display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 ideas
| 12681 | There are natural kinds of processes [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: There are natural kinds of processes. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism [2009], 3) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. I am tempted by the view that processes are the most basic feature of reality, since I think of the mind as a process, and quantum reality seems more like processes than like objects. |
| 12680 | Natural kind structures go right down to the bottom level [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: Natural kind structures go all the way down to the most basic levels of existence. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism [2009], 3) | |
| A reaction: Even the bottom level? Is there anything to explain why the bottom level is a kind, given that all the higher kinds presumably have an explanation? |
| 8383 | Day and night are constantly conjoined, but they don't cause one another [Reid, by Crane] |
| Full Idea: A famous example of Thomas Reid: day regularly follows night, and night regularly follows day. There is therefore a constant conjunction between night and day. But day does not cause night, nor does night cause day. | |
| From: report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788]) by Tim Crane - Causation 1.2.2 | |
| A reaction: Not a fatal objection to Hume, of course, because in the complex real world there are huge numbers of nested constant conjunctions. Night and the rotation of the Earth are conjoined. But how do you tell which constant conjunctions are causal? |
| 23667 | Regular events don't imply a cause, without an innate conviction of universal causation [Reid] |
| Full Idea: A train of events following one another ever so regularly, could never lead us to the notion of a cause, if we had not, from our constitution, a conviction of the necessity of a cause for every event. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 5) | |
| A reaction: Presumably a theist like Reid must assume that the actions of God are freely chosen, rather than necessities. It's hard to see why this principle should be innate in us, and hard to see why it must thereby be true. A bit Kantian, this idea. |
| 23670 | Scientists don't know the cause of magnetism, and only discover its regulations [Reid] |
| Full Idea: A Newtonian philosopher …confesses his ignorance of the true cause of magnetic motion, and thinks that his business, as a philosopher, is only to find from experiment the laws by which it is regulated in all cases. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: Since there is a 'true cause', that implies that the laws don't actively 'regulate' the magnetism, but only describe its regularity, which I think is the correct view of laws. |
| 23671 | Laws are rules for effects, but these need a cause; rules of navigation don't navigate [Reid] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: Very nice. No enquirer should be satisfied with merely discovering patterns; the point is to explain the patterns. |
| 12675 | Laws of nature are just descriptions of how things are disposed to behave [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature must be supposed to be just descriptions of the ways in which things are intrinsically disposed to behave: of how they would behave if they existed as closed and isolated systems. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism [2009], 3) | |
| A reaction: I agree with this, and therefore take 'laws of nature' to be eliminable from any plausible ontology (which just contains the things and their behaviour). Ellis tends to defend laws, when he doesn't need to. |