display all the ideas for this combination of texts
8 ideas
| 9661 | Induction is just reasonable methods of inferring the unobserved from the observed [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I use the word 'induction' broadly, to cover all the methods we deem reasonable for forming beliefs about the unobserved parts of our world on the basis of experience with the observed parts. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: Good. Attempts to be precise about it seem to be hopeless and invite paradoxes. Personally I just define it as 'learning from experience', because that makes what we do continuous with the behaviour of other sensible animals. |
| 9652 | To just expect unexamined emeralds to be grue would be totally unreasonable [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Some beliefs are just unreasonable in a strong sense. Think of the man who, for no special reason, expects unexamined emeralds to be grue. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice converse way of seeing the point that 'grue' is such an totally artificial predicate. I still say that the most illuminating point is that grue is not a colour, so seeing a grue thing is no confirmation at all. |
| 9658 | An explanation tells us how an event was caused [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: An explanation, I think, is an account of etiology: it tells us something about how an event was caused. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Will this cover mathematical explanations? Numbers would have to have causal powers. |
| 16280 | Often explanaton seeks fundamental laws, rather than causal histories [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Sometimes the pursuit of explanation is more the pursuit of unified and general fundamental laws than of information about the causal histories of events. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to disagree, given the 'sometimes'. I don't think that Newton's Law of Gravity (say), with its lovely equation, actually explained anything at all about gravity. Finding the law closes the quest for an accurate description of what happens. |
| 16037 | Locke seems to use real essence for scientific explanation, and substratum for the being of a thing [Locke, by Jones,J-E] |
| Full Idea: It seems that Locke employs the concept of a real essence when he is addressing issues of scientific explanation, and he appeals to substratum when he is discussing the general concept of what it is to be a thing (as opposed to a property or mode). | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]) by Jan-Erik Jones - Real Essence §4.4 | |
| A reaction: [This idea is attributed to Nicholas Jolley 1999] Locke was, of course, utterly pessimistic about the possibility of knowing real essences. For Aristotle, real essence does both jobs. |
| 16032 | To explain qualities, Locke invokes primary and secondary qualities, not real essences [Locke, by Jones,J-E] |
| Full Idea: When criticising the scholastic account of the explanation of qualities, Locke typically refrains from invoking real essences, and instead talks about primary, secondary and tertiary qualities. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.10-26) by Jan-Erik Jones - Real Essence §2 | |
| A reaction: This is the good empiricists' response to attempts to explain by means of essences - that we must stick to what is 'nearer the surface' and more knowable, only distinguishing which bits match the reality of the object. |
| 12519 | Gold is supposed to have a real essence, from whence its detectable properties flow [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The ring on my finger is supposed to have a real essence, whereby it is gold, from whence those qualities flow which I find in it, viz. its colour, weight, hardness, fusibility, fixedness, and change of colour upon a slight touch of mercury, etc. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.31.06) | |
| A reaction: This is Locke's notion of essence, as simply the underlying cause of the detectable properties. Oderberg says real essences are not hidden, but are the macro-features we all know gold to have. Locke never denies real essences. |
| 16274 | If the well-ordering of a pack of cards was by shuffling, the explanation would make it more surprising [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Suppose you find in a hotel room a pack of cards in exactly standard order. Not surprising - maybe it's a new deck, or someone arranged them. Not so. They got that way by being fairly shuffled. The explanation would make the explanandum more surprising. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] A lovely Lewisian example, that instantly makes big trouble for the (implausible) view that a cause is something which increases the likelihood of a thing. |