50 ideas
| 13966 | Analytic philosophy loved the necessary a priori analytic, linguistic modality, and rigour [Soames] |
| 13974 | If philosophy is analysis of meaning, available to all competent speakers, what's left for philosophers? [Soames] |
| 15163 | The interest of quantified modal logic is its metaphysical necessity and essentialism [Soames] |
| 15158 | Indefinite descriptions are quantificational in subject position, but not in predicate position [Soames] |
| 15157 | Recognising the definite description 'the man' as a quantifier phrase, not a singular term, is a real insight [Soames] |
| 15156 | The universal and existential quantifiers were chosen to suit mathematics [Soames] |
| 15682 | Even fairly simple animals make judgements based on categories [Gelman] |
| 15691 | Children accept real stable categories, with nonobvious potential that gives causal explanations [Gelman] |
| 15700 | In India, upper-castes essentialize caste more than lower-castes do [Gelman] |
| 15685 | Essentialism is either natural to us, or an accident of our culture, or a necessary result of language [Gelman] |
| 15684 | Children's concepts include nonobvious features, like internal parts, functions and causes [Gelman] |
| 15681 | Essentialism: real or representational? sortal, causal or ideal? real particulars, or placeholders? [Gelman] |
| 15678 | Essentialism says categories have a true hidden nature which gives an object its identity [Gelman] |
| 15683 | Sortals are needed for determining essence - the thing must be categorised first [Gelman] |
| 15697 | Kind (unlike individual) essentialism assumes preexisting natural categories [Gelman] |
| 13969 | Kripkean essential properties and relations are necessary, in all genuinely possible worlds [Soames] |
| 15687 | Kinship is essence that comes in degrees, and age groups are essences that change over time [Gelman] |
| 15679 | Essentialism comes from the cognitive need to categorise [Gelman] |
| 15698 | We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children [Gelman] |
| 15709 | Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman] |
| 15696 | Peope favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is [Gelman] |
| 15162 | We understand metaphysical necessity intuitively, from ordinary life [Soames] |
| 15161 | There are more metaphysically than logically necessary truths [Soames] |
| 13973 | A key achievement of Kripke is showing that important modalities are not linguistic in source [Soames] |
| 13968 | Kripkean possible worlds are abstract maximal states in which the real world could have been [Soames] |
| 15707 | There is intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist and deontological understanding [Gelman] |
| 15703 | Memories often conform to a theory, rather than being neutral [Gelman] |
| 15708 | Inductive success is rewarded with more induction [Gelman] |
| 15694 | Children overestimate the power of a single example [Gelman] |
| 15695 | Children make errors in induction by focusing too much on categories [Gelman] |
| 15692 | People tend to be satisfied with shallow explanations [Gelman] |
| 15680 | Folk essentialism rests on belief in natural kinds, in hidden properties, and on words indicating structures [Gelman] |
| 15686 | Labels may indicate categories which embody an essence [Gelman] |
| 15690 | Causal properties are seen as more central to category concepts [Gelman] |
| 15688 | Categories are characterized by distance from a prototype [Gelman] |
| 15689 | Theory-based concepts use rich models to show which similarities really matter [Gelman] |
| 15699 | Prelinguistic infants acquire and use many categories [Gelman] |
| 15152 | To study meaning, study truth conditions, on the basis of syntax, and representation by the parts [Soames] |
| 15153 | Tarski's account of truth-conditions is too weak to determine meanings [Soames] |
| 13965 | Semantics as theory of meaning and semantics as truth-based logical consequence are very different [Soames] |
| 13964 | Semantic content is a proposition made of sentence constituents (not some set of circumstances) [Soames] |
| 13972 | Two-dimensionalism reinstates descriptivism, and reconnects necessity and apriority to analyticity [Soames] |
| 15154 | We should use cognitive states to explain representational propositions, not vice versa [Soames] |
| 15693 | One sample of gold is enough, but one tree doesn't give the height of trees [Gelman] |
| 15701 | Nouns seem to invoke stable kinds more than predicates do [Gelman] |
| 15705 | Essentialism encourages us to think about the world scientifically [Gelman] |
| 15702 | Essentialism doesn't mean we know the essences [Gelman] |
| 15704 | Essentialism starts from richly structured categories, leading to a search for underlying properties [Gelman] |
| 15706 | A major objection to real essences is the essentialising of social categories like race, caste and occupation [Gelman] |
| 1513 | The Egyptians were the first to say the soul is immortal and reincarnated [Herodotus] |