Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'The Definition of Good', 'Assertion' and 'Phil of Mathematics: why nothing works'

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4 ideas

6. Mathematics / C. Sources of Mathematics / 1. Mathematical Platonism / b. Against mathematical platonism

3663	How can you contemplate Platonic entities without causal transactions with them? [Putnam]
	Full Idea: Platonism has the attendant problem of how we can succeed in thinking about and referring to entities we can have no causal transactions with.
	From: Hilary Putnam (Phil of Mathematics: why nothing works [1979], Modalism)

19. Language / F. Communication / 2. Assertion

18052	An assertion aims to add to the content of a context [Stalnaker, by Magidor]
	Full Idea: Stalnaker starts with the general thesis that the role of a successful assertion of s is to update the context by adding to it the content of s.
	From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 5.3.2
	A reaction: This is to be compared with criteria of meaningfulness, such as verificationism, and with Grice's rules of conversational implicature. Presumably if you assert what the context presupposes, you fail to assert, without being meaningless.

19. Language / F. Communication / 5. Pragmatics / b. Implicature

14718	An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter]
	Full Idea: Stalnaker's guiding idea is that in making an assertion the speaker is trying to get the audience to rule out certain possibilities. ....If all goes well, further planning will proceed on the basis of a smaller and more accurate range of possibilities.
	From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics
	A reaction: This sounds intuitively rather plausible, and is a nice original thought. This is what we pay clever chaps like Stalnaker to come up with. It seems to imply some notion of verisimilitude (qv. under 'truth'), depending on how much narrowing happens.

23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 1. Virtue Theory / c. Particularism

18671	The ground for an attitude is not a thing's 'goodness', but its concrete characteristics [Ewing]
	Full Idea: The ground for an attitude lies not in some other ethical concept, goodness, but in the concrete, factual characteristics of what we pronounce good. ...We shall not be better off if we interpolate an indefinable characteristic of goodness besides.
	From: A.C. Ewing (The Definition of Good [1948], p.172), quoted by Francesco Orsi - Value Theory 1.4
	A reaction: This is a forerunner of Scanlon's Buck-Passing theory of the source of value (in other properties). I approve of this approach. If I say 'actually this very strong cheese is really good', I'm not adding goodness to the cheese.