45 ideas
14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
17596 | Coherence problems have positive and negative restraints; solutions maximise constraint satisfaction [Thagard] |
17597 | Coherence is explanatory, deductive, conceptual, analogical, perceptual, and deliberative [Thagard] |
17598 | Explanatory coherence needs symmetry,explanation,analogy,data priority, contradiction,competition,acceptance [Thagard] |
14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
17602 | Verisimilitude comes from including more phenomena, and revealing what underlies [Thagard] |
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] |
18850 | 'Metaphysical' modality is the one that makes the necessity or contingency of laws of nature interesting [Rosen] |
18849 | Metaphysical necessity is absolute and universal; metaphysical possibility is very tolerant [Rosen] |
18857 | Standard Metaphysical Necessity: P holds wherever the actual form of the world holds [Rosen] |
14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
18858 | Sets, universals and aggregates may be metaphysically necessary in one sense, but not another [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] |
17601 | Neither a priori rationalism nor sense data empiricism account for scientific knowledge [Thagard] |
17600 | Bayesian inference is forced to rely on approximations [Thagard] |
17066 | 3: If an analogous pair explain another analogous pair, then they all cohere [Thagard, by Smart] |
17064 | 1: Coherence is a symmetrical relation between two propositions [Thagard, by Smart] |
17067 | 4: For coherence, observation reports have a degree of intrinsic acceptability [Thagard, by Smart] |
17068 | 5: Contradictory propositions incohere [Thagard, by Smart] |
17069 | 6: A proposition's acceptability depends on its coherence with a system [Thagard, by Smart] |
17065 | 2: An explanation must wholly cohere internally, and with the new fact [Thagard, by Smart] |
17599 | The best theory has the highest subjective (Bayesian) probability? [Thagard] |
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] |
21730 | A 'field' is a property with a magnitude, distributed across all of space and time [Baggott] |
21731 | Fields can be 'scalar', or 'vector', or 'tensor', or 'spinor' [Baggott] |
21732 | The current standard model requires 61 particles [Baggott] |
14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |