10 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 23900 | Chance is compatible with necessity, and the two occur together [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Chance is not the contrary of necessity; it is not incompatible with necessity. On the contrary, it never appears except at the same time as necessity. | |
| From: Simone Weil (The Scientific Image [1941], p.175) | |
| A reaction: She illustrates it with the six terminating results of a die throw, and the innumerabe ways the throw can occur. This thought strikes me as relevant to discussions of free will. …But I'm not sure I fully understand it. |
| 9100 | Our intellect only assents to what we believe to be true [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: Our intellect does not assent to anything unless we believe it to be true. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Prologue to Ordinatio [1320], Q 1 N sqq) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a much more accurate and commonsense view of belief than that of Hume, who simply views it phenomenologically. ...But then the remark appears to be circular. Belief requires a belief that it is true. Hm. |
| 9101 | Abstractive cognition knows universals abstracted from many singulars [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: Abstractive cognition (in one sense) relates to something abstracted from many singulars; and in this sense abstractive cognition is nothing else but cognition of a universal which can be abstracted from many things. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Prologue to Ordinatio [1320], Q 1 N sqq) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being correct common sense, even though it has become deeply unfashionable since Frege. We may not be able to see quite how the mind manages to see universals in a bunch of objects, but there is no better story. |
| 23899 | The secret of art is that beauty is a just blend of unity and its opposite [Weil] |
| Full Idea: A just blend of unity and that which opposes it is the condition of the beautiful, and it is the secret of art. | |
| From: Simone Weil (The Scientific Image [1941], p.169) | |
| A reaction: Rather sweeping, but the observation strikes me as fairly accurate. It seems to work for most novels, paintings and music, though more recent art may provide counterexamples. |