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Single Idea 14919
[filed under theme 10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
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Full Idea
To be an empiricist is to withhold belief in anything that goes beyond the actual, observable phenomena, and to recognise no objective modality in nature.
Gist of Idea
Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality
Source
Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980], p.202), quoted by J Ladyman / D Ross - Every Thing Must Go 2.3.1
Book Ref
Ladyman,J/Ross,D: 'Every Thing Must Go' [OUP 2007], p.99
A Reaction
To only believe in what is actually observable strikes me as ridiculous. It might be, though, that we observe modality, in observing dispositions. If you pull back a bowstring, you feel the possibilities.
The
20 ideas
with the same theme
[there is nothing necessary about the real world]:
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4766
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Necessity only exists in the mind, and not in objects
[Hume]
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7186
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There are no necessary truths, but something must be held to be true
[Nietzsche]
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4528
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For me, a priori 'truths' are just provisional assumptions
[Nietzsche]
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9362
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Necessary truths are those we will maintain no matter what
[Lewis,CI]
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8483
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Necessity is relative to context; it is what is assumed in an inquiry
[Quine]
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10924
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Necessity is in the way in which we say things, and not things themselves
[Quine]
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8206
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Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia
[Quine]
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4577
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There is no necessity higher than natural necessity, and that is just regularity
[Quine]
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9201
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Whether 9 is necessarily greater than 7 depends on how '9' is described
[Quine, by Fine,K]
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10927
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Necessity only applies to objects if they are distinctively specified
[Quine]
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15090
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Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction undermined necessary truths
[Quine, by Shoemaker]
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4718
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If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity
[Putnam, by O'Grady]
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14919
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Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality
[Fraassen]
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19284
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Asserting a necessity just expresses our inability to imagine it is false
[Blackburn]
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20475
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Maybe modal sentences cannot be true or false
[Casullo]
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11119
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De re necessity is just de dicto necessity about object-essences
[Jubien]
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3888
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Hume assumes that necessity can only be de dicto, not de re
[Scruton]
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9200
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Empiricists suspect modal notions: either it happens or it doesn't; it is just regularities.
[Fine,K]
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14589
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A modal can reverse meaning if the context is seen differently, so maybe context is all?
[Hawthorne]
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14598
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Abstracta imply non-logical brute necessities, so only nominalists can deny such things
[Dorr]
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