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Single Idea 13954
[filed under theme 9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 14. Knowledge of Essences
]
Full Idea
I see no reason for thinking essentialism unintelligible, but a chief perplexity is the obscurity of the grounds on which ratings of attributes as essential or accidental are to be made.
Gist of Idea
The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential
Source
Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158)
Book Ref
Cartwright,Richard: 'Philosophical Essays' [MIT 1987], p.158
A Reaction
In that case some of us younger philosophers will have to roll up our sleeves and tease out the grounds for essentialism, starting with Aristotle and Leibniz, and ending with the successes of modern science.
The
19 ideas
from Richard Cartwright
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9783
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While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes
[Cartwright,R]
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9784
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A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system
[Cartwright,R]
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9786
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Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard
[Cartwright,R]
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13952
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Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent
[Cartwright,R]
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13953
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An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind
[Cartwright,R]
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13954
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The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential
[Cartwright,R]
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13955
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Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic
[Cartwright,R]
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13941
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Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements?
[Cartwright,R]
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13942
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Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons
[Cartwright,R]
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13943
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We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said
[Cartwright,R]
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13944
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We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each
[Cartwright,R]
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13946
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To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words
[Cartwright,R]
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13947
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'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same
[Cartwright,R]
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13948
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For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have
[Cartwright,R]
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13950
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People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter
[Cartwright,R]
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13951
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Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false....
[Cartwright,R]
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13945
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A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows
[Cartwright,R]
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14961
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Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart
[Cartwright,R]
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14962
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Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts
[Cartwright,R]
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