Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Through the Looking Glass', 'Anthropological Studies of Classification' and 'Philosophy of Mind'

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5 ideas

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / e. Being and nothing
I only wish I had such eyes as to see Nobody! It's as much as I can do to see real people. [Carroll,L]
     Full Idea: "I see nobody on the road," said Alice. - "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked. ..."To be able to see Nobody! ...Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people."
     From: Lewis Carroll (C.Dodgson) (Through the Looking Glass [1886], p.189), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7
     A reaction: [Moore quotes this, inevitably, in a chapter on Hegel] This may be a better candidate for the birth of philosophy of language than Frege's Groundwork.
7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 3. Levels of Reality
A higher level is 'supervenient' if it is determined by lower levels, but has its own natural laws [Heil]
     Full Idea: 'Supervenience' means lower-level objects and properties suffice for the higher level ones, but the higher level is distinct from its ground, which is reflected in the higher level being governed by distinct laws of nature.
     From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.6)
     A reaction: A nice summary of Davidson's idea. It feels wrong to me. Can I create some 'new laws of nature' by combining things novelly in a laboratory so that a supervenient state emerges. Sounds silly to me. Must we invoke God to achieve this?
7. Existence / E. Categories / 1. Categories
Monothetic categories have fixed defining features, and polythetic categories do not [Ellen]
     Full Idea: Many categories are 'monothetic' (the defining set of features is always unique), and others are 'polythetic' (single features being neither essential to group membership nor sufficient to allocate an item to a group).
     From: Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.33)
     A reaction: This seems a rather important distinction which hasn't made its way into philosophy, where there is a horrible tendency to oversimplify, with the dream of a neat and unified picture. But see Goodman's 'Imperfect Community' problem (Idea 7957).
In symbolic classification, the categories are linked to rules [Ellen]
     Full Idea: Symbolic classification occurs when we use some things as a means of saying something about other things. ..They enhance the significance of some categories, so that categories imply rules and rules imply categories.
     From: Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.35)
     A reaction: I'm afraid the anthropologists seem to have more of interest to say about categories than philosophers do. Though maybe we couldn't do anthropology if philosophers had made us more self-conscious about categories. Teamwork!
7. Existence / E. Categories / 5. Category Anti-Realism
Continuous experience sometimes needs imposition of boundaries to create categories [Ellen]
     Full Idea: Because parts of our experience of the world are complexly continuous, it is occasionally necessary to impose boundaries to produce categories at all.
     From: Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.33)
     A reaction: I like it. Ellen says that people tend to universally cut nature somewhere around the joints, but we can't cope with large things, so the sea tends to be labelled in sections, even though most of the world's seas are continuous.