45 ideas
| 2557 | Analytical philosophy seems to have little interest in how to tell a good analysis from a bad one [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: There is nowadays little attempt to bring "analytic philosophy" to self-consciousness by explaining how to tell a successful from an unsuccessful analysis. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 4.1) |
| 2556 | Rational certainty may be victory in argument rather than knowledge of facts [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: We can think of "rational certainty" as a matter of victory in argument rather than relation to an object known. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 3.4) |
| 4726 | Rorty seems to view truth as simply being able to hold one's view against all comers [Rorty, by O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: Rorty seems to view truth as simply being able to hold one's view against all comers. | |
| From: report of Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: This may be a caricature of Rorty, but he certainly seems to be in the business of denying truth as much as possible. This strikes me as the essence of pragmatism, and as a kind of philosophical nihilism. |
| 2549 | For James truth is "what it is better for us to believe" rather than a correct picture of reality [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Truth is, in James' phrase, "what it is better for us to believe", rather than "the accurate representation of reality". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Intro) |
| 2548 | If knowledge is merely justified belief, justification is social [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: If we have a Deweyan conception of knowledge, as what we are justified in believing, we will see "justification" as a social phenomenon. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find this observation highly illuminating (though I probably need to study Dewey to understand it). There just is no absolute about whether someone is justified. How justified do you want to be? |
| 6599 | Knowing has no definable essence, but is a social right, found in the context of conversations [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: If we see knowing not as having an essence, described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we see conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Ch.5), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: This teeters towards ridiculous relativism (e.g. what if the conversation is among a group of fools? - Ah, there are no fools! Politically incorrect!). However, knowledge can be social, provided we are healthily elitist. Scientists know more than us. |
| 2566 | You can't debate about whether to have higher standards for the application of words [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: The decision about whether to have higher than usual standards for the application of words like "true" or "good" or "red" is, as far as I can see, not a debatable issue. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.6) |
| 17405 | If a theory can be fudged, so can observations [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: A theorist may have designed his theory to fit the facts, but is it not equally possible for observers to be influenced by a theory in their report of experimental facts? | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 05 'Power') | |
| A reaction: This is in reply to Lipton's claim that prediction is better than accommodation because of the 'fudging' problem. The reply is that you might fudge to achieve a prediction. If it was correct, that wouldn't avoid the charge of fudging. |
| 17397 | The periodic system is the big counterexample to Kuhn's theory of revolutionary science [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The history of the periodic system appears to be the supreme counterexample to Kuhn's thesis, whereby scientific developments proceed in a sudden, revolutionary fashion. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 03 'Rapid') | |
| A reaction: What is lovely about the periodic table is that it seems so wonderfully right, and hence no revolution has ever been needed. The big theories of physics and cosmology are much more precarious. |
| 17393 | Scientists eventually seek underlying explanations for every pattern [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Whenever scientists are presented with a useful pattern or system of classification, it is only a matter of time before the begin to ask whether there may be some underlying explanation for the pattern. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], Intro 'Evol') | |
| A reaction: Music to my ears, against the idea that the sole aim of science is accurately describe the patterns. |
| 17403 | The periodic table suggests accommodation to facts rates above prediction [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Rather than proving the value of prediction, the development and acceptance of the periodic table may give us a powerful illustration of the importance of accommodation, that is, the ability of a new scientific theory to explain already known facts. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 05 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: The original table made famous predictions, but also just as many wrong ones (Scerri:143), and Scerri thinks this aspect has been overrated. |
| 2553 | The mind is a property, or it is baffling [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: All that is needed for the mind-body problem to be unintelligible is for us to be nominalist, to refuse firmly to hypostasize individual properties. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Edelman says the mind is a process rather than a property. It might vanish if the clockspeed was turned right down? Nominalism here sounds like behaviourism or instrumentalism. Would Dennett plead guilty? |
| 2550 | Pain lacks intentionality; beliefs lack qualia [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: We can't define the mental as intentional because pains aren't about anything, and we can't define it as phenomenal because beliefs don't feel like anything. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: Nice, but simplistic? There is usually an intentional object for a pain, and the concepts which we use to build beliefs contain the residue of remembered qualia. It seems unlikely that any mind could have one without the other (even a computer). |
| 2554 | Is intentionality a special sort of function? [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Following Wittgenstein, we shall treat the intentional as merely a subspecies of the functional. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing but obscure. Sounds wrong to me. The intentional refers to the content of thoughts, but function concerns their role. They have roles because they have content, so they can't be the same. |
| 2565 | Nature has no preferred way of being represented [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Nature has no preferred way of being represented. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: Tree rings accidentally represent the passing of the years. If God went back and started again would she or he opt for a 'preferred way'? |
| 2560 | Can meanings remain the same when beliefs change? [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: For cooler heads there must be some middle view between "meanings remain and beliefs change" and "meanings change whenever beliefs do". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: The second one seems blatanty false. How could we otherwise explain a change in belief? But obviously some changes in belief (e.g. about electrons) produce a change in meaning. |
| 2562 | A theory of reference seems needed to pick out objects without ghostly inner states [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: The need to pick out objects without the help of definitions, essences, and meanings of terms produced, philosophers thought, a need for a "theory of reference". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: Frege's was very perceptive in noting that meaning and reference are not the same. Whether we need a 'theory' of reference is unclear. It is worth describing how it occurs. |
| 2559 | Davidson's theory of meaning focuses not on terms, but on relations between sentences [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: A theory of meaning, for Davidson, is not an assemblage of "analyses" of the meanings of individual terms, but rather an understanding of the inferential relations between sentences. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: Put that way, the influence of Frege on Davidson is obvious. Purely algebraic expressions can have inferential relations, using variables and formal 'sentences'. |
| 2558 | Since Hegel we have tended to see a human as merely animal if it is outside a society [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Only since Hegel have philosophers begun toying with the idea that the individual apart from his society is just one more animal. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 4.3) |
| 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 |
| 17394 | Natural kinds are what are differentiated by nature, and not just by us [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Natural kinds are realistic scientific entities that are differentiated by nature itself rather than by our human attempts at classification. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], Intro 'Evol') |
| 17421 | If elements are natural kinds, might the groups of the periodic table also be natural kinds? [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Elements defined by their atomic numbers are frequently assumed to represent 'natural kinds' in chemistry. ...The question arises as to whether groups of elements appearing in the periodic table might also represent natural kinds. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 10 'Elements') | |
| A reaction: Scerri says the distinction is not as sharp as that between the elements. As a realist, he believes there is 'one ideal periodic classification', which would then make the periods into kinds. |
| 17396 | The colour of gold is best explained by relativistic effects due to fast-moving inner-shell electrons [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Many seemingly mundane properties of elements such as the characteristic color of gold ....can best be explained by relativistic effects due to fast-moving inner-shell electrons. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 01 'Under') | |
| A reaction: John Locke - I wish you were reading this! That we could work out the hidden facts of gold, and thereby explain and predict the surface properties we experience, is exactly what Locke thought to be forever impossible. |
| 17420 | The stability of nuclei can be estimated through their binding energy [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The stability of nuclei can be estimated through their binding energy, a quantity given by the difference between their masses and the masses of their constituent particles. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 10 'Stabil') |
| 17411 | If all elements are multiples of one (of hydrogen), that suggests once again that matter is unified [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The work of Moseley and others rehabilitated Prout's hypothesis that all elements were composites of hydrogen, being exact multiples of 1. ..This revitalized some philososophical notions of the unity of all matter, criticised by Mendeleev and others. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 06 'Philos') |
| 17407 | The electron is the main source of chemical properties [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: It is the electron that is mainly responsible for the chemical properties of the elements. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 06 'Intro') |
| 17415 | A big chemistry idea is that covalent bonds are shared electrons, not transfer of electrons [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: One of the most influential ideas in modern chemistry is of a covalent bond as a shared pair of electrons (not as transfer of electrons and the formation of ionic bonds). | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 08 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Gilbert Newton Lewis was responsible for this. |
| 17392 | How can poisonous elements survive in the nutritious compound they compose? [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: A central mystery of chemistry is how the elements survive in the compounds they form. For example, how can poisonous grey metal sodium combine with green poisonous gas chlorine, to make salt, which is non-poisonous and essential for life? | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], Intro 'Elem') | |
| A reaction: A very nice question which had never occurred to me. If our digestive system pulled the sodium apart from the chlorine, we would die. |
| 17391 | Periodicity and bonding are the two big ideas in chemistry [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The two big ideas in chemistry are chemical periodicity and chemical bonding, and they are deeply interconnected. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], Intro 'Per') |
| 17404 | Chemistry does not work from general principles, but by careful induction from large amounts of data [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Unlike in physics, chemical reasoning does not generally proceed unambiguously from general principles. It is a more inductive science in which large amounts of observational data must be carefully weighed. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 05 'Mendel') | |
| A reaction: This is why essentialist thinking was important for Mendeleev, because it kept his focus on the core facts beneath the messy and incomplete data. |
| 17409 | Does radioactivity show that only physics can explain chemistry? [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Some authors believe that the interpretation of the properties of the elements passed from chemistry to physics as a result of the discovery of radioactivity. ...I believe this view to be overly reductionist. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 06 'Radio') | |
| A reaction: It is all a matter of the explanations, and how far down they have to go. If most non-radiocative chemistry doesn't need to mention the physics, then chemistry is largely autonomous. |
| 17418 | It is now thought that all the elements have literally evolved from hydrogen [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The elements are now believed to have literally evolved from hydrogen by various mechanisms. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 10 'Evol) |
| 17398 | 19th C views said elements survived abstractly in compounds, but also as 'material ingredients' [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: In the 19th century abstract elements were believed to be permanent and responsible for observed properties in compounds, but (departing from Aristotle) they were also 'material ingredients', thus linking the metaphysical and material realm. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 04 'Nature') | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure I can make sense of this gulf between the metaphysical and the material realm, so this was an account heading for disaster. |
| 17406 | Moseley, using X-rays, showed that atomic number ordered better than atomic weight [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: By using X-rays, Henry Moseley later discovered that a better ordering principle for the periodic system is atomic numbers rather than atomic weight, by subjecting many different elements to bombardment. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 06 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Moseley was killed in the First World War at the age of 26. It is interesting that they more or less worked out the whole table, before they discovered the best principle on which to found it. |
| 17408 | Some suggested basing the new periodic table on isotopes, not elements [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Some chemists even suggested that the periodic table would have to be abandoned in favor of a classification system that included a separate place for every single isotope. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 06 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: The extreme case is tin, which has 21 isotopes, so is tin a fundamental, or is each of the isotopes a fundamental? Does there have to be a right answer to that? All tin isotopes basically react in the same way, so we stick with the elements table. |
| 17412 | Elements are placed in the table by the number of positive charges - the atomic number [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The serial number of an element in the periodic table, its atomic number, corresponds to the number of positive charges in the atom. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 07 'Models') | |
| A reaction: Note that this is a feature of the nucleus, despite that fact that the electrons decide the chemical properties. A nice model for Locke's views on essentialism. |
| 17413 | Elements in the table are grouped by having the same number of outer-shell electrons [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The modern notion is that atoms fall into the same group of the periodic table if they possess the same numbers of outer-shell electrons. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 07 'Quantum') | |
| A reaction: Scerri goes on to raise questions about this, on p.242. By this principle helium should be an alkaline earth element, but it isn't. |
| 17416 | Orthodoxy says the periodic table is explained by quantum mechanics [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The prevailing reductionist climate implies that quantum mechanics inevitably provides a more fundamental explanation for the periodic system. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 08 'Concl') | |
| A reaction: Scerri has argued that chemists did much better than physicists in working out how the outer electron shells of atoms worked, by induction from data, rather than inference from basic principles. |
| 17414 | Pauli explained the electron shells, but not the lengths of the periods in the table [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Pauli explained the maximum number of electrons successive shells can accommodate, ...but it does not explain the lengths of the periods, which is the really crucial property of the periodic table. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 07 'Pauli') | |
| A reaction: Paulis' Exclusion Principle says no two electrons in an atom can have the same set of four quantum numbers. He added 'spin' as a fourth number. It means 'electrons cannot be distinguished' (243). Scerri says the big problem is still not fully explained. |
| 17410 | Moseley showed the elements progress in units, and thereby clearly identified the gaps [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Moseley's work showed that the successive elements in the periodic table have an atomic number greater by one unit. The gaps could then be identified definitively, as 43, 61, 72, 75, 85, 87, and 91. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 06 'Henry') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 17395 | Elements were ordered by equivalent weight; later by atomic weight; finally by atomic number [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: Historically, the ordering of elements across periods was determined by equivalent weight, then later by atomic weight, and eventually by atomic number. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 01 'React') | |
| A reaction: So they used to be ordered by quantities (measured by real numbers), but eventually were ordered by unit items (counted by natural numbers). There need to be distinct protons (unified) to be counted. |
| 17422 | The best classification needs the deepest and most general principles of the atoms [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: An optimal classification can be obtained by identifying the deepest and most general principles that govern the atoms of the elements. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 10 'Continuum') | |
| A reaction: He adds (p.286) that the best system will add the 'greatest degree of regularity' to these best principles. |
| 17417 | To explain the table, quantum mechanics still needs to explain order of shell filling [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: The order of shell filling has not yet been deduced from first principles, and this issue cannot be avoided if one is to really ask whether quantum mechanics explains the periodic system in a fundamental manner. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 09 'From') |
| 17419 | Since 99.96% of the universe is hydrogen and helium, the periodic table hardly matters [Scerri] |
| Full Idea: All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04% of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic table appears to rather insignificant. | |
| From: Eric R. Scerri (The Periodic Table [2007], 10 'Astro') |
| 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. |