44 ideas
9786 | Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R] |
9784 | A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R] |
13941 | Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R] |
13942 | Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R] |
17925 | Showing a disproof is impossible is not a proof, so don't eliminate double negation [Colyvan] |
17926 | Rejecting double negation elimination undermines reductio proofs [Colyvan] |
17924 | Excluded middle says P or not-P; bivalence says P is either true or false [Colyvan] |
17929 | Löwenheim proved his result for a first-order sentence, and Skolem generalised it [Colyvan] |
17930 | Axioms are 'categorical' if all of their models are isomorphic [Colyvan] |
17928 | Ordinal numbers represent order relations [Colyvan] |
17923 | Intuitionists only accept a few safe infinities [Colyvan] |
17941 | Infinitesimals were sometimes zero, and sometimes close to zero [Colyvan] |
17922 | Reducing real numbers to rationals suggested arithmetic as the foundation of maths [Colyvan] |
17936 | Transfinite induction moves from all cases, up to the limit ordinal [Colyvan] |
17940 | Most mathematical proofs are using set theory, but without saying so [Colyvan] |
17931 | Structuralism say only 'up to isomorphism' matters because that is all there is to it [Colyvan] |
17932 | If 'in re' structures relies on the world, does the world contain rich enough structures? [Colyvan] |
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] |
9783 | While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes [Cartwright,R] |
14962 | Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts [Cartwright,R] |
14961 | Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart [Cartwright,R] |
13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
13954 | The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R] |
13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
13953 | An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R] |
13945 | A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R] |
17943 | Probability supports Bayesianism better as degrees of belief than as ratios of frequencies [Colyvan] |
17939 | Mathematics can reveal structural similarities in diverse systems [Colyvan] |
17938 | Mathematics can show why some surprising events have to occur [Colyvan] |
17934 | Proof by cases (by 'exhaustion') is said to be unexplanatory [Colyvan] |
17933 | Reductio proofs do not seem to be very explanatory [Colyvan] |
17935 | If inductive proofs hold because of the structure of natural numbers, they may explain theorems [Colyvan] |
17942 | Can a proof that no one understands (of the four-colour theorem) really be a proof? [Colyvan] |
17937 | Mathematical generalisation is by extending a system, or by abstracting away from it [Colyvan] |
13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
13944 | We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R] |
13947 | 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R] |
13943 | We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R] |
13946 | To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R] |
13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |