display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
19492 | Quine is hopeless circular, deriving ontology from what is literal, and 'literal' from good ontology [Yablo on Quine] |
Full Idea: Quine's advice is to countenance numbers iff the literal part of our theory quantifies over them; and to count the part of our theory that quantifies over numbers literal iff there turn out really to be numbers. | |
From: comment on Willard Quine (Two Dogmas of Empiricism [1953]) by Stephen Yablo - Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? XIII | |
A reaction: This sounds a bit devastating. Presumably it is indeed the choice of a best theory which results in the ontological commitment, so it is not much help to then read off the ontology from the theory. |
15682 | Even fairly simple animals make judgements based on categories [Gelman] |
Full Idea: All organisms form categories: even mealworms have category-based preferences, and higher-order animals such as pigeons or octopi can display quite sophisticated categorical judgements. | |
From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
A reaction: [She cites some 1980 research to support this] This comes as no surprise, as I take categorisation as almost definitive of what a mind is. My surmise is that some sort of 'labelling' system is at the heart of it (like Googlemail labels!). |
15691 | Children accept real stable categories, with nonobvious potential that gives causal explanations [Gelman] |
Full Idea: By five children assume that a variety of categories have rich inductive potential, are stable over outward transformations, include crucial nonobvious properties, have innate potential, privilege causal features, can be explained causally, and are real. | |
From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Intro') | |
A reaction: This is Gelman's helpful summary of the findings of research on childhood essentialising, and says the case for this phenomenon is 'compelling'. |