19 ideas
| 23548 | Indeterminacy is in conflict with classical logic [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: I now believe that the existence of indeterminacy is in conflict with classical logic. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 3) | |
| A reaction: I think that prior to this Fine had defended classical logic. Presumably the difficulty is over Bivalence. Nietzsche spotted this problem, despite not being a logician. Logic has to simplify the world. Hence philosophy is quite different from logic. |
| 23539 | Classical semantics has referents for names, extensions for predicates, and T or F for sentences [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: A precise language is often assigned a classical semantics, in which the semantic value of a name is its referent, the semantic value of a predicate is its extension (the objects of which it is true), and the value of a sentence is True or False. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 1) | |
| A reaction: Helpful to have this clear statement of how predicates are treated. This extensionalism in logic causes trouble when it creeps into philosophy, and people say that 'red' just means all the red things. No it doesn't. |
| 23544 | Local indeterminacy concerns a single object, and global indeterminacy covers a range [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Vagueness concerns 'local' indeterminacy, such as whether one man in the lineup is bald, and 'global' indeterminacy, applying to a range of cases, as when it is indeterminate how 'bald' applies to the lineup. But how do these relate? | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 1) | |
| A reaction: This puts the focus either on objects or on predicates which are vague. |
| 23540 | Conjoining two indefinites by related sentences seems to produce a contradiction [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: If 'P is red' and 'P is orange' are indefinite, then 'P is red and P is orange' seems false, because red and orange are exclusive. But if two conjoined indefinite sentences are false, that makes 'P is red and P is red' false, when it should be indefinite. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 1) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This is the problem of 'penumbral connection', where two indefinite values are still logically related, by excluding one another. Presumably 'P is red and P is of indefinite shape' can be true? Doubtful about this argument. |
| 23546 | Standardly vagueness involves borderline cases, and a higher standpoint from which they can be seen [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Standard notions of vagueness all accept borderline cases, and presuppose a higher standpoint from which a judgement of being borderline F, rather than simply being F or being not F, can be made. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 3) | |
| A reaction: He says that the concept of borderline cases is an impediment to understanding vagueness. Proposing a third group when you are struggling to separate two other groups doesn't seem helpful, come to think of it. Limbo cases. |
| 23542 | Identifying vagueness with ignorance is the common mistake of confusing symptoms with cause [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: We can see Epistemicism [vagueness as ignorance] as a common and misguided tendency to identify a cause with its symptoms. We are unsure how to characterise vagueness, and identify it with the resulting ignorance, instead of explaining it. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 1) | |
| A reaction: Love it. This echoes my repeated plea in these reactions to stop identifying features of reality with the functions which embody them or the patterns they create. We need to explain them, and must dig deeper. |
| 23541 | Supervaluation can give no answer to 'who is the last bald man' [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Under supervaluation there should always be someone who is the last bald man in the sequence, but there is always an acceptable way to make some other man the last bald man. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 1) | |
| A reaction: Fine seems to take this as a conclusive refutation of the supervaluation approach. Fine says (p.41) that supervaluation says there is a precisification for every instance. |
| 4483 | If abstract terms are sets of tropes, 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' turn out identical [Loux] |
| Full Idea: If trope theorists say abstract singular terms name sets of tropes, what is the referent of 'is a unicorn'? The only candidate is the null set (with no members), but there is just one null set, so 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' will be identical. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.86) | |
| A reaction: Not crucial, I would think, given that a unicorn is just a horse with a horn. Hume explains how we do that, combining ideas which arose from actual tropes. |
| 4481 | Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.60) | |
| A reaction: Plato's view seems to be that we don't identify universals independently. We ascend The Line, or think about the shadows in The Cave, and infer the universals from an array of particulars (by dialectic). |
| 4477 | Universals come in hierarchies of generality [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Universals come in hierarchies of generality. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.24) | |
| A reaction: If it is possible to state facts about universals, this obviously encourages a rather Platonic approach to them, as existent things with properties. But maybe the hierarchies are conventional, not natural. |
| 4482 | Austere nominalism has to take a host of things (like being red, or human) as primitive [Loux] |
| Full Idea: In return for a one-category ontology (with particulars but no universals), the austere nominalist is forced to take a whole host of things (like being red, or triangular, or human) as unanalysable or primitive. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.68) | |
| A reaction: I see that 'red' might have to be primitive, but being human can just be a collection of particulars. It is no ontologically worse to call them 'primitive' than to say they exist. |
| 4478 | Nominalism needs to account for abstract singular terms like 'circularity'. [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Nominalists have been very concerned to provide an account of the role of abstract singular terms (such as 'circularity'). | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.34) | |
| A reaction: Whether this is a big problem depends on our view of abstraction. If it only consists of selecting one property of an object and reifying it, then we can give a nominalist account of properties, and the problem is solved. |
| 4480 | Times and places are identified by objects, so cannot be used in a theory of object-identity [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Any account of the identity of material objects which turns on the identity of places and times must face the objection that the identity of places and times depends, in turn, on the identities of the objects located at them. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.56) | |
| A reaction: This may be a benign circle, in which we concede that there are two basic interdependent concepts of objects and space-time. If you want to define identity - in terms of what? |
| 23545 | We do not have an intelligible concept of a borderline case [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: We simply have no intelligible notion of local indeterminacy or of a borderline case. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 2) | |
| A reaction: He mentions cases which are near a borderline, and cases which are hard to decide, but denies that these are intrinsically borderline. If there are borderline cases between red and orange, what are the outer boundaries of the border? |
| 18383 | Plantinga says there is just this world, with possibilities expressed in propositions [Plantinga, by Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Plantinga rejects other possible worlds, but adds to our world an uncountable multitude of sets of propositions, each set a way that the world might have been, but is in fact not. (Roughly, for each Lewis world, Plantinga has such a set). | |
| From: report of Alvin Plantinga (The Nature of Necessity [1974]) by David M. Armstrong - Truth and Truthmakers 07.2 | |
| A reaction: To me it seems as ontologically extravagant to postulate unexpressed propositions as to postulate concrete possible worlds. I think the best line is that there is just the actual world, with the possibilities implied in its dispositions. |
| 11891 | Possibilities for an individual can only refer to that individual, in some possible world [Plantinga, by Mackie,P] |
| Full Idea: Plantinga says for an individual to exist with certain properties in some possible world is simply for it to be true that, had that possible world obtained, that individual would have existed with those properties. | |
| From: report of Alvin Plantinga (The Nature of Necessity [1974]) by Penelope Mackie - How Things Might Have Been 5.1 | |
| A reaction: This is intended to dissolve the problem of transworld identity, and is certainly a flat rejection of counterparts. I take the point to be that the individual is the key element in defining the possible world, so can't possibly be different. |
| 23547 | It seems absurd that there is no identity of any kind between two objects which involve survival [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Pace Parfit and others, it boggles the mind that survival could be independent of any relation of identity between the currently existing object and the objects that subsequently exist. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 3) | |
| A reaction: Yes. If the self or mind just consists of a diachronic trail of memories such that the two ends of the trail have no connection at all, that isn't the kind of survival that any of us want. I want to live my life, not a life. |
| 23543 | We identify laws with regularities because we mistakenly identify causes with their symptoms [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: There is a common tendency to identify a cause with its symptoms. Hence we are not sure how to characterise a law, and so we identify it with the regularities to which it gives rise. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 1) | |
| A reaction: A lovely clear identification of my pet hate, which is superficial accounts of things, which claim to be the last word, but actually explain nothing. |
| 20704 | A possible world contains a being of maximal greatness - which is existence in all worlds [Plantinga, by Davies,B] |
| Full Idea: Plantinga reformulates Malcolm's argument thus: 1) There is a possible world in which there exists a being with maximal greatness, 2) A being has maximal greatness in a world only if it exists in every world. | |
| From: report of Alvin Plantinga (The Nature of Necessity [1974], p.213) by Brian Davies - Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 4 'b Descartes' | |
| A reaction: This is only Plantinga's starting point, which says nothing about the nature of God, but only that this 'great' being exists in all worlds. I would like to know why it is a 'being' rather than a 'thing'. Malcolm says if it is possible it is necessary. |