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2 ideas
| 13713 | Quine holds time to be 'space-like': past objects are as real as spatially remote ones [Quine, by Sider] |
| Full Idea: Quine's view is that time is 'space-like'. Past objects are as real as present ones; they're just temporally distant, just as spatially distant objects are just as real as the ones around here. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953]) by Theodore Sider - Logic for Philosophy 7.3.1 | |
| A reaction: Something is a wrong with a view that says that a long-dead person is just as real as one currently living. Death is rather more than travelling to a distant place. Arthur Prior responded to Quine by saying 'tense operators' are inescapable. |
| 6938 | Natural selection might well fill an animal's mind with pleasing thoughts rather than true ones [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: It is probably of more advantage to an animal to have his mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their truth; and thus, upon unpractical subjects, natural selection might occasion a fallacious tendency of thought. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief [1877], p. 8) | |
| A reaction: Note that this is a pragmatist saying that a set of beliefs might work fine but be untrue. So Peirce does not have the highly relativistic notion of truth of some later pragmatists. Good for him. Note the early date to be thinking about Darwin. |