51 ideas
| 10245 | One geometry cannot be more true than another [Poincaré] |
| 15923 | Poincaré rejected the actual infinite, claiming definitions gave apparent infinity to finite objects [Poincaré, by Lavine] |
| 10180 | Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects [Poincaré] |
| 9916 | Convention, yes! Arbitrary, no! [Poincaré, by Putnam] |
| 18203 | Avoid non-predicative classifications and definitions [Poincaré] |
| 16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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] |
| 16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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] |
| 16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 15702 | Essentialism doesn't mean we know the essences [Gelman] |
| 15705 | Essentialism encourages us to think about the world scientifically [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] |
| 15877 | The aim of science is just to create a comprehensive, elegant language to describe brute facts [Poincaré, by Harré] |
| 16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |