46 ideas
| 14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
| 14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
| 18851 | Pairing (with Extensionality) guarantees an infinity of sets, just from a single element [Rosen] |
| 14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
| 14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
| 14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
| 14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
| 8915 | How we refer to abstractions is much less clear than how we refer to other things [Rosen] |
| 18852 | A Meinongian principle might say that there is an object for any modest class of properties [Rosen] |
| 18849 | Metaphysical necessity is absolute and universal; metaphysical possibility is very tolerant [Rosen] |
| 18850 | 'Metaphysical' modality is the one that makes the necessity or contingency of laws of nature interesting [Rosen] |
| 18858 | Sets, universals and aggregates may be metaphysically necessary in one sense, but not another [Rosen] |
| 14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
| 18857 | Standard Metaphysical Necessity: P holds wherever the actual form of the world holds [Rosen] |
| 18856 | Non-Standard Metaphysical Necessity: when ¬P is incompatible with the nature of things [Rosen] |
| 18848 | Something may be necessary because of logic, but is that therefore a special sort of necessity? [Rosen] |
| 18855 | Combinatorial theories of possibility assume the principles of combination don't change across worlds [Rosen] |
| 14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
| 18853 | A proposition is 'correctly' conceivable if an ominiscient being could conceive it [Rosen] |
| 3756 | Perception, introspection, testimony, memory, reason, and inference can give us knowledge [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3757 | Causal theory says true perceptions must be caused by the object perceived [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3759 | You can acquire new knowledge by exploring memories [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3752 | Justification can be of the belief, or of the person holding the belief [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3753 | Foundationalism aims to avoid an infinite regress [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3754 | Infallible sensations can't be foundations if they are non-epistemic [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3755 | Justification is normative, so it can't be reduced to cognitive psychology [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3761 | Modern arguments against the sceptic are epistemological and semantic externalism, and the focus on relevance [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3760 | Predictions are bound to be arbitrary if they depend on the language used [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 3758 | Semantic externalism ties content to the world, reducing error [Bernecker/Dretske] |
| 8917 | The Way of Abstraction used to say an abstraction is an idea that was formed by abstracting [Rosen] |
| 8912 | Nowadays abstractions are defined as non-spatial, causally inert things [Rosen] |
| 8913 | Chess may be abstract, but it has existed in specific space and time [Rosen] |
| 8914 | Sets are said to be abstract and non-spatial, but a set of books can be on a shelf [Rosen] |
| 8916 | Conflating abstractions with either sets or universals is a big claim, needing a big defence [Rosen] |
| 8918 | Functional terms can pick out abstractions by asserting an equivalence relation [Rosen] |
| 8919 | Abstraction by equivalence relationships might prove that a train is an abstract entity [Rosen] |
| 14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
| 18854 | The MRL view says laws are the theorems of the simplest and strongest account of the world [Rosen] |
| 24162 | Planck introduced the idea that energy can be quantized [Baggott] |
| 21731 | Fields can be 'scalar', or 'vector', or 'tensor', or 'spinor' [Baggott] |
| 21730 | A 'field' is a property with a magnitude, distributed across all of space and time [Baggott] |
| 24163 | Free electrons have clouds of virtual particles, arising from field interaction [Baggott] |
| 24161 | Thermodynamics sees nature as a continuous flow of energy, as radiation and as substance [Baggott] |
| 21732 | The current standard model requires 61 particles [Baggott] |
| 24160 | Particle measurements don't seem to reflect their reality [Baggott] |
| 14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |