display all the ideas for this combination of texts
2 ideas
6550 | Reduction requires that an object's properties consist of its constituents' properties and relations [Sellars] |
Full Idea: The 'Principle of Reducibility' says if an object is a system of objects, then every property of the object must consist in the fact that its constituents have such and such qualities and such and such relations | |
From: Wilfrid Sellars (Philosophy and Scientific Image of Man [1962], p.27), quoted by William Lycan - Consciousness | |
A reaction: This sounds to me a more promising attitude to reduction than all this talk of Ernest Nagel's 'Bridge Laws'. If we ask HOW a higher level property arises because of a lower level property, we can describe a mechanism rather than a law. |
8946 | We could make our intuitions about heaps precise with a million-valued logic [Fisher] |
Full Idea: We could construct a 1,000,000-valued logic that would allow our intuitions concerning a heap to vary exactly with the amount of sand in the heap. | |
From: Jennifer Fisher (On the Philosophy of Logic [2008]) | |
A reaction: Presumably only an infinite number of grains of sand would then produce a true heap, and even one grain would count as a bit of a heap, which must both be wrong, so I can't see this helping much. |