display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 10421 | Supervenience is nowadays seen as between properties, rather than linguistic [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is sometimes taken to be a relationship between two fragments of language, but it is increasingly taken to be a relationship between pairs of families of properties. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.17) | |
| A reaction: If supervenience is a feature of the world, rather than of our descriptions, then it cries out for explanation, just as any other regularities do. Personally I would have thought the best explanation of the supervenience of mind and body was obvious. |
| 12741 | If experience is just a dream, it is still real enough if critical reason is never deceived [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Even if this whole life were said to be only a dream, and the visible world only a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough if we were never deceived by it when we make good use of reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (De modo distinguendi phaenomena [1685], A6.4.1502), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 7 | |
| A reaction: I find this response more satisfactory than his response in Idea 12740. As a supporter of the coherence account of justification, I take the closest we get to knowledge to be when our full critical faculties and experience are brought to bear, and shared. |
| 12740 | The strongest criterion that phenomena show reality is success in prediction [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The most powerful criterion of the reality of phenomena, sufficient even by itself, is success in predicting future phenomena from past and present ones. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (De modo distinguendi phaenomena [1685], A6.4.1502), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 7 | |
| A reaction: I would say that this is clutching at straws, as there is no reason at all to deny that dreams could be thoroughly coherent and predictable in their events. We must just live with these doubts, not try to defeat them. |
| 10410 | Anti-realists can't explain different methods to measure distance [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Anti-realists theories of measurement (like operationalism) cannot explain how we can use different methods to measure the same thing (e.g. lengths and distances in cosmology, geology, histology and atomic physics). | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Swoyer says that the explanation is that measurement aims at objective properties, the same in each of these areas. Quite good. |