66 ideas
| 17713 | After 1903, Husserl avoids metaphysical commitments [Mares] |
| 14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
| 18781 | Inconsistency doesn't prevent us reasoning about some system [Mares] |
| 14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
| 18789 | Intuitionist logic looks best as natural deduction [Mares] |
| 18790 | Intuitionism as natural deduction has no rule for negation [Mares] |
| 18787 | Three-valued logic is useful for a theory of presupposition [Mares] |
| 18851 | Pairing (with Extensionality) guarantees an infinity of sets, just from a single element [Rosen] |
| 18793 | Material implication (and classical logic) considers nothing but truth values for implications [Mares] |
| 18784 | In classical logic the connectives can be related elegantly, as in De Morgan's laws [Mares] |
| 18786 | Excluded middle standardly implies bivalence; attacks use non-contradiction, De M 3, or double negation [Mares] |
| 18780 | Standard disjunction and negation force us to accept the principle of bivalence [Mares] |
| 18782 | The connectives are studied either through model theory or through proof theory [Mares] |
| 18783 | Many-valued logics lack a natural deduction system [Mares] |
| 18792 | Situation semantics for logics: not possible worlds, but information in situations [Mares] |
| 18785 | Consistency is semantic, but non-contradiction is syntactic [Mares] |
| 14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
| 17715 | The truth of the axioms doesn't matter for pure mathematics, but it does for applied [Mares] |
| 17716 | Mathematics is relations between properties we abstract from experience [Mares] |
| 18788 | For intuitionists there are not numbers and sets, but processes of counting and collecting [Mares] |
| 14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
| 7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
| 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] |
| 18849 | Metaphysical necessity is absolute and universal; metaphysical possibility is very tolerant [Rosen] |
| 18850 | 'Metaphysical' modality is the one that makes the necessity or contingency of laws of nature interesting [Rosen] |
| 18858 | Sets, universals and aggregates may be metaphysically necessary in one sense, but not another [Rosen] |
| 14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
| 18857 | Standard Metaphysical Necessity: P holds wherever the actual form of the world holds [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] |
| 17703 | Light in straight lines is contingent a priori; stipulated as straight, because they happen to be so [Mares] |
| 18853 | A proposition is 'correctly' conceivable if an ominiscient being could conceive it [Rosen] |
| 17714 | Aristotelians dislike the idea of a priori judgements from pure reason [Mares] |
| 17705 | Empiricists say rationalists mistake imaginative powers for modal insights [Mares] |
| 7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
| 7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
| 17700 | The most popular view is that coherent beliefs explain one another [Mares] |
| 17704 | Operationalism defines concepts by our ways of measuring them [Mares] |
| 7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
| 7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
| 7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
| 17710 | Aristotelian justification uses concepts abstracted from experience [Mares] |
| 17706 | The essence of a concept is either its definition or its conceptual relations? [Mares] |
| 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] |
| 18791 | In 'situation semantics' our main concepts are abstracted from situations [Mares] |
| 17701 | Possible worlds semantics has a nice compositional account of modal statements [Mares] |
| 17702 | Unstructured propositions are sets of possible worlds; structured ones have components [Mares] |
| 14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
| 7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
| 18854 | The MRL view says laws are the theorems of the simplest and strongest account of the world [Rosen] |
| 17708 | Maybe space has points, but processes always need regions with a size [Mares] |
| 14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |
| 7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
| 7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
| 7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |