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15. Nature of Minds / C. Capacities of Minds / 7. Seeing Resemblance

[seeing recurrences of properties and structures]

13 ideas
Everything resembles everything else up to a point [Plato]
     Full Idea: Everything resembles everything else up to a point.
     From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 331d)
Many memories of the same item form a single experience [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: When it occurs often in connection with the same item, ..memories which are many in number form a single experience.
     From: Aristotle (Posterior Analytics [c.327 BCE], 100a05)
     A reaction: This is Aristotle at his most empirical. He is not describing an operation of the understanding, but a process of association. The process he alludes to is at the heart of the abstractionist view of concept-formation.
General ideas are the connection by resemblance to some particular [Hume]
     Full Idea: All general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them.
     From: David Hume (Enquiry Conc Human Understanding [1748], I.VII.17), quoted by Edwin D. Mares - A Priori 08.2
     A reaction: This is close to Berkeley's idea that we can only grasp particulars. Personally I think the idea of (psychological) abstraction is unavoidable. Irrelevant features of particulars need to ignored.
A picture of a friend strengthens our idea of him, by resemblance [Hume]
     Full Idea: Upon the appearance of the picture of an absent friend, our idea of him is evidently enlivened by the resemblance.
     From: David Hume (Enquiry Conc Human Understanding [1748], V.II.41)
Hume does not distinguish real resemblances among degrees of resemblance [Shoemaker on Hume]
     Full Idea: Hume regarded the notion of resemblance as unproblematic, ..but any two objects share infinitely many Cambridge (whimsical relational) properties, and resemble in infinite ways. He needs real resemblance, which needs degrees of resemblance.
     From: comment on David Hume (Enquiry Conc Human Understanding [1748], V.II.41) by Sydney Shoemaker - Causality and Properties §2
     A reaction: [compressed] See Idea 191. We forgive Hume, because he is a pioneer, but this is obviously right. Draw a line between 'real' resemblances and rest will be tricky, and bad news for regularity accounts of laws and causation.
Hume needs a notion which includes degrees of resemblance [Shoemaker on Hume]
     Full Idea: Hume needs a notion of resemblance where some things resemble a given thing more than other things do, and some may resemble exactly, and some hardly at all.
     From: comment on David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740]) by Sydney Shoemaker - Causality and Properties §02
     A reaction: An astute and simple point. Once you admit degrees of resemblance, of course, then resemblance probably ceases to be a primitive concept in your system, and Hume would be well stuck.
We don't recognise comparisons by something in our minds; the concepts result from the comparisons [Mill]
     Full Idea: It is not a law of our intellect that in comparing things and noting their agreements we recognise as realized in the outward world something we already had in our minds. The conception found its way to us as the result of such a comparison.
     From: John Stuart Mill (System of Logic [1843], 4.2.2)
     A reaction: He recognises, of course, that this gradually becomes a two-way process. In the physicalist view of things, it is not really of great importance which concepts are hard-wired, and which constructed culturally or through perception.
I learn the universal 'resemblance' by seeing two shades of green, and their contrast with red [Russell]
     Full Idea: If I see simultaneously two shades of green, I can see that they resemble each other, and I see that they resemble each other more than they resemble a shade of red; in this way I become acquainted with the universal 'resemblance'.
     From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch.10)
     A reaction: This is strikingly different from the account of Hume, who seemed to regard resemblance as a fairly mechanical, computer-like activity of the brain, whereas Russell (an empiricist) responds by inclining towards Platonism. Hume sounds better here.
General terms depend on similarities among things [Quine]
     Full Idea: The usual general term, whether a common noun or a verb or an adjective, owes its generality to some resemblance among the things referred to.
     From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.116)
     A reaction: Quine has a nice analysis of the basic role of similarity in a huge amount of supposedly strict scientific thought.
To learn yellow by observation, must we be told to look at the colour? [Quine]
     Full Idea: According to the 'respects' view, our learning of yellow by ostension would have depended on our first having been told or somehow apprised that it was going to be a question of color.
     From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.122)
     A reaction: Quine suggests there is just one notion of similarity, and respects can be 'abstracted' afterwards. Even the ontologically ruthless Quine admits psychological abstraction!
Standards of similarity are innate, and the spacing of qualities such as colours can be mapped [Quine]
     Full Idea: A standard of similarity is in some sense innate. The spacing of qualities (such as red, pink and blue) can be explored and mapped in the laboratory by experiments. They are needed for all learning.
     From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.123)
     A reaction: This reasserts Hume's original point in more scientific terms. It is one of the undeniable facts about our perceptions of qualities and properties, no matter how platonist your view of universals may be.
Similarity is just interchangeability in the cosmic machine [Quine]
     Full Idea: Things are similar to the extent that they are interchangeable parts of the cosmic machine.
     From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.134)
     A reaction: This is a major idea for Quine, because it is a means to gradually eliminate the fuzzy ideas of 'resemblance' or 'similarity' or 'natural kind' from science. I love it! Two tigers are same insofar as they are substitutable.
The different types of resemblance don't resemble one another [Fodor]
     Full Idea: The ways in which different kinds of thing are similar to one another aren't, in general, similar to one another.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4)
     A reaction: Nice, but I think one would say that they lack similarity at the level of primary thought, but have obvious similarity (as concept-connectors) at the level of meta-thought.