display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 21492 | Realism is basic to the scientific method [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The fundamental hypothesis of the method of science is this: There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinion of them. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief [1877]), quoted by Albert Atkin - Peirce 3 'method' | |
| A reaction: He admits later that this is only a commitment and not a fact. It seems to me that when you combine this idea with the huge success of science, the denial of realism is crazy. Philosophy has a lot to answer for. |
| 6949 | If someone doubted reality, they would not actually feel dissatisfaction [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Nobody can really doubt that there are Reals, for, if he did, doubt would not be a source of dissatisfaction. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief [1877], p.19) | |
| A reaction: This rests on Peirce's view that all that really matters is a sense of genuine dissatisfaction, rather than a theoretical idea. So even at the end of Meditation One, Descartes isn't actually worried about whether his furniture exists. |
| 10262 | Fictionalism eschews the abstract, but it still needs the possible (without model theory) [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Fictionalism takes an epistemology of the concrete to be more promising than concrete-and-abstract, but fictionalism requires an epistemology of the actual and possible, secured without the benefits of model theory. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Philosophy of Mathematics [1997], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: The idea that possibilities (logical, natural and metaphysical) should be understood as features of the concrete world has always struck me as appealing, so I have (unlike Shapiro) no intuitive problems with this proposal. |
| 10277 | Structuralism blurs the distinction between mathematical and ordinary objects [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: One result of the structuralist perspective is a healthy blurring of the distinction between mathematical and ordinary objects. ..'According to the structuralist, physical configurations often instantiate mathematical patterns'. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Philosophy of Mathematics [1997], 8.4) | |
| A reaction: [The quotation is from Penelope Maddy 1988 p.28] This is probably the main reason why I found structuralism interesting, and began to investigate it. |