display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 6984 | Smooth reductions preserve high-level laws in the lower level [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: In a 'smooth' reduction the laws of the reduced theory (thermodynamics of gases) are pretty much preserved in (and isomorphic with) the corresponding laws in the reducing theory (molecular or kinetic theory of gases). | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Are the 'laws' of weather (e.g. linking humidity, temperature and pressure to rainfall) preserved at the level of physics? One might say that they are not preserved, but they are not lost either (they just fade away). Contradictions would be worrying. |
| 21684 | Atomic facts may be inferrable from others, but never from non-atomic facts [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps one atomic fact may sometimes be capable of being inferred from another, though I do not believe this to be the case; but in any case it cannot be inferred from premises no one of which is an atomic fact. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], p.48) | |
| A reaction: I prefer Russell's caution to Wittgenstein's dogmatism. I presume utterly simple facts give you nothing to work with. Hegel thought that you could infer new concepts from given concepts. |
| 22316 | A positive and negative fact have the same constituents; their difference is primitive [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It must not be supposed that a negative fact contains a constituent corresponding to the word 'not'. It contains no more constituents than a positive fact of the correlative positive form. The differenece between the two forms is ultimate and irreducible. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], VIII.279), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 41 'Neg' | |
| A reaction: ['Harvard Lectures'] The audience disliked this. How does one fact exclude the other fact? Potter asks whether absence is a fact, and whether an absence can be a truthmaker. |
| 6978 | Baldness is just hair distribution, but the former is indeterminate, unlike the latter [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Baldness is a much more indeterminate matter than is hair distribution, nevetheless baldness is nothing over and above hair distribution. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], p.22) | |
| A reaction: This seems to support Williamson's view that there is no vagueness in nature, and that 'vague' is an entirely epistemological concept. |