18 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. |
| 14329 | Some dispositional properties (such as mental ones) may have no categorical base [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: There is no a priori necessity for supposing that all disposition properties must have a 'categorical base'. In particular, there may be some mental dispositions which are ultimate. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.XI) | |
| A reaction: I take the notion that mental dispositions could be ultimate as rather old-fashioned, but I agree with the notion that dispositions might be more fundamental that categorical (actual) properties. Personally I like 'powers'. |
| 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. |
| 9032 | Before we can abstract from an instance of violet, we must first recognise it [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Abstraction is preceded by an earlier stage, in which we learn to recognize instances; before I can conceive of the colour violet in abstracto, I must learn to recognize instances of this colour when I see them. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.II) | |
| A reaction: The problem here might be one of circularity. If you are actually going to identify something as violet, you seem to need the abstract concept of 'violet' in advance. See Idea 9034 for Price's attempt to deal with the problem. |
| 9035 | If judgement of a characteristic is possible, that part of abstraction must be complete [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: If we are to 'judge' - rightly or not - that this object has a specific characteristic, it would seem that so far as the characteristic is concerned the process of abstraction must already be completed. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.III) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think Price is right, despite the vicious attack from Geach that looms. We all know the experiences of familiarity, recognition, and identification that go on when see a person or picture. 'What animal is that, in the distance?' |
| 9034 | There may be degrees of abstraction which allow recognition by signs, without full concepts [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: If abstraction is a matter of degree, and the first faint beginnings of it are already present as soon as anything has begun to feel familiar to us, then recognition by means of signs can occur long before the process of abstraction has been completed. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.III) | |
| A reaction: I like this, even though it is unscientific introspective psychology, for which no proper evidence can be adduced - because it is right. Neuroscience confirms that hardly any mental life has an all-or-nothing form. |
| 9036 | There is pre-verbal sign-based abstraction, as when ice actually looks cold [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: We must still insist that some degree of abstraction, and even a very considerable degree of it, is present in sign-cognition, pre-verbal as it is. ...To us, who are familiar with northern winters, the ice actually looks cold. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.IV) | |
| A reaction: Price may be in the weak position of doing armchair psychology, but something like his proposal strikes me as correct. I'm much happier with accounts of thought that talk of 'degrees' of an activity, than with all-or-nothing cut-and-dried pictures. |
| 9037 | Intelligent behaviour, even in animals, has something abstract about it [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Though it may sound odd to say so, intelligent behaviour has something abstract about it no less than intelligent cognition; and indeed at the animal level it is unrealistic to separate the two. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.IV) | |
| A reaction: This elusive thought strikes me as being a key one for understanding human existence. To think is to abstract. Brains are abstraction machines. Resemblance and recognition require abstaction. |
| 9033 | Recognition must precede the acquisition of basic concepts, so it is the fundamental intellectual process [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Recognition is the first stage towards the acquisition of a primary or basic concept. It is, therefore, the most fundamental of all intellectual processes. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.II) | |
| A reaction: An interesting question is whether it is an 'intellectual' process. Animals evidently recognise things, though it is a moot point whether slugs 'recognise' tasty leaves. |
| 9030 | Abstractions can be interpreted dispositionally, as the ability to recognise or imagine an item [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: An abstract idea may have a dispositional as well as an occurrent interpretation. ..A man who possesses the concept Dog, when he is actually perceiving a dog can recognize that it is one, and can think about dogs when he is not perceiving any dog. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.IX) | |
| A reaction: Ryle had just popularised the 'dispositional' account of mental events. Price is obviously right. The man may also be able to use the word 'dog' in sentences, but presumably dogs recognise dogs, and probably dream about dogs too. |
| 9029 | If ideas have to be images, then abstract ideas become a paradoxical problem [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: There used to be a 'problem of Abstract Ideas' because it was assumed that an idea ought, somehow, to be a mental image; if some of our ideas appeared not to be images, this was a paradox and some solution must be found. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.VIII) | |
| A reaction: Berkeley in particular seems to be struck by the fact that we are incapable of thinking of a general triangle, simply because there is no image related to it. Most conversations go too fast for images to form even of very visual things. |
| 9031 | The basic concepts of conceptual cognition are acquired by direct abstraction from instances [Price,HH] |
| Full Idea: Basic concepts are acquired by direct abstraction from instances; unless there were some concepts acquired in this way by direct abstraction, there would be no conceptual cognition at all. | |
| From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.II) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be correct. A key point is that not only will I acquire the concept of 'dog' in this direct way, from instances, but also the concept of 'my dog Spot' - that is I can acquire the abstract concept of an instance from an instance. |
| 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. |