |
19491 | 'The clouds are angry' can only mean '...if one were attributing emotions to clouds' [Yablo] |
8864 | We quantify over events, worlds, etc. in order to make logical possibilities clearer [Yablo] |
19494 | Fictionalism allows that simulated beliefs may be tracking real facts [Yablo] |
8858 | Philosophers keep finding unexpected objects, like models, worlds, functions, numbers, events, sets, properties [Yablo] |
14381 | A statue is essentially the statue, but its lump is not essentially a statue, so statue isn't lump [Yablo, by Rocca] |
18998 | Parthood lacks the restriction of kind which most relations have [Yablo] |
23018 | How does a changing object retain identity or have incompatible properties over time? [Baron/Miller] |
19493 | Governing possible worlds theory is the fiction that if something is possible, it happens in a world [Yablo] |
19004 | Gettier says you don't know if you are confused about how it is true [Yablo] |
19007 | A theory need not be true to be good; it should just be true about its physical aspects [Yablo] |
18993 | If sentences point to different evidence, they must have different subject-matter [Yablo] |
19003 | Most people say nonblack nonravens do confirm 'all ravens are black', but only a tiny bit [Yablo] |
10805 | A sentence should be recarved to reveal its content or implication relations [Yablo] |
18992 | Sentence-meaning is the truth-conditions - plus factors responsible for them [Yablo] |
18994 | The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content [Yablo] |
18997 | Truth-conditions as subject-matter has problems of relevance, short cut, and reversal [Yablo] |
19005 | Not-A is too strong to just erase an improper assertion, because it actually reverses A [Yablo] |
8861 | Hardly a word in the language is devoid of metaphorical potential [Yablo] |
23011 | Modern accounts of causation involve either processes or counterfactuals [Baron/Miller] |
23013 | The main process theory of causation says it is transference of mass, energy, momentum or charge [Baron/Miller] |
23014 | If causes are processes, what is causation by omission? (Distinguish legal from scientific causes?) [Baron/Miller] |
23015 | The counterfactual theory of causation handles the problem no matter what causes actually are [Baron/Miller] |
23016 | Counterfactual theories struggle with pre-emption by a causal back-up system [Baron/Miller] |
23009 | There is no second 'law' of thermodynamics; it just reflects probabilities of certain microstates [Baron/Miller] |
23002 | In relativity space and time depend on one's motion, but spacetime gives an invariant metric [Baron/Miller] |
22988 | The block universe theory says entities of all times exist, and time is the B-series [Baron/Miller] |
22991 | How can we know this is the present moment, if other times are real? [Baron/Miller] |
22992 | If we are actually in the past then we shouldn't experience time passing [Baron/Miller] |
22994 | Erzatz Presentism allows the existence of other times, with only the present 'actualised' [Baron/Miller] |
22998 | How do presentists explain relations between things existing at different times? [Baron/Miller] |
23017 | Presentism needs endurantism, because other theories imply most of the object doesn't exist [Baron/Miller] |
23023 | How can presentists move to the next future moment, if that doesn't exist? [Baron/Miller] |
22995 | Most of the sciences depend on the concept of time [Baron/Miller] |
22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |
22999 | It is meaningless to measure the rate of time using time itself, and without a rate there is no flow [Baron/Miller] |
22986 | The C-series rejects A and B, and just sees times as order by betweenness, without direction [Baron/Miller] |
22996 | The A-series has to treat being past, present or future as properties [Baron/Miller] |
23007 | The B-series can have a direction, as long as it does not arise from temporal flow [Baron/Miller] |
23003 | Static theories cannot account for time's obvious asymmetry, so time must be dynamic [Baron/Miller] |
23004 | The direction of time is either primitive, or reducible to something else [Baron/Miller] |
23005 | The kaon does not seem to be time-reversal invariant, unlike the rest of nature [Baron/Miller] |
23006 | Maybe the past is just the direction of decreasing entropy [Baron/Miller] |
23010 | We could explain time's direction by causation: past is the direction of causes, future of effects [Baron/Miller] |
22989 | Static time theory presents change as one property at t1, and a different property at t2 [Baron/Miller] |
23020 | If a time traveller kills his youthful grandfather, he both exists and fails to exist [Baron/Miller] |
23022 | Presentism means there no existing past for a time traveller to visit [Baron/Miller] |
22987 | The past (unlike the future) is fixed, along with truths about it, by the existence of past objects [Baron/Miller] |
22990 | The moving spotlight says entities can have properties of being present, past or future [Baron/Miller] |
22997 | The present moment is a matter of existence, not of acquiring a property [Baron/Miller] |
9287 | Bruno said that ancient Egyptian magic was the true religion [Bruno, by Yates] |