100 ideas
| 6979 | Serious metaphysics cares about entailment between sentences [Jackson] |
| 6980 | Conceptual analysis studies whether one story is made true by another story [Jackson] |
| 6983 | Intuitions about possibilities are basic to conceptual analysis [Jackson] |
| 14707 | Conceptual analysis is needed to establish that metaphysical reductions respect original meanings [Jackson, by Schroeter] |
| 7005 | Something can only have a place in a preferred account of things if it is entailed by the account [Jackson] |
| 6994 | Truth supervenes on being [Jackson] |
| 14352 | '¬', '&', and 'v' are truth functions: the truth of the compound is fixed by the truth of the components [Jackson] |
| 14562 | A process is unified as an expression of a collection of causal powers [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14541 | Events are essentially changes; property exemplifications are just states of affairs [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 6984 | Smooth reductions preserve high-level laws in the lower level [Jackson] |
| 6978 | Baldness is just hair distribution, but the former is indeterminate, unlike the latter [Jackson] |
| 6993 | Redness is a property, but only as a presentation to normal humans [Jackson] |
| 14553 | Weak emergence is just unexpected, and strong emergence is beyond all deduction [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14538 | Powers explain properties, causes, modality, events, and perhaps even particulars [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14555 | Powers offer no more explanation of nature than laws do [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14557 | Powers are not just basic forces, since they combine to make new powers [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14583 | Dispositionality is a natural selection function, picking outcomes from the range of possibilities [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14536 | We say 'power' and 'disposition' are equivalent, but some say dispositions are manifestable [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14584 | The simple conditional analysis of dispositions doesn't allow for possible prevention [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14582 | Might dispositions be reduced to normativity, or to intentionality? [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 8499 | Nominalists cannot translate 'red resembles pink more than blue' into particulars [Jackson] |
| 8500 | Colour resemblance isn't just resemblance between things; 'colour' must be mentioned [Jackson] |
| 14542 | If statue and clay fall and crush someone, the event is not overdetermined [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14535 | Pandispositionalists say structures are clusters of causal powers [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14633 | How do we tell a table's being contingently plastic from its being essentially plastic? [Jackson] |
| 14635 | An x is essentially F if it is F in every possible world in which it appears [Jackson] |
| 14632 | Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson] |
| 14561 | Perdurantism imposes no order on temporal parts, so sequences of events are contingent [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 17535 | Dispositionality has its own distinctive type of modality [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14579 | Dispositionality is the core modality, with possibility and necessity as its extreme cases [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14580 | Dispositions may suggest modality to us - as what might not have been, and what could have been [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 6987 | We should not multiply senses of necessity beyond necessity [Jackson] |
| 14552 | Relations are naturally necessary when they are generated by the essential mechanisms of the world [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14578 | Possibility might be non-contradiction, or recombinations of the actual, or truth in possible worlds [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14360 | Possible worlds for subjunctives (and dispositions), and no-truth for indicatives? [Jackson] |
| 14288 | 'If A,B' affirms that A⊃B, and also that this wouldn't change if A were certain [Jackson, by Edgington] |
| 13769 | Conditionals are truth-functional, but should only be asserted when they are confident [Jackson, by Edgington] |
| 13858 | The truth-functional account of conditionals is right, if the antecedent is really acceptable [Jackson, by Edgington] |
| 14289 | There are some assertable conditionals one would reject if one learned the antecedent [Jackson, by Edgington] |
| 14353 | Modus ponens requires that A→B is F when A is T and B is F [Jackson] |
| 14354 | When A and B have the same truth value, A→B is true, because A→A is a logical truth [Jackson] |
| 14355 | (A&B)→A is a logical truth, even if antecedent false and consequent true, so it is T if A is F and B is T [Jackson] |
| 14358 | In the possible worlds account of conditionals, modus ponens and modus tollens are validated [Jackson] |
| 14359 | Only assertions have truth-values, and conditionals are not proper assertions [Jackson] |
| 14357 | Possible worlds account, unlike A⊃B, says nothing about when A is false [Jackson] |
| 14356 | We can't insist that A is relevant to B, as conditionals can express lack of relevance [Jackson] |
| 14549 | Maybe truths are necessitated by the facts which are their truthmakers [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14631 | How can you show the necessity of an a posteriori necessity, if it might turn out to be false? [Jackson] |
| 6988 | Mathematical sentences are a problem in a possible-worlds framework [Jackson] |
| 6975 | Possible worlds could be concrete, abstract, universals, sentences, or properties [Jackson] |
| 6982 | Long arithmetic calculations show the a priori can be fallible [Jackson] |
| 14585 | We have more than five senses; balance and proprioception, for example [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 6991 | We examine objects to determine colour; we do not introspect [Jackson] |
| 14576 | Smoking disposes towards cancer; smokers without cancer do not falsify this claim [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14551 | If causation were necessary, the past would fix the future, and induction would be simple [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14571 | The only full uniformities in nature occur from the essences of fundamental things [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14570 | Nature is not completely uniform, and some regular causes sometimes fail to produce their effects [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14569 | It is tempting to think that only entailment provides a full explanation [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14568 | A structure won't give a causal explanation unless we know the powers of the structure [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 4894 | I say Mary does not have new knowledge, but knows an old fact in a new way [Perry on Jackson] |
| 4895 | Is it unfair that physicalist knowledge can be written down, but dualist knowledge can't be [Perry on Jackson] |
| 4886 | Mary knows all the physical facts of seeing red, but experiencing it is new knowledge [Jackson] |
| 14556 | Strong emergence seems to imply top-down causation, originating in consciousness [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 6976 | In physicalism, the psychological depends on the physical, not the other way around [Jackson] |
| 6986 | Is the dependence of the psychological on the physical a priori or a posteriori? [Jackson] |
| 6992 | If different states can fulfil the same role, the converse must also be possible [Jackson] |
| 7880 | If a blind persons suddenly sees a kestrel, that doesn't make visual and theoretical kestrels different [Papineau on Jackson] |
| 7378 | No one bothers to imagine what it would really be like to have ALL the physical information [Dennett on Jackson] |
| 7377 | Mary learns when she sees colour, so her complete physical information had missed something [Jackson] |
| 6996 | Folk psychology covers input, internal role, and output [Jackson] |
| 6977 | Egocentric or de se content seems to be irreducibly so [Jackson] |
| 6990 | Keep distinct the essential properties of water, and application conditions for the word 'water' [Jackson] |
| 6985 | Analysis is finding necessary and sufficient conditions by studying possible cases [Jackson] |
| 6995 | Successful predication supervenes on nature [Jackson] |
| 6989 | I can understand "He has a beard", without identifying 'he', and hence the truth conditions [Jackson] |
| 4377 | Intellectualism is an excessive emphasis on reasoning in moral philosophy [Burnyeat] |
| 6998 | Folk morality does not clearly distinguish between doing and allowing [Jackson] |
| 6997 | Moral functionalism says moral terms get their meaning from their role in folk morality [Jackson] |
| 7000 | Which are prior - thin concepts like right, good, ought; or thick concepts like kindness, equity etc.? [Jackson] |
| 6999 | It is hard to justify the huge difference in our judgements of abortion and infanticide [Jackson] |
| 14566 | Causation by absence is not real causation, but part of our explanatory practices [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14577 | Causation may not be transitive. Does a fire cause itself to be extinguished by the sprinklers? [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14563 | Causation is the passing around of powers [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14587 | We take causation to be primitive, as it is hard to see how it could be further reduced [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14533 | Causation doesn't have two distinct relata; it is a single unfolding process [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14558 | A collision is a process, which involves simultaneous happenings, but not instantaneous ones [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14559 | Does causation need a third tying ingredient, or just two that meet, or might there be a single process? [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14565 | Sugar dissolving is a process taking time, not one event and then another [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14567 | Privileging one cause is just an epistemic or pragmatic matter, not an ontological one [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14537 | Coincidence is conjunction without causation; smoking causing cancer is the reverse [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14573 | Occasionally a cause makes no difference (pre-emption, perhaps) so the counterfactual is false [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14572 | Is a cause because of counterfactual dependence, or is the dependence because there is a cause? [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14574 | Cases of preventing a prevention may give counterfactual dependence without causation [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14539 | Nature can be interfered with, so a cause never necessitates its effects [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14550 | We assert causes without asserting that they necessitate their effects [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14546 | Necessary causation should survive antecedent strengthening, but no cause can always survive that [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14575 | A 'ceteris paribus' clause implies that a conditional only has dispositional force [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14548 | There may be necessitation in the world, but causation does not supply it [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14554 | Laws are nothing more than descriptions of the behaviour of powers [Mumford/Anjum] |
| 14564 | If laws are equations, cause and effect must be simultaneous (or the law would be falsified)! [Mumford/Anjum] |