19 ideas
| 12772 | Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise [Fraassen] |
| 12771 | Is it likely that a successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? [Fraassen] |
| 12773 | Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools [Fraassen] |
| 12770 | We may end up with a huge theory of carefully constructed falsehoods [Fraassen] |
| 17619 | We renounce all abstract entities [Goodman/Quine] |
| 14221 | Serious essentialism says everything has essences, they're not things, and they ground necessities [Shalkowski] |
| 14222 | Essences are what it is to be that (kind of) thing - in fact, they are the thing's identity [Shalkowski] |
| 14226 | We distinguish objects by their attributes, not by their essences [Shalkowski] |
| 14225 | Critics say that essences are too mysterious to be known [Shalkowski] |
| 14223 | De dicto necessity has linguistic entities as their source, so it is a type of de re necessity [Shalkowski] |
| 14919 | Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality [Fraassen] |
| 9220 | Lewis must specify that all possibilities are in his worlds, making the whole thing circular [Shalkowski, by Sider] |
| 6783 | To 'accept' a theory is not to believe it, but to believe it empirically adequate [Fraassen, by Bird] |
| 14917 | To accept a scientific theory, we only need to believe that it is empirically adequate [Fraassen] |
| 6784 | Why should the true explanation be one of the few we have actually thought of? [Fraassen, by Bird] |
| 12769 | Inference to best explanation contains all sorts of hidden values [Fraassen] |
| 13066 | An explanation is just descriptive information answering a particular question [Fraassen, by Salmon] |
| 12768 | We accept many scientific theories without endorsing them as true [Fraassen] |
| 14224 | Equilateral and equiangular aren't the same, as we have to prove their connection [Shalkowski] |