35 ideas
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
| 14611 | Metaphysics should avoid talk of past, present or future [Smart] |
| 17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
| 17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
| 8081 | 'No councillors are bankers' and 'All bankers are athletes' implies 'Some athletes are not councillors' [Devlin] |
| 8085 | Modern propositional inference replaces Aristotle's 19 syllogisms with modus ponens [Devlin] |
| 8086 | Predicate logic retains the axioms of propositional logic [Devlin] |
| 8091 | Situation theory is logic that takes account of context [Devlin] |
| 8087 | Golden ages: 1900-1960 for pure logic, and 1950-1985 for applied logic [Devlin] |
| 8089 | Montague's intensional logic incorporated the notion of meaning [Devlin] |
| 8082 | Where a conditional is purely formal, an implication implies a link between premise and conclusion [Devlin] |
| 8072 | Sentences of apparent identical form can have different contextual meanings [Devlin] |
| 8075 | Space and time are atomic in the arrow, and divisible in the tortoise [Devlin] |
| 16062 | A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| 16061 | If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| 16060 | Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| 16064 | The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| 17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
| 8088 | People still say the Hopi have no time concepts, despite Whorf's later denial [Devlin] |
| 17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
| 17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
| 17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
| 17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
| 17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
| 17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
| 17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
| 17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
| 8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
| 8076 | The distinction between sentences and abstract propositions is crucial in logic [Devlin] |
| 22405 | Negative utilitarianism implies that the world should be destroyed, to avoid future misery [Smart] |
| 22404 | Any group interested in ethics must surely have a sentiment of generalised benevolence [Smart] |
| 14613 | Special relativity won't determine a preferred frame, but we can pick one externally [Smart] |
| 17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |
| 14615 | If time flows, then 'how fast does it flow?' is a tricky question [Smart] |
| 14614 | The past, present, future and tenses of A-theory are too weird, and should be analysed indexically [Smart] |