12 ideas
| 9406 | A class is natural when everybody can spot further members of it [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: To say that a class is natural is to say that when some of its members are shown to people they pick out others without hesitation and in agreement. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: He concedes a number of problems with his view, but I admire his attempt to at least begin to distinguish the natural (real!) classes from the ersatz ones. A mention of causal powers would greatly improve his story. |
| 12394 | If the result is bad, we change the rule; if we like the rule, we reject the result [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.64) | |
| A reaction: This is clearly in tune with Quine's assertion that logic is potentially revisable, and the idea is pragmatist in spirit. It is hard to deny that intuitions about what makes a good argument control our logic. I say the world controls our intuitions. |
| 10670 | A 'singulariser' converts a plural like 'number of' to a syntactically neutral form [Cartwright,H, by Hossack] |
| Full Idea: Helen Cartwright calls 'a number of' a 'singulariser', an expression whose linguistic function is to convert to a syntactically neutral form an expression whose semantic value remains plural. It is a great convenience grammatically. | |
| From: report of Helen Cartwright (On Plural Reference and Set Theory [1993]) by Keith Hossack - Plurals and Complexes 2 | |
| A reaction: Compare Hofweber's Idea 10004, suggesting it is a crucial psychological convenience for reasoning, as well as a 'grammatical' convenience. |
| 15730 | Extreme nominalists say all classification is arbitrary convention [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: Pure, extreme nominalism sees all classification as the product of arbitrary convention. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure what the word 'arbitrary' is doing there. Nominalists are not daft, and if they can classify any way they like, they are not likely to choose an 'arbitrary' system. Pragmatism tells the right story here. |
| 15728 | The naturalness of a class depends as much on the observers as on the objects [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: The naturalness of a class depends as essentially on the nature of the observers who classify as it does on the nature of the objects that they classify. ...It depends on our perceptual apparatus, and on our relatively mutable needs and interests. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: This seems to translate 'natural' as 'natural for us', which is not much use to scientists, who spend quite a lot of effort combating folk wisdom. Do desirable sports cars constitute a natural class? |
| 9407 | Properties imply natural classes which can be picked out by everybody [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: To say there are properties is to say there are natural classes, classes introduction to some of whose members enables people to pick out others without hesitation and in agreement. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: Aristotle would like this approach, but it doesn't find many friends among modern logician/philosophers. We should go on to ask why people agree on these things. Causal powers will then come into it. |
| 14292 | Dispositions seem more ethereal than behaviour; a non-occult account of them would be nice [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Dispositions of a thing are as important to us as overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. So we are moved to enquire whether we can bring them down to earth, and explain disposition terms without reference to occult powers. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], II.3) | |
| A reaction: Mumford quotes this at the start of his book on dispositions, as his agenda. I suspect that the 'occult' aspect crept in because dispositions were based on powers, and the dominant view was that these were the immediate work of God. |
| 15729 | Uninstantiated properties must be defined using the instantiated ones [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: Properties that have no concrete instances must be defined in terms of those that have. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: I wonder what the dodo used to smell like? |
| 8520 | An individual is a union of a group of qualities and a position [Quinton, by Campbell,K] |
| Full Idea: Quinton proposes that an individual is a union of a group of qualities and a position. | |
| From: report of Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], Pt I) by Keith Campbell - The Metaphysic of Abstract Particulars §5 | |
| A reaction: This seems the obvious defence of a bundle account of objects against the charge that indiscernibles would have to be identical. It introduces, however, 'positions' into the ontology, but maybe that price must be paid. Materialism needs space. |
| 18749 | Goodman argued that the confirmation relation can never be formalised [Goodman, by Horsten/Pettigrew] |
| Full Idea: Goodman constructed arguments that purported to show that a satisfactory syntactic analysis of the confirmation relation can never be found. In response, philosophers of science tried to model it in probabilistic terms. | |
| From: report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R - Mathematical Methods in Philosophy 4 | |
| A reaction: I take this idea to say that Bayesianism was developed in response to the grue problem. This is an interesting light on 'grue', which never bothered me much. The point is it scuppered formal attempts to model induction. |
| 17646 | Goodman showed that every sound inductive argument has an unsound one of the same form [Goodman, by Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Goodman has shown that no purely formal criterion can distinguish arguments that are intuitively sound inductive arguments for unsound ones: for every sound one there is an unsound one of the same form. The predicates in the argument make the difference. | |
| From: report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Hilary Putnam - Why there isn't a ready-made world 'Causation' | |
| A reaction: This is to swallow grue whole. I think a bit more chewing is called for. By this date Putnam strikes me as a crazy relativist who has lost his grip on the world. Note the word 'formal' - but Putnam seems to think the argument is important. |
| 4794 | We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Rather than a sentence being used for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.21), quoted by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §5.4 | |
| A reaction: This smacks of dodgy pragmatism, and sounds deeply wrong. The perception of a law has to be prior to making the prediction. Why do we make the prediction, if we haven't spotted a law. Goodman is mesmerised by language instead of reality. |