display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 15101 | Once you give up necessity as a priori, causal necessity becomes the main type of necessity [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Once the obstacle of the deeply rooted conviction that necessary truths should be knowable a priori is removed, ...causal necessity is (pretheoretically) the very paradigm of necessity, in ordinary usage and in dictionaries. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VII) | |
| A reaction: The a priori route seems to lead to logical necessity, just by doing a priori logic, and also to metaphysical necessity, by some sort of intuitive vision. This is a powerful idea of Shoemaker's (implied, of course, in Kripke). |
| 15098 | Empirical evidence shows that imagining a phenomenon can show it is possible [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: We have abundant empirical evidence that when we can imagine some phenomenal situation, e.g., imagine things appearing certain ways, such a situation could actually exist. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: There seem to be good reasons for holding the opposite view too. We can imagine gold appearing to be all sorts of colours, but that doesn't make it possible. What does empirical evidence really tell us here? |
| 15100 | Imagination reveals conceptual possibility, where descriptions avoid contradiction or incoherence [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Imaginability can give us access to conceptual possibility, when we come to believe situations to be conceptually possible by reflecting on their descriptions and seeing no contradiction or incoherence. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: If take the absence of contradiction to indicate 'logical' possibility, but the absence of incoherence is more interesting, even if it is a bit vague. He is talking of 'situations', which I take to be features of reality. A priori synthetic? |