75 ideas
| 13939 | No possible evidence could decide the reality of numbers, so it is a pseudo-question [Carnap] |
| 16252 | Metaphysics uses empty words, or just produces pseudo-statements [Carnap] |
| 11147 | Naturalistic philosophers oppose analysis, preferring explanation to a priori intuition [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 13342 | Carnap defined consequence by contradiction, but this is unintuitive and changes with substitution [Tarski on Carnap] |
| 13251 | Each person is free to build their own logic, just by specifying a syntax [Carnap] |
| 13936 | Questions about numbers are answered by analysis, and are analytic, and hence logically true [Carnap] |
| 8748 | Logical positivists incorporated geometry into logicism, saying axioms are just definitions [Carnap, by Shapiro] |
| 8960 | Internal questions about abstractions are trivial, and external ones deeply problematic [Carnap, by Szabó] |
| 13933 | Existence questions are 'internal' (within a framework) or 'external' (concerning the whole framework) [Carnap] |
| 13934 | To be 'real' is to be an element of a system, so we cannot ask reality questions about the system itself [Carnap] |
| 13938 | A linguistic framework involves commitment to entities, so only commitment to the framework is in question [Carnap] |
| 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] |
| 13935 | We only accept 'things' within a language with formation, testing and acceptance rules [Carnap] |
| 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] |
| 14305 | In the truth-functional account a burnt-up match was soluble because it never entered water [Carnap] |
| 15707 | There is intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist and deontological understanding [Gelman] |
| 13932 | Empiricists tend to reject abstract entities, and to feel sympathy with nominalism [Carnap] |
| 11141 | Modern empiricism tends to emphasise psychological connections, not semantic relations [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 13937 | New linguistic claims about entities are not true or false, but just expedient, fruitful or successful [Carnap] |
| 15703 | Memories often conform to a theory, rather than being neutral [Gelman] |
| 18699 | Carnap tried to define all scientific predicates in terms of primitive relations, using type theory [Carnap, by Button] |
| 13940 | All linguistic forms in science are merely judged by their efficiency as instruments [Carnap] |
| 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] |
| 13048 | Good explications are exact, fruitful, simple and similar to the explicandum [Carnap, by Salmon] |
| 11142 | Body-type seems to affect a mind's cognition and conceptual scheme [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 15680 | Folk essentialism rests on belief in natural kinds, in hidden properties, and on words indicating structures [Gelman] |
| 11121 | Language of thought has subject/predicate form and includes logical devices [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11120 | Concepts are either representations, or abilities, or Fregean senses [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 15686 | Labels may indicate categories which embody an essence [Gelman] |
| 11122 | A computer may have propositional attitudes without representations [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11124 | Do mental representations just lead to a vicious regress of explanations [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11123 | Maybe the concept CAT is just the ability to discriminate and infer about cats [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11125 | The abilities view cannot explain the productivity of thought, or mental processes [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11140 | Concept-structure explains typicality, categories, development, reference and composition [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 15690 | Causal properties are seen as more central to category concepts [Gelman] |
| 11128 | Classically, concepts give necessary and sufficient conditions for falling under them [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11130 | Typicality challenges the classical view; we see better fruit-prototypes in apples than in plums [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11129 | The classical theory explains acquisition, categorization and reference [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11131 | It may be that our concepts (such as 'knowledge') have no definitional structure [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 15688 | Categories are characterized by distance from a prototype [Gelman] |
| 11132 | The prototype theory is probabilistic, picking something out if it has sufficient of the properties [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11133 | Prototype theory categorises by computing the number of shared constituents [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11134 | People don't just categorise by apparent similarities [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11135 | Complex concepts have emergent properties not in the ingredient prototypes [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11136 | Many complex concepts obviously have no prototype [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 15689 | Theory-based concepts use rich models to show which similarities really matter [Gelman] |
| 11137 | The theory theory of concepts says they are parts of theories, defined by their roles [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11138 | The theory theory is holistic, so how can people have identical concepts? [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 12131 | All concepts can be derived from a few basics, making possible one science of everything [Carnap, by Brody] |
| 11139 | Maybe concepts have no structure, and determined by relations to the world, not to other concepts [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 15699 | Prelinguistic infants acquire and use many categories [Gelman] |
| 11146 | People can formulate new concepts which are only named later [Margolis/Laurence] |
| 11968 | The intension of a sentence is the set of all possible worlds in which it is true [Carnap, by Kaplan] |
| 18285 | All translation loses some content (but language does not create reality) [Carnap] |
| 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] |
| 15705 | Essentialism encourages us to think about the world scientifically [Gelman] |
| 15702 | Essentialism doesn't mean we know the essences [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] |