27 ideas
18405 | A 'teepee' argument has several mutually supporting planks to it [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: In a 'teepee' argument, a number of argumentative planks intersupport each other. No plank is sufficiently strong to establish the position, but each lends credibility to the others because there is the appearance of a unified phenomenon. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.5) | |
A reaction: To attack it, they say, you have to identify the separate planks of the argument. It is a moot point whether the teepee might be so imprecise that it is better described as 'coherence'. There is a background support, as well as the planks. |
18422 | Prioprioception focuses on your body parts, not on your self, or indexicality [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Proprioception is not focused single-mindedly on the self, but is focused on a number of objects - the component bodily parts that belong to the self. There is no obvious need for a concept of the self, or of indexicality. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 07.2) |
18425 | We can acquire self-knowledge with mirrors, not just with proprioception and introspection [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Imagine a being that learns everything about itself by watching itself in mirrors, rather than by proprioception and introspection. Surely it can get wet in a storm, even though allegedly distinctive routes of self-knowledge are not available to it? | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 09.3) | |
A reaction: [compressed] |
18421 | Proprioception is only immune from error if you are certain that it represents the agent [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: The guarantee of immunity from error in prioprioception is only as strong as the guarantee that proprioception only ever represents the proprioceiving agent. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 07.1) | |
A reaction: This is part of an interesting and sustained attack on the idea that self-knowledge is immune from error. They are thinking of science-fictiony situations where I am wired up to experience your leg movement. My experiences usually track me, that's all. |
18419 | Folk Functionalism is a Ramsification of our folk psychology [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: According to Folk Functionalism, mental states are theoretically defined by Ramsifying on our folk-psychological theory. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 06.2) |
18404 | It is assumed that indexical content is needed to represent the perspective of perception [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Because our perceptual states typically represent the world as seen from a perspective, it is sometimes thought that some distinctively indexical kind of content is needed to characterise those states. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.4) | |
A reaction: They are summarising this view precisely so that they can oppose it, and I think they are right. |
18426 | All information is objective, and purely indexical information is not much use [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Fundamentally, all information is objective information. ...[176] What we want is fully portable information, and information that co-ordinates on the world, rather than on us, is best suited for the task. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
A reaction: I agree entirely with their thesis. We just pick up information about ourselves, such as who and where we are, which is just like equivalent information about other people. It is isn't a special type of information. |
18428 | You don't remember your house interior just from an experienced viewpoint [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: When you recall the look of the inside of your house ....where things are relative to one another is what persists in memory, not where they were relative to you when seen. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
A reaction: This seems to be a very telling example, though you could postulate some system which converts perspectival input into objective information. But why bother? We seek objective information, not perspectives. |
18429 | Our beliefs and desires are not organised around ourselves, but around the world [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Our view on the world is not primarily a view from a perspective. Our beliefs and desires are not organized around us. They are instead organized around the world itself. Our view is a view from everywhere. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
A reaction: Slipping in the claim that our desires are also organised around the world is not quite as persuasive as the claim about beliefs. If you want to draw a freehand straight line, focus on the far end of it. The world will guide your hand. |
18407 | Indexicality is not significantly connected to agency [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: There are no interesting or distinctive explanatory connections between indexicality and agency. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.8) |
18427 | If some of our thought is tied to its context, it will be hard to communicate it [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: It is bad news if some of our contents are essentially tied to particular contexts. ...If information needs to be assessed relative to some ur-context, later recipients won't know what to do with it. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) |
18413 | Fregeans can't agree on what 'senses' are [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: There is little agreement among Fregeans about what senses are. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 04.5) | |
A reaction: I don't take this to be sufficient grounds for dismissing Fregean senses. When we look into the workings of the linguistic mind, there seems little prospect of clarity or agreement. |
18417 | Possible worlds accounts of content are notoriously coarse-grained [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Possible worlds accounts of content are notoriously coarse-grained. They fail to distinguish between logical or mathematical truths, ..between metaphysical equivalences, ..between coreferentials, ..and between indexicals and non-indexicals. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 05.5) | |
A reaction: [A nice summary, very compressed] |
18408 | Indexicals are just non-constant in meaning, and don't involve any special concepts [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Once the non-constant characters of expressions has been characterised, there is no further need for additional devices like 'first-person concepts' or 'demonstrative concepts'. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.7) | |
A reaction: This seems to me to be a wonderfully liberating attack on this issue. There is a kind of creepy mysticism that has been allowed to accrue around indexicals, and it's nonsense. |
18414 | Fregeans say 'I' differs in reference, so it must also differ in sense [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Fregeans tend to treat as a fundamental tenet that sense determines reference; same sense, same reference. From that it follow trivially that indexicals don't have the same sense: different uses of 'I' have different referents, so sense must differ. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 04.6) | |
A reaction: Interesting. Since it seems implausible that 'I' is profoundly different when two people use it, this seems to be a strong argument against Frege's distinction. But I rather like Frege's distinction, while being sceptical about 'I', so I'm baffled.... |
18423 | All indexicals can be expressed non-indexically [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Whatever can be expressed indexically could be expressed by non-indexical means. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 08.1) | |
A reaction: This is the best summary of the thesis of their book. Indexicality in non-essential. |
18406 | The basic Kaplan view is that there is truth-conditional content, and contextual character [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: In what we label 'Basic Kaplanianism', each of the sentences 'Smith is happy' and 'I am happy', as uttered by Smith, has two levels of meaning. The 'content' is a truth-conditional representation. The 'character' is a function from contexts to contents. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.6) | |
A reaction: They give this as a minimal and plausible account of the situation, without reading huge significance into the indexical. I'm inclined to see the situation in terms of the underlying proposition containing both ingredients. |
18411 | It is proposed that a huge range of linguistic items are context-sensitive [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: An enormous amount has been written about whether 'all', 'know', 'might', 'delicious', 'good', 'if, then', 'and', 'red', 'just', 'justified', 'probable', 'local', 'ready', and 'left-right' are context-sensitive. | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 02.3) | |
A reaction: The clearest way to approach these things is ask what the (informal) domain of quantification is for that particular context. The domain can shift in the course of a sentence. |
18420 | We deny that action involves some special class of beliefs [Cappelen/Dever] |
Full Idea: Maybe there is a class of beliefs that plays a special role in the explanation of action. We have argued against the existence of such a class (or at least any interesting such class). | |
From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 06.2) | |
A reaction: The main class which has been proposed is the one that involves indexical beliefs. I agree with this idea. |
20400 | Intentions either succeed or fail, so external evidence for them is always irrelevant [Wimsatt/Beardsley, by Davies,S] |
Full Idea: Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed that either the intention succeeded, so one does not need to look outside the work for its meaning, or the intention failed, so external evidence does not help. | |
From: report of W Wimsatt/W Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy [1946]) by Stephen Davies - The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) 5.3 | |
A reaction: Actually, the external evidence may tell you much more clearly and accurately what the intention was than the work itself does. The best example may be the title of the work, which is presumably outside the work. |
7266 | The author's intentions are irrelevant to the judgement of a work's success [Wimsatt/Beardsley] |
Full Idea: The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art. | |
From: W Wimsatt/W Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy [1946], §I) | |
A reaction: This famous proposal may have been misunderstood. Note that it is a comment about judging the work, not about understanding it. The idea allows for a work being much more successful than the author's humble intentions (e.g. Pepys). |
7267 | Poetry, unlike messages, can be successful without communicating intentions [Wimsatt/Beardsley] |
Full Idea: Poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. | |
From: W Wimsatt/W Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy [1946], §I) | |
A reaction: I am not convinced by this claim. It is plausible that a work does much more than it intends (Astaire said he danced "to make a buck"), but it is rather odd to rate very highly a work of which you have missed the point. |
7268 | The thoughts of a poem should be imputed to the dramatic speaker, and hardly at all to the poet [Wimsatt/Beardsley] |
Full Idea: We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference. | |
From: W Wimsatt/W Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy [1946], §I) | |
A reaction: Wrong. If in Browning's "My Last Duchess" (say), we only inferred the mind of the speaker (and his Duchess), and took no interest in Browning's view of things, we would miss the point. We might end up respecting the Duke, which would be daft. |
7269 | The intentional fallacy is a romantic one [Wimsatt/Beardsley] |
Full Idea: The intentional fallacy is a romantic one. | |
From: W Wimsatt/W Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy [1946], §II) | |
A reaction: Wrong. Even with those most famous of anonymous artists, the architects and carvers of medieval cathedrals, without some discernment of the purpose you won't get it. The Taj Mahal is a love letter, not a potential ice cream parlour. |
7271 | Biography can reveal meanings and dramatic character, as well as possible intentions [Wimsatt/Beardsley] |
Full Idea: The use of biographical evidence need not involve intentionalism, because while it may be evidence of what the author intended, it may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his utterance. | |
From: W Wimsatt/W Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy [1946], §IV) | |
A reaction: I am very keen to penetrate the author's intentions, but I have always be doubtful about the use of biography as a means to achieve this. Most of the effort to infer intentions must come from a study of the work itself, not introductions, letters etc. |
1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |