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24 ideas
15290 | What reduces the field of the possible is a step towards necessity [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: Whatever reduces the field of the possible is a step towards necessity. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 7.IV) | |
A reaction: This is a deeply stirring idea, because it suddenly opens up a research project of narrowing the possibilities, with a stunning Holy Grail at the end of it. Sherlock Holmes said this first, of course. |
15291 | There is 'absolute' necessity (implied by all propositions) and 'relative' necessity (from what is given) [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: In addition to absolute necessity ('p is strictly implied by ¬p'), i.e. p strictly implied by any proposition whatever, C.I. Lewis also distinguished relative necessity ('p implied by what is given or known'). | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 7.V) | |
A reaction: Once you accept this distinction you find that the 'relative' one comes in all sorts of degrees. You "have to" put more salt in this soup. (Deontic' necessity, someone on Twitter tells me!) |
15230 | Logical necessity is grounded in the logical form of a statement [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: When the logical form of a statement is offered as the grounds for the judgement that it cannot be true we have logical necessity. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.V.B) | |
A reaction: This sounds like a truth about logical necessity, but certainly not a full account of it, because contingent statements also have logical form. I can't think of any other criterion than the finding of a contradiction buried in the logical form. |
15214 | Natural necessity is not logical necessity or empirical contingency in disguise [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: Natural necessity is neither a mere reflection of logical necessity nor a roundabout way of referring to empirical contingency. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.I.B) | |
A reaction: They offer a strong defence of natural necessity, which is basic to their scientific essentialism. The key point is that they, unlike some others, are not defending metaphysical necessity about nature, but finding a different type of necessity. Good. |
15221 | The relation between what a thing is and what it can do or undergo relate by natural necessity [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: The relation between what a thing is and what it is capable of doing and undergoing is naturally necessary. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.II.C) | |
A reaction: Note that this was written in 1975, and in no way rests of Kripkean notions of rigid designation and necessary identities. Needs thought, but I take it to be an appealing proposal. |
15224 | A necessity corresponds to the nature of the actual [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: There is a necessity corresponding to the nature of the actual. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.III.C) | |
A reaction: A nice slogan for the assertion of a genuine and distinct natural necessity. Hence every possible world will have its own distinctive natural necessity. If the actual contains the possible, then there are possible new natural necessities in the actual! |
15232 | Natural necessity is when powerful particulars must produce certain results in a situation [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: When the natures of the operative powerful particulars, the constraining or stimulating effect of conditions and so on are offered as the grounds for the judgement that a certain effect cannot but happen (or fail), we have natural necessity. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.V.B) | |
A reaction: This is the view I subscribe to, the really right bit of scientific essentialism. Can this view be proved? Hm. I take the opposite view to be the misguided Humean idea that if you can imagine it not happening, then it might not happen. Firey furnace. |
15288 | People doubt science because if it isn't logically necessary it seems to be absolutely contingent [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: At the basis of all doubts about the rationality of science lies the idea that there is no rational resting place between logical necessity and absolute contingency. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 7.III) | |
A reaction: I'm struck by the fact that when someone says "I have to go now", they express a necessity. Are there thousands of types of necessity, or one conditional necessity resting on thousands of different foundations? |
15289 | Property or event relations are naturally necessary if generated by essential mechanisms [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: The relationship between co-existing properties or successive events or states is naturally necessary when understood by scientists to be related by generative mechanisms, whose structure and components constitute the essential natures of the world. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 7.III) | |
A reaction: Does that mean that the relationship between an actual state and a possible state is metaphysically necessary, rather than naturally necessary? I think we need dispositions to be part of actuality, and hence replace 'co-existing' with 'possible'. |
15231 | Transcendental necessity is conditions of a world required for a rational being to know its nature [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: When the conditions for a rational being having knowledge of the nature of a world are offered as the grounds for the judgement that such a world must have certain characteristics, we have transcendental necessity. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.V.B) | |
A reaction: It seems like a rather hard call to decide whether such characteristics pertain to the world, or to the mind of the rational being. Kant is obviously behind this one. You must read his first Critique at least four times to evaluate it. |
15234 | There is a transcendental necessity for each logical necessity, but the transcendental extends further [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: Whatever is logically necessary must be reflected in a corresponding transcendental necessity. But there are a great range of transcendental necessities which are not reflected in any logical necessity. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.V.C) | |
A reaction: That is, the world would be unknowable if any of the logical necessities failed to apply to it. I hope that doesn't mean that we are supposed to intuitively know all the logical necessities. Nowadays we are famous for being bad at that. |
15260 | Counterfactuals are just right for analysing statements about the powers which things have [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: We understand subjunctive conditionals as statements about possibilities, excluding those actualised. So that form is just right for part of the analysis of a power statement, since to say a thing has a power is to say what behaviour is possible for it. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 5.VII) | |
A reaction: They seem unaware of the famous work of Stalnaker and Lewis on this type of analysis, but as a fan of powers I find this interesting, and it offers a nice extra piece for my big jigsaw. |
15030 | Humeans say that we decide what is necessary [Sider] |
Full Idea: The spirit of Humeanism is that necessity is not a realm to be discovered. We draw the lines around what is necessary. | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 12.3) | |
A reaction: I disagree, but it is hard to argue the point. My intuitions are that the obvious necessities of logic and mathematics reflect the way nature has to be. The deepest necessities are patterns (about which God has no choice). |
15031 | Modal terms in English are entirely contextual, with no modality outside the language [Sider] |
Full Idea: English modals are context-dependent through and through; there is no stable 'outer modality'. | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 12.7) | |
A reaction: Sider has been doing so well up to here. To me this is swallowing the bait of linguistic approaches to philosophy which he has fought so hard to avoid. |
15027 | If truths are necessary 'by convention', that seems to make them contingent [Sider] |
Full Idea: If □φ says that φ is true by convention, then □φ would apparently turn out to be contingent, since statements about what conventions we adopt are not themselves true by convention. The main axioms of S4 and S5 would be false. | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 12.1) |
15233 | If natural necessity is used to include or exclude some predicate, the predicate is conceptually necessary [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: When a natural necessity is used as the basis for the inclusion or exclusion of the appropriate predicate in the meaning of a concept of a kind of particular, then it is conceptually necessary that that kind of particular has that property or power. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.V.B) | |
A reaction: This is one of the bolder views of Harré and Madden, since many philosophers would say that conceptual necessity rests entirely on convention rather than on nature. We could cut them out by just saying that most of our conventions rest on nature. |
15242 | Having a child is contingent for a 'man', necessary for a 'father'; the latter reflects a necessity of nature [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: Described as a man it is quite contingent that he has a child, but described as a father it is conceptually necessary that he has a child. But that conceptual necessity is a reflection of the natural necessity of the father's role in reproduction. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 3.I) | |
A reaction: This is a (good) response to Quine's claim that necessity depends entirely on the mode of description (and his mathematician cyclist example). |
15028 | Conventionalism doesn't seem to apply to examples of the necessary a posteriori [Sider] |
Full Idea: Conventionalism is apparently inapplicable to Kripke's and Putnam's examples of the necessary a posteriori (and, relatedly, to de re modality). | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 12.1) | |
A reaction: [Sidelle 1989 discusses this] |
15216 | Is conceptual necessity just conventional, or does it mirror something about nature? [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: The question about conceptual necessity is whether it is only stipulative and conventional in character or whether it mirrors something about the nature of physical systems. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.II.A) | |
A reaction: This is the key question, which fans of conventionalism (such as Sidelle) don't seem to face up to. I take it to be important that our concepts are not created by a committee of fools, but by people constantly relating to the world. |
15235 | There is a conceptual necessity when properties become a standard part of a nominal essence [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: When discoveries about the nature of a thing or substance explain or justify our holding that certain properties are its nominal essence, then the diachronic process of meaning development creates a genuine conceptual necessity. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.VI) | |
A reaction: This sounds like a pretty good account of one of the bases for conceptual necessity. They seem to think that conceptual necessity rests on a mixture of real and nominal essence (but then some of the nominal features are also real). |
15033 | Humeans says mathematics and logic are necessary because that is how our concept of necessity works [Sider] |
Full Idea: Why are logical (or mathematical, or analytic...) truths necessary? The Humean's answer is that this is just how our concept of necessity works. | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 12.11) | |
A reaction: This is why I (unlike Sider) am not a Humean. If we agreed that 'necessary' meant 'whatever is decreed by the Pope', that would so obviously not be necessary that we would have to start searching nature for true necessities. |
15025 | The world does not contain necessity and possibility - merely how things are [Sider] |
Full Idea: At bottom, the world is an amodal place. Necessity and possibility do not carve at the joints; ultimate reality is not 'full of threats and promises' (Goodman). The book of the world says how things are, not how they must or might be. | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 12) | |
A reaction: Nice to see this expressed so clearly. I find it much easier to disagree with as a result. At first blush I would say that if you haven't noticed that the world is full of threats and promises, you should wake up and smell the coffee. Actuality is active. |
15228 | Necessity and contingency are separate from the a priori and the a posteriori [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: The concepts of necessity and contingency are detached from those of the apriori and the a posteriori. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 1.IV) | |
A reaction: This seems to arise quite independently of Kripke, from the attack by the authors on the Humean view of modality. They also mention the possibility of the apriori contingent. |
15252 | If Goldbach's Conjecture is true (and logically necessary), we may be able to conceive its opposite [Harré/Madden] |
Full Idea: Even in cases (such as Goldbach's Conjecture) which, if true, are logically necessary, we may be able to conceive the opposite. We can conceive of there being a number which is not the sum of two primes. | |
From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 3.II) | |
A reaction: [attributed to Kneale] Ah, but can we conceive this (as Descartes would say) 'clearly and distinctly'? I can conceive circular squares, as long as I don't concentrate too hard. |