68 ideas
| 6891 | Quine's naturalistic and empirical view is based entirely on first-order logic and set theory [Quine, by Mautner] |
| Full Idea: Quine has aimed at a naturalistic and empirical world-view, and claims that first-order logic and set theory provide a framework sufficient for the articulation of our knowledge of the world. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960]) by Thomas Mautner - Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy p.465 | |
| A reaction: Consequently he is fairly eliminativist about meaning and mental states, and does without universals in his metaphysics. An impressively puritanical enterprise, taking Ockham's Razor to the limit, but I find it hard to swallow. |
| 6310 | Enquiry needs a conceptual scheme, so we should retain the best available [Quine] |
| Full Idea: No enquiry is possible without some conceptual scheme, so we may as well retain and use the best one we know. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §01) | |
| A reaction: This remark leads to Davidson's splendid paper 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme'. Quine's remark raises the question of how we know which conceptual scheme is 'best'. |
| 2463 | A standard naturalist view is realist, externalist, and computationalist, and believes in rationality [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be an emerging naturalist consensus that is Realist in ontology and epistemology, externalist in semantics, and computationalist in cognitive psychology, which nicely allows us to retain our understanding of ourselves as rational creatures. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2435 | Psychology has to include the idea that mental processes are typically truth-preserving [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A psychology that can't make sense of such facts as that mental processes are typically truth-preserving is ipso facto dead in the water. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) |
| 1564 | True and false statements can use exactly the same words [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: There is no difference between a true statement and a false statement, because they can use exactly the same words. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §4) |
| 2442 | Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §3) |
| 12798 | Plurals can in principle be paraphrased away altogether [Quine] |
| Full Idea: By certain standardizations of phrasing the contexts that call for plurals can in principle be paraphrased away altogether. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §19) | |
| A reaction: Laycock, who quotes this, calls it 'unduly optimistic', but I presume that it was the standard view of plural reference until Boolos raised the subject. |
| 17905 | Any progression will do nicely for numbers; they can all then be used to measure multiplicity [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The condition on an explication of number can be put succinctly: any progression will do nicely. Russell once held that one must also be able to measure multiplicity, but this was a mistake; any progression can be fitted to that further condition. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §54) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This is the strongest possible statement that the numbers are the ordinals, and the Peano Axioms will define them. The Fregean view that cardinality comes first is redundant. |
| 9556 | Nearly all of mathematics has to quantify over abstract objects [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Mathematics, except for very trivial portions such as very elementary arithmetic, is irredeemably committed to quantification over abstract objects. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §55) | |
| A reaction: Personally I would say that we are no more committed to such things than actors in 'The Tempest' are committed to the existence of Prospero and Caliban (which is quite a strong commitment, actually). |
| 16462 | The quest for ultimate categories is the quest for a simple clear pattern of notation [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The quest of a simplest, clearest overall pattern of canonical notation is not to be distinguished from a quest of ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §33) | |
| A reaction: I won't disagree, as long as we recognise that reality calls the shots, not the notation, and that even animals must have some sort of system of categories, achieved without 'notation'. |
| 15723 | Either dispositions rest on structures, or we keep saying 'all things being equal' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The further a disposition is from those that can confidently be pinned on molecular structure or something comparably firm, the more our talk of it tends to depend on a vague factor of 'caeteris paribus' | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) | |
| A reaction: I approve of this. It is precisely the point of scientific essentialism, I take it. We are faced with innumerable uncertain dispositions, but once the underlying mechanisms are known, their role in nature becomes fairly precise. |
| 15490 | Explain unmanifested dispositions as structural similarities to objects which have manifested them [Quine, by Martin,CB] |
| Full Idea: Quine claims that an unmanifested disposition is explicable in terms of an object having a structure similar to a structure of an object that has manifested the supposed disposition. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) by C.B. Martin - The Mind in Nature 07.4 | |
| A reaction: This is probably the best account available for the firm empiricist who denies modal features in the actual world. In other words, a disposition is the result of an induction, not a conditional statement. |
| 8504 | Quine aims to deal with properties by the use of eternal open sentences, or classes [Quine, by Devitt] |
| Full Idea: Quine is not an 'ostrich', because his strategy for dealing with property sentences is clear enough: all talk of attributes is to be dispensed with in favour of talk of eternal open sentences or talk of classes. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §43) by Michael Devitt - 'Ostrich Nominalism' or 'Mirage Realism'? p.100 | |
| A reaction: [See p.209 'Word and Object'] The proposal seems to be that a property like being-human (a category) would be dealt with by classes, and qualitative properties would be dealt with simply as predicates. I like the split, and the first half, not the second. |
| 8464 | Physical objects in space-time are just events or processes, no matter how disconnected [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Physical objects, conceived four-dimensionally in space-time, are not to be distinguished from events or concrete processes. Each comprises simply the content, however heterogeneous, of a portion of space-time, however disconnected and gerrymandered. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §36) | |
| A reaction: I very much like the suggestion that objects should be thought of as 'processes', but I dislike the idea that they can be gerrymandered. This is a refusal to cut nature at the joints (Idea 7953), which I find very counterintuitive. |
| 7924 | The notion of a physical object is by far the most useful one for science [Quine] |
| Full Idea: In a contest of sheer systematic utility to science, the notion of physical object still leads the field. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §48) | |
| A reaction: A delightful circumlocution from someone who seems terrified to assert that there just are objects. Not that I object to Quine's caution. It would be disturbing if his researches had revealed that we could manage without objects. But compare Idea 6124. |
| 8482 | Mathematicians must be rational but not two-legged, cyclists the opposite. So a mathematical cyclist? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Mathematicians are necessarily rational, and not necessarily two-legged; cyclists are the opposite. But what of an individual who counts among his eccentricities both mathematics and cycling? | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §41) | |
| A reaction: Quine's view is that the necessity (and essence) depends on how this eccentric is described. If he loses a leg, he must give up cycling; if he loses his rationality, he must give up the mathematics. Quine is wrong. |
| 12136 | Cyclist are not actually essentially two-legged [Brody on Quine] |
| Full Idea: Cyclists are not essentially two-legged (a one-legged cyclist exists, but can't cycle any more), and mathematicians are not essentially rational (as they can lose rationality and continue to exist, though unable to do mathematics). | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §41.5) by Baruch Brody - Identity and Essence 5.1 | |
| A reaction: Was Quine thinking of the nominal essence of this person - that 'cyclists' necessarily cylce, and 'mathematicians' necessarily do some maths? It is as bad to confuse 'necessary' with 'essential' as to confuse 'use' with 'mention'. |
| 17594 | We can paraphrase 'x=y' as a sequence of the form 'if Fx then Fy' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: For general terms write 'if Fx then Fy' and vice versa, and 'if Fxz then Fyz'..... The conjunction of all these is coextensive with 'x=y' if any formula constructible from the vocabulary is; and we can adopt that conjunction as our version of identity. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §47) | |
| A reaction: [first half compressed] The main rival views of equality are this and Wiggins (1980:199). Quine concedes that his account implies a modest version of the identity of indiscernibles. Wiggins says identity statements need a sortal. |
| 15725 | Normal conditionals have a truth-value gap when the antecedent is false. [Quine] |
| Full Idea: In its unquantified form 'If p then q' the indicative conditional is perhaps best represented as suffering a truth-value gap whenever its antecedent is false. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) | |
| A reaction: That is, the clear truth-functional reading of the conditional (favoured by Lewis, his pupil) is unacceptable. Quine favours the Edgington line, that we are only interested in situations where the antecedent might be true. |
| 15722 | Conditionals are pointless if the truth value of the antecedent is known [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The ordinary conditional loses its point when the truth value of its antecedent is known. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) | |
| A reaction: A beautifully simple point that reveals a lot about what conditionals are. |
| 15719 | We feign belief in counterfactual antecedents, and assess how convincing the consequent is [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The subjunctive conditional depends, like indirect quotation and more so, on a dramatic projection: we feign belief in the antececent and see how convincing we then find the consequent. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) | |
| A reaction: This seems accurate. It means that we are only interested in when the antecedent is true, and when it is false is irrelevant. |
| 15721 | Counterfactuals are plausible when dispositions are involved, as they imply structures [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The subjunctive conditional is seen at its most respectable in the disposition terms. ...The reason is that they are conceived as built-in, enduring structural traits. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) | |
| A reaction: Surprisingly, this is very sympathetic to a metaphysical view that seems a long way from Quine, since dispositions seem to invite commitment to modal features of reality. But the structural traits are not, of course, modal, in any way! |
| 15720 | What stays the same in assessing a counterfactual antecedent depends on context [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The traits to suppose preserved in a counterfactual depend on sympathy for the fabulist's purpose. Compare 'If Caesar were in command, he would use the atom bomb', and 'If Caesar were in command, he would use catapults'. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be an important example for the Lewis approach, since you are asked to consider the 'nearest' possible world, but that will depend on context. |
| 15724 | Counterfactuals have no place in a strict account of science [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The subjunctive conditional has no place in an austere canonical notation for science - but that ban is less restrictive than would at first appear. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §46) | |
| A reaction: Idea 15723 shows what he has in mind - that what science aims for is accounts of dispositional mechanisms, which then leave talk of other possible worlds (in Lewis style) as unnecessary. I may be with Quine one this one. |
| 2462 | Control of belief is possible if you know truth conditions and what causes beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Premeditated cognitive management is possible if knowing the contents of one's thoughts would tell you what would make them true and what would cause you to have them. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I love the idea of 'cognitive management'. Since belief is fairly involuntary, I subject myself to the newspapers, books, TV and conversation which will create the style of beliefs to which I aspire. Why? |
| 1561 | Anything can be acceptable in some circumstances and unacceptable in others [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: Anything can be acceptable under the right circumstances, and unacceptable under the wrong circumstances. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §2) |
| 1559 | Thracians think tattooing adds to a girl's beauty, but elsewhere it is a punishment [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: Thracians think that tattooing enhances a girl's beauty, whereas for everyone else tattooing is a punishment for a crime. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §2) |
| 1560 | Lydians prostitute their daughters to raise a dowery, but no Greek would marry such a girl [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: The Lydians find it acceptable for their daughters to work as prostitutes to raise money for getting married, but no one in Greece would be prepared to marry such a girl. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §2) |
| 2461 | An experiment is a deliberate version of what informal thinking does all the time [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Experimentation is an occasional and more or less self-conscious exercise in what informal thinking does all the time without thinking about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2454 | We can deliberately cause ourselves to have true thoughts - hence the value of experiments [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A creature that knows what makes its thoughts true and what would cause it to have them, could therefore cause itself to have true thoughts. …This would explain why experimentation is so close to the heart of our cognitive style. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2455 | Interrogation and experiment submit us to having beliefs caused [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can put yourself into a situation where you may be caused to believe that P. Putting a question to someone who is in the know is one species of this behaviour, and putting a question to Nature (an experiment) is another. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2460 | Participation in an experiment requires agreement about what the outcome will mean [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: To be in the audience for an experiment you have to believe what the experimenter believes about what the outcome would mean, but not necessarily what the outcome will be. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 4630 | Two theories can be internally consistent and match all the facts, yet be inconsistent with one another [Quine, by Baggini /Fosl] |
| Full Idea: Duhem and Quine have maintained that it may be possible to develop two or more theories that are 1) internally consistent, 2) inconsistent with one another, and 3) perfectly consistent with all the data we can muster. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960]) by J Baggini / PS Fosl - The Philosopher's Toolkit §1.06 | |
| A reaction: Obviously this may be a contingent truth about our theories, but why not presume that this is because we are unable to collect the crucial data (e.g. about prehistoric biology), rather than denigrate the whole concept of a theory, and undermine science? |
| 2458 | Theories are links in the causal chain between the environment and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Theories function as links in the causal chains that run from environmental outcomes to the beliefs that they cause the inquirer to have. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2443 | I say psychology is intentional, semantics is informational, and thinking is computation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I hold that psychological laws are intentional, that semantics is purely informational, and that thinking is computation (and that it is possible to hold all of these assumptions at once). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: When he puts it baldly like that, it doesn't sound terribly persuasive. Thinking is 'computation'? Raw experience is irrelevant? What is it 'like' to spot an interesting connection between two propositions or concepts? It's not like adding 7 and 5. |
| 2453 | We are probably the only creatures that can think about our own thoughts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I think it is likely that we are the only creatures that can think about the contents of our thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a major idea. If you ask me the traditional question - what is the essential difference between us and other animals? - this is my answer (not language, or reason). We are the metathinkers. |
| 2445 | Semantics v syntax is the interaction problem all over again [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The question how mental representations could be both semantic, like propositions, and causal, like rocks, trees, and neural firings, is arguably just the interaction problem all over again. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Interesting way of presenting the problem. If you seem to be confronting the interaction problem, you have probably drifted into a bogus dualist way of thinking. Retreat, and reformulate you questions and conceptual apparatus, till the question vanishes. |
| 2446 | Cartesians consider interaction to be a miracle [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The Cartesian view is that the interaction problem does arise, but is unsolvable because interaction is miraculous. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: A rather unsympathetic statement of the position. Cartesians might think that God could explain to us how interaction works. Cartesians are not mysterians, I think, but they see no sign of any theory of interaction. |
| 2464 | Type physicalism equates mental kinds with physical kinds [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Type physicalism is, roughly, the doctrine that psychological kinds are identical to neurological kinds. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App A n.1) | |
| A reaction: This gets my general support, leaving open the nature of 'kinds'. Presumably the identity is strict, as in 'Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus'. It seems unlikely that if you and I think the 'same' thought, that we have strictly identical brain states. |
| 3131 | Quine expresses the instrumental version of eliminativism [Quine, by Rey] |
| Full Idea: Quine expresses the instrumental version of eliminativism. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960]) by Georges Rey - Contemporary Philosophy of Mind Int.3 |
| 2447 | Hume has no theory of the co-ordination of the mind [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: What Hume didn't see was that the causal and representational properties of mental symbols have somehow to be coordinated if the coherence of mental life is to be accounted for. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly the idea that it all somehow becomes magic at the point where the brain represents the world is incoherent - but it is a bit magical. How can the whole of my garden be in my brain? Weird. |
| 2440 | Propositional attitudes are propositions presented in a certain way [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Propositional attitudes are really three-place relations, between a creature, a proposition, and a mode of presentation (which are sentences of Mentalese). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'really'! Why do we need a creature? Isn't 'hoping it will rain' a propositional attitude which some creature may or may not have? Fodor wants it to be physical, but it's abstract? |
| 2450 | Rationality has mental properties - autonomy, productivity, experiment [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mentalism isn't gratuitous; you need it to explain rationality. Mental causation buys you behaviours that are unlike reflexes in at least three ways: they're autonomous, they're productive, and they're experimental. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: He makes his three ways sound all-or-nothing, which is (I believe) the single biggest danger when thinking about the mind. "Either you are conscious, or you are not..." |
| 2437 | XYZ (Twin Earth 'water') is an impossibility [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There isn't any XYZ, and there couldn't be any, and so we don't have to worry about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: Jadeite and Nephrite are real enough, which are virtually indistinguishable variants of jade. You just need Twin Jewellers instead of Twin Earths. We could build them, and employ twins to work there. |
| 2441 | Truth conditions require a broad concept of content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We need the idea of broad content to make sense of the fact that thoughts have the truth-conditions that they do. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be (as Dummett points out) a potential circularity here, as you can hardly know the truth-conditions of something if you don't already know its content. |
| 3114 | Concepts aren't linked to stuff; they are what is caused by stuff [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the words of 'Swamp Man' (spontaneously created, with concepts) are about XYZ on Twin Earth, it is not because he's causally connected to the stuff, but because XYZ would cause his 'water' tokens (in the absence of H2O). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App B) | |
| A reaction: The sight of the Eiffel tower causes my 'France' tokens, so is my word "France" about the Eiffel Tower? What would cause my 'nothing' tokens? |
| 2452 | Knowing the cause of a thought is almost knowing its content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you know quite a lot about what would cause you to have it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where this fits into the great jigsaw of the mind, but it strikes me as an acute and important observation. The truth of a thought is not essential to make you have it. Ask Othello. |
| 2432 | Is content basically information, fixed externally? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I assume intentional content reduces (in some way) to information. …The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not the way that it is related to other thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2) | |
| A reaction: Does this make Fodor a 'weak' functionalist? The 'strong' version would say a thought is merely a location in a flow diagram, but Fodor's 'mentalism' includes a further 'content' in each diagram box. |
| 2438 | In the information view, concepts are potentials for making distinctions [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Semantics, according to the informational view, is mostly about counterfactuals; what counts for the identity of my concepts is not what I do distinguish but what I could distinguish if I cared to (even using instruments and experts). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: We all differ in our discriminations (and awareness of expertise), so our concepts would differ, which is bad news for communication (see Idea 223). The view has some plausibility, though. |
| 2439 | Semantic externalism says the concept 'elm' needs no further beliefs or inferences [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the essence of semantic externalism that there is nothing that you have to believe, there are no inferences that you have to accept, to have the concept 'elm'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: [REMINDER: broad content is filed in 18.C.7, under 'Thought' rather than under language. That is because I am a philospher of thought, rather than of language. |
| 2457 | If meaning is information, that establishes the causal link between the state of the world and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the causal connection between the state of the world and the contents of beliefs that the reduction of meaning to information is designed to insure. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear why characterising the contents of a belief in terms of its information has to amount to a 'reduction'. A cup of tea isn't reduced to tea. Connections imply duality. |
| 2451 | To know the content of a thought is to know what would make it true [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you thereby know what would make the thought true. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: The truthmaker might by physically impossible, and careful thought might show it to be contradictory - but that wouldn't destroy the meaning. |
| 2433 | For holists no two thoughts are ever quite the same, which destroys faith in meaning [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If what you are thinking depends on all of what you believe, then nobody ever thinks the same thing twice. …That is why so many semantic holists (Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Churchland, probably Wittgenstein) end up being semantic eliminativists. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: If linguistic holism is nonsense, this is easily settled. What I say about breakfast is not changed by reading some Gibbon yesterday. |
| 2436 | It is claimed that reference doesn't fix sense (Jocasta), and sense doesn't fix reference (Twin Earth) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that Frege cases [knowing Jocasta but not mother] show that reference doesn't determine sense, and Twin cases [knowing water but not H2O] show that sense doesn't determine reference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: How about 'references don't contain much information', and 'descriptions may not fix what they are referring to'? Simple really. |
| 2434 | Broad semantics holds that the basic semantic properties are truth and denotation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Broad semantic theories generally hold that the basic semantic properties of thoughts are truth and denotation. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: I think truth and denotation are the basic semantic properties, but I am dubious about whole-hearted broad semantic theories, so I seem to have gone horribly wrong somewhere. |
| 2459 | Externalist semantics are necessary to connect the contents of beliefs with how the world is [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You need an externalist semantics to explain why the contents of beliefs should have anything to do with how the world is. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Since externalist semantics only emerged in the 1970s, that implies that no previous theory had any notion that language had some connection to how the world is. Eh? |
| 3988 | Indeterminacy of translation also implies indeterminacy in interpreting people's mental states [Dennett on Quine] |
| Full Idea: Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation carries all the way in, as the thesis of the indeterminacy of radical interpretation of mental states and processes. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960]) by Daniel C. Dennett - Daniel Dennett on himself p.239 | |
| A reaction: Strong scepticism seems wrong here. Davidson's account of charity in interpretation, and the role of truth, seems closer. |
| 6311 | The firmer the links between sentences and stimuli, the less translations can diverge [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The firmer the direct links of a sentence with non-verbal stimulation, the less drastically its translations can diverge from one another from manual to manual. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §07) | |
| A reaction: This implies (plausibly) that talk about farming will have fairly determinate translations into foreign languages, but talk of philosophy will not. An interesting case is logic, where we might expect tight translation with little non-verbal stimulation. |
| 6312 | We can never precisely pin down how to translate the native word 'Gavagai' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: There is no evident criterion whereby to strip extraneous effects away and leave just the meaning of 'Gavagai' properly so-called - whatever meaning properly so-called may be. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §09) | |
| A reaction: Quine's famous assertion that translation is ultimately 'indeterminate'. Huge doubts about meaning and language and truth follow from his claim. Personally I think it is rubbish. People become fluent in very foreign languages, and don't have breakdowns. |
| 6313 | Stimulus synonymy of 'Gavagai' and 'Rabbit' does not even guarantee they are coextensive [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Stimulus synonymy of the occasion sentences 'Gavagai' and 'Rabbit' does not even guarantee that 'gavagai' and 'rabbit' are coextensive terms, terms true of the same things. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §12) | |
| A reaction: Since this scepticism eventually seems to result in the reader no longer knowing what they mean themselves by the word 'rabbit', I doubt Quine's claim. Problems after hearing one word of a foreign language disappear after years of residence. |
| 6317 | Dispositions to speech behaviour, and actual speech, are never enough to fix any one translation [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Rival systems of analytical hypotheses can fit the totality of speech behaviour to perfection, and can fit the totality of dispositions to speech behaviour as well, and still specify mutually incompatible translations of countless sentences. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §15) | |
| A reaction: This is Quine's final assertion of indeterminacy, having explored charity, bilingual speakers etc. It seems to me that he is a victim of his underlying anti-realism, which won't allow nature to dictate ways of cutting up the world. |
| 6314 | Weird translations are always possible, but they improve if we impose our own logic on them [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Wanton translation can make natives sound as queer as one pleases; better translation imposes our logic upon them. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §13) | |
| A reaction: This begins to point towards the principle of charity, on which Davidson is so keen, and even on doubts whether two different conceptual schemes are possible. Personally I think there is only one logic (deep down), and the natives will have it. |
| 6315 | We should be suspicious of a translation which implies that a people have very strange beliefs [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The more absurd or exotic the beliefs imputed to a people, the more suspicious we are entitled to be of the translations. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §15) | |
| A reaction: Quine is famous for his relativist and indeterminate account of translation, but he gradually works his way towards the common sense which Davidson later brought out into the open. |
| 1567 | How could someone who knows everything fail to act correctly? [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: If someone knows the nature of everything, how could he fail to be able also to act correctly in every case? | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §8) |
| 1563 | Every apparent crime can be right in certain circumstances [Anon (Diss), by PG] |
| Full Idea: It can be right, in certain circumstances, to steal, to break a solemn promise, to rob temples, and even (as Orestes did) to murder one's nearest and dearest. | |
| From: report of Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §3) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: Not sure about the last one! I suppose you can justify any hideousness if the fate of the universe depends on it. It must be better to die than the perform certain extreme deeds. |
| 1562 | It is right to lie to someone, to get them to take medicine they are reluctant to take [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: It is right to lie to your parents, in order to get them to take a good medicine they are reluctant to take. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §3) | |
| A reaction: I dread to think what the medicines were which convinced the writer of this. A rule such as this strikes me as dangerous. Justifiable in extreme cases. House on fire etc. |
| 1566 | The first priority in elections is to vote for people who support democracy [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: A lottery is not democratic, because every state contains people who are not democratic, and if the lottery chooses them they will destroy the democracy. People should elect those who are observed to favour democracy. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §7) |
| 1565 | We learn language, and we don't know who teaches us it [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: We learn language, and we don't know who teaches us it. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §6) |