20 ideas
| 22334 | Analysis must include definitions, search for simples, concept analysis, and Kant's analysis [Glock] |
| Full Idea: Under 'analysis' a minimum would include the Socratic quest for definitions, Descartes' search for simple natures, the empiricists' psychological resolution of complex ideas, and Kant's 'transcendental' analysis of our cognitive capacities. | |
| From: Hans-Johann Glock (What is Analytic Philosophy? [2008], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: This has always struck me, and I find the narrow focus on modern logic a very distorted idea of the larger project. The aim, I think, is to understand by taking things apart, in the spirit of figuring out how a watch works. |
| 18996 | A statement S is 'partly true' if it has some wholly true parts [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A statement S is 'partly true' insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 01.6) | |
| A reaction: He suggests that if we have rival theories, we agree that it is one or the other. And 'we may have pork for dinner, or human flesh' is partly true. |
| 19006 | An 'enthymeme' is an argument with an indispensable unstated assumption [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: An 'enthymeme' is a deductive argument with an unstated assumption that must be true for the premises to lead to the conclusion. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 11.1) |
| 18999 | y is only a proper part of x if there is a z which 'makes up the difference' between them [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The principle of Supplementation says that y is properly part of x, only if a z exists that 'makes up the difference' between them. [note: that is, z is disjoint from y and sums with y to form x] | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) |
| 19001 | 'Pegasus doesn't exist' is false without Pegasus, yet the absence of Pegasus is its truthmaker [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: 'Pegasus does not exist' has a paradoxical, self-undermining flavour. On the one hand, the empty name makes it untrue. But now, why is the name empty? Because Pegasus does not exist. 'Pegasus does not exist' is untrue because Pegasus does not exist. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.7 n20) | |
| A reaction: Beautiful! This is Yablo's reward for continuing to ask 'why?' after everyone else has stopped in bewilderment at the tricky phenomenon. |
| 19002 | A nominalist can assert statements about mathematical objects, as being partly true [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: If I am a nominalist non-Platonist, I think it is false that 'there are primes over 10', but I want to be able to say it like everyone else. I argue that this because the statement has a part that I do believe, a part that remains interestingly true. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.8) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously a key motivation for Yablo's book, as it reinforces his fictional view of abstract objects, but aims to capture the phenomena, by investigating what such sentences are 'about'. Admirable. |
| 18998 | Parthood lacks the restriction of kind which most relations have [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Most relations obtain only between certain kinds of thing. To learn that x is a part of y, however, tells you nothing about x and y taken individually. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: Too sweeping. To be a part of crowd you have to be a person. To be part of the sea you have to be wet. It might depend on whether composition is unrestricted. |
| 22332 | German and British idealism is not about individual ideas, but the intelligibility of reality [Glock] |
| Full Idea: Neither German nor British Idealism reduced reality to episodes in the minds of individuals. Instsead, they insisted that reality is intelligible only because it is a manifestation of a divine spirit or rational principle. | |
| From: Hans-Johann Glock (What is Analytic Philosophy? [2008], 5.2) | |
| A reaction: They standardly reject Berkeley. Such Idealism seems either to be the design argument for God's existence, or neo-Stoicism (in its claim that nature is rational). Why not just say that nature seems to be intelligible, and stop there? |
| 19004 | Gettier says you don't know if you are confused about how it is true [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: We know from Gettier that if you are right to regard Q as true, but you are sufficiently confused about HOW it is true - about how things stand with respect to its subject matter - then you don't know that Q. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 07.4) | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to approach Gettier by focusing on the propositions being expressed, where his cases tend to focus on the literal wording of the sentences. What did the utterer mean by the sentences - not what did they appear to say. |
| 19007 | A theory need not be true to be good; it should just be true about its physical aspects [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A physical theory need not be true to be good, Field has argued, and I agree. All we ask of it truth-wise is that its physical implications should be true, or, in my version, that it should be true about the physical. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 12.5) | |
| A reaction: Yablo is, of course, writing a book here about the concept of 'about'. This seems persuasive. The internal terminology of the theory isn't committed to anything - it is only at its physical periphery (Quine) that the ontology matters. |
| 18993 | If sentences point to different evidence, they must have different subject-matter [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: 'All crows are black' cannot say quite the same as 'All non-black things are non-crows', for the two are confirmed by different evidence. Subject matter looks to be the distinguishing feature. One is about crows, the other not. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: You might reply that they are confirmed by the same evidence (but only in its unobtainable totality). The point, I think, is that the sentences invite you to start your search in different places. |
| 19003 | Most people say nonblack nonravens do confirm 'all ravens are black', but only a tiny bit [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The standard response to the raven paradox is to say that a nonblack nonraven does confirm that all ravens are black. But it confirms it just the teeniest little bit - not as much as a black raven does. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 06.5) | |
| A reaction: It depends on the proportion between the relevant items. How do you confirm 'all the large animals in this zoo are mammals'? Check for size every animal which is obviously not a mammal? |
| 22336 | We might say that the family resemblance is just a consequence of meaning-as-use [Glock] |
| Full Idea: Against Wittgenstein's family resemblance view one might evoke his own idea that the meaning of a word is its use, and that diversity of use entails diversity of meaning. | |
| From: Hans-Johann Glock (What is Analytic Philosophy? [2008], 8.2) | |
| A reaction: Wittgenstein might just accept the point. Diversity of concepts reflects diversity of usage. But how do you distinguish 'football is a game' from 'oy, what's your game?'. How does usage distinguish metaphorical from literal (if it does)? |
| 22335 | The variety of uses of 'game' may be that it has several meanings, and isn't a single concept [Glock] |
| Full Idea: The proper conclusion to draw from the fact that we explain 'game' in a variety of different ways is that it is not a univocal term, but has different, albeit related, meanings. | |
| From: Hans-Johann Glock (What is Analytic Philosophy? [2008], 8.2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Rundle 1990] Potter says Wittgenstein insisted that 'game' is a single concept. 'Game' certainly slides off into metaphor, as in 'are you playing games with me?'. The multivocal view would still meet family resemblance on a narrower range. |
| 18992 | Sentence-meaning is the truth-conditions - plus factors responsible for them [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A sentence's meaning is to do with its truth-value in various possible scenarios, AND the factors responsible for that truth-value. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The thesis of his book, which I welcome. I'm increasingly struck by the way in which much modern philosophy settles for a theory being complete, when actually further explanation is possible. Exhibit A is functional explanations. Why that function? |
| 18994 | The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Assertive content - what a sentence is heard as saying - can be at quite a distance from compositional content. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is the obvious reason why semantics cannot be entirely compositional, since there is nearly always a contextual component which then has to be added. In the case of irony, the compositional content is entirely reversed. |
| 18997 | Truth-conditions as subject-matter has problems of relevance, short cut, and reversal [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: If the subject-matter of S is how it is true, we get three unfortunate results: S has truth-value in worlds where its subject-matter draws a blank; learning what S is about tells you its truth-value; negating S changes what it's about. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 02.8) | |
| A reaction: Together these make fairly devastating objections to the truth-conditions (in possible worlds) theory of meaning. The first-objection concerns when S is false |
| 19005 | Not-A is too strong to just erase an improper assertion, because it actually reverses A [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The idea that negation is, or can be, a cancellation device raises an interesting question. What does one do to wipe the slate clean after an improper assertion? Not-A is too strong; it reverses our stand on A rather than nullifying it. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 09.8) | |
| A reaction: [He is discussing a remark of Strawson 1952] It seems that 'not' has two meanings or uses: a weak use of 'nullifying' an assertion, and a strong use of 'reversing' an assertion. One could do both: 'that's not right; in fact, it's just the opposite'. |
| 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. |