11 ideas
| 9354 | Why should necessities only be knowable a priori? That Hesperus is Phosporus is known empirically [Devitt] |
| Full Idea: Why should we accept that necessities can only be known a priori? Prima facie, some necessities are known empirically; for example, that water is necessarily H2O, and that Hesperus is necessarily Phosphorus. | |
| From: Michael Devitt (There is no a Priori [2005], §2) | |
| A reaction: An important question, whatever your view. If the only thing we can know a priori is necessities, it doesn't follow that necessities can only be known a priori. It gets interesting if we say that some necessities can never be known a priori. |
| 9353 | We explain away a priori knowledge, not as directly empirical, but as indirectly holistically empirical [Devitt] |
| Full Idea: We have no need to turn to an a priori explanation of our knowledge of mathematics and logic. Our intuitions that this knowledge is not justified in some direct empirical way is preserved. It is justified in an indirect holistic way. | |
| From: Michael Devitt (There is no a Priori [2005], §2) | |
| A reaction: I think this is roughly the right story, but the only way it will work is if we have some sort of theory of abstraction, which gets us up the ladder of generalisations to the ones which, it appears, are necessarily true. |
| 9356 | The idea of the a priori is so obscure that it won't explain anything [Devitt] |
| Full Idea: The whole idea of the a priori is too obscure for it to feature in a good explanation of our knowledge of anything. | |
| From: Michael Devitt (There is no a Priori [2005], §3) | |
| A reaction: I never like this style of argument. It would be nice if all the components of all our our explanations were crystal clear. Total clarity about anything is probably a hopeless dream, and we may have to settle for murky corners in all explanations. |
| 17771 | How we evaluate evidence depends on our background beliefs [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: A claim that might be very plausible given one set of background beliefs might be highly implausible when evaluated in the light of a different set of background beliefs. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.7) |
| 17770 | Clifford's dictum seems to block our beliefs in morality, politics and philosophy [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: Endorsing Clifford's dictum threatens to undermine our right to hold many of our most cherished beliefs about morality, politics, and philosophy, for these are domains in which it is notoriously difficult to secure consensus. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: I would say that those beliefs are amenable to evidence, but the evidence is often highly generalised, which is what makes those subjects notoriously difficult. The existence of a convention is a sort of evidence. |
| 17766 | Physicalism correlates brain and mind, explains causation by thought, and makes nature continuous [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: The motivations for physicalism about the mind are that it accounts for correlations between states of the brain and states of thought, ...that it accounts for the causal role of thoughts, ...and that it does justice to the continuity of nature. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: [summary] That is a pretty good summary of why I am a physicalist about the mind. I take all other theories to be dead footnotes in the history of thought - unless someone can produce a really good new argument. Which they can't. |
| 17768 | Perception reveals what animals think, but humans can disengage thought from perception [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: One striking feature of human thought involves our ability to disengage the focus of thought from that of our perceptual attention. ...To get a fix on what an animal is thinking about, one need only determine the object of its perceptual attention. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: What happens when an animal closes its eyes, or stirs violently during sleep? I take the hallmark of human thought to be its multi-level character, and this offers nice evidence for that view. Doing philosophy while driving a car is very revealing. |
| 17769 | Some people centre space on themselves; others centre space on the earth [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: Egocentric conceptions of space employ a frame of reference that is focused on oneself; ...geocentric conceptions of space, by contrast, employ a frame of reference that is centred on the earth. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Famously, Europeans nearly always employ the egocentric conception, but many other cultures are geocentric. Thus the salt cellar is either 'to my left' or 'to the west'. In the latter view, everyone always knows their orientation (even indoors?). |
| 17767 | The alternative to a language of thought is map-like or diagram-like thought [Bayne] |
| Full Idea: One could think that the structure of thought has more in common with that of maps or diagrams, and is not particularly language-like. | |
| From: Tim Bayne (Thought: a very short introduction [2013], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: It seems unwise to be ensnared by analogies on this one, since the phenomenon is buried deep. You can no more infer what goes on underneath than you can infer electrons from looking at trees? |
| 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. |