display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
21982 | 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. |
8960 | Internal questions about abstractions are trivial, and external ones deeply problematic [Carnap, by Szabó] |
Full Idea: Carnap's verdict is that questions regarding the existence of abstracta tend to be trivial when taken as internal and deeply problematic when taken as external. | |
From: report of Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950]) by Zoltán Gendler Szabó - Nominalism 6 | |
A reaction: If the internal aspect of the problem is 'trivial', this would put Carnap in league with fictionalists, who are only committed to entities while playing the current game. What is the status of the theory? Carnap wanted flowers to bloom. |
13933 | Existence questions are 'internal' (within a framework) or 'external' (concerning the whole framework) [Carnap] |
Full Idea: We distinguish two kinds of existence questions: first, entities of a new kind within the framework; we call them 'internal questions'. Second, 'external questions', concerning the existence or reality of the system of entities as a whole. | |
From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) | |
A reaction: This nicely disposes of many ontological difficulties, but at the price of labelling most external questions as meaningless, so that the internal answers have very little commitment, and the external (big) questions are now banned. Not for me. |
13934 | To be 'real' is to be an element of a system, so we cannot ask reality questions about the system itself [Carnap] |
Full Idea: To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself. | |
From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) |
13938 | A linguistic framework involves commitment to entities, so only commitment to the framework is in question [Carnap] |
Full Idea: If someone accepts a framework for a kind of entities, then he must admit the entities as possible designata. Thus the question of the admissibility of entities is reduced to the question of the acceptability of the linguistic framework for the entities. | |
From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 4) | |
A reaction: Despite the many differences of opinion between Quine and Carnap, this appears to be a straight endorsement by Carnap of the Quinean conception of ontological commitment. |