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4 ideas
| 15965 | Boyle attacked a contemporary belief that powers were occult things [Boyle, by Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: Boyle attacks an idea of powers, held by some modern schoolmen and chemists, that makes powers occult. | |
| From: report of Robert Boyle (The Origin of Forms and Qualities [1666]) by Peter Alexander - Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles 03.3 | |
| A reaction: [This involves Boyle's famous example of a key having the power to turn a lock] On p.86 Alexander says the 'occult' belief is in affinities, antipathies, attractions and repulsions. How did Boyle explain magnetism? |
| 14296 | Dispositions are physical states of mechanism; when known, these replace the old disposition term [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Each disposition, in my view, is a physical state or mechanism. ...In some cases nowadays we understand the physical details and set them forth explicitly in terms of the arrangement and interaction of small bodies. This replaces the old disposition. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Roots of Reference [1990], p.11), quoted by Stephen Mumford - Dispositions 01.3 | |
| A reaction: A challenge to the dispositions and powers view of nature, one which rests on the 'categorical' structural properties, rather than the 'hypothetical' dispositions. But can we define a mechanism without mentioning its powers? |
| 16735 | In the 17th century, 'disposition' usually just means the spatial arrangement of parts [Boyle, by Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: In Locke and Boyle, 'disposition' and its various cognates are standardly used to refer to the corpuscular structure of a body - the spatial arrangement of its parts - without reflecting any commitment to a dispositional property. | |
| From: report of Robert Boyle (The Origin of Forms and Qualities [1666]) by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 23.2 | |
| A reaction: Here as a warning against enthusiasts for dispositional properties misreadigmg 17th century texts to their supposed advantage. Pasnau says none of them believe in dispositional properties or real powers. |
| 15453 | The main rivals to universals are resemblance or natural-class nominalism, or sparse trope theory [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: The leading rivals to a theory of universals are resemblance or natural-class nominalism, or sparse trope theory. | |
| From: David Lewis (Comment on Armstrong and Forrest [1986], p.110) | |
| A reaction: If that is the complete menu, I choose resemblance nominalism. All discussion of properties in terms of classes is wildly misguided (because properties come first). Why not 'natural' tropes? |