Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Events and Their Names', 'On What There Is' and 'Aboutness'

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2 ideas

9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 1. Physical Objects
Treating scattered sensations as single objects simplifies our understanding of experience [Quine]
     Full Idea: By bringing together scattered sense events and treating them as perceptions of one object, we reduce the complexity of our stream of experience to a manageable conceptual simplicity.
     From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.17)
     A reaction: If, however, our consideration of tricky cases, such as vague objects, or fast-changing objects, or spatially coinciding objects made it all seem too complex, then Quine's argument would be grounds for abandoning objects. See Merricks.
9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 8. Parts of Objects / a. Parts of objects
Parthood lacks the restriction of kind which most relations have [Yablo]
     Full Idea: Most relations obtain only between certain kinds of thing. To learn that x is a part of y, however, tells you nothing about x and y taken individually.
     From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2)
     A reaction: Too sweeping. To be a part of crowd you have to be a person. To be part of the sea you have to be wet. It might depend on whether composition is unrestricted.