29 ideas
| 16477 | Asserting not-p is saying p is false [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When you do what a logician would call 'asserting not-p', you are saying 'p is false'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is presumably classical logic. If we could label p as 'undetermined' (a third truth value), then 'not-p' might equally mean 'undetermined'. |
| 16484 | There are four experiences that lead us to talk of 'some' things [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Propositions about 'some' arise, in practice, in four ways: as generalisations of disjunctions; when an instance suggests compatibility of terms we thought incompatible; as steps to a generalisation; and in cases of imperfect memory. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: Modern logicians seem to have no interest in the question Russell is investigating here, but I love his attempt, however vague the result, to connect logic to real experience and thought. |
| 16486 | The physical world doesn't need logic, but the mental world does [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The non-mental world can be completely described without the use of any logical word, …but when it comes to the mental world, there are facts which cannot be mentioned without the use of logical words. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: He adds that logical words are not needed for physics, but are needed for psychology. I love Russell's interest in the psychology of logic (in defiance of the anti-psychologism of Frege). See also the ideas of Robert Hanna. |
| 2947 | Questions wouldn't lead anywhere without the law of excluded middle [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Without the law of excluded middle, we could not ask the questions that give rise to discoveries. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], c.p.88) |
| 16480 | A disjunction expresses indecision [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A disjunction is the verbal expression of indecision, or, if a question, of the desire to reach a decision. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: Russell is fishing here for Grice's conversational implicature. If you want to assert a simple proposition, you don't introduce it into an irrelevant disjunction, because that would have a particular expressive purpose. |
| 16479 | 'Or' expresses hesitation, in a dog at a crossroads, or birds risking grabbing crumbs [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Psychologically, 'or' corresponds to a state of hesitation. A dog waits at a fork in the road, to see which way you are going. For crumbs on a windowsill, birds behave in a manner we would express by 'shall I be brave, or go hungry?'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: I love two facts here - first, that Russell wants to link the connective to the psychology of experience, and second, that a great logician wants to connect his logic to the minds of animals. |
| 16481 | 'Or' expresses a mental state, not something about the world [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When we assert 'p or q' we are in a state which is derivative from two previous states, and we express this state, not something about the world. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: His example: at a junction this road or that road goes to Oxford, but the world only contains the roads, not some state of 'this or that road'. He doesn't deny that in one sense 'p or q' tells you something about the world. |
| 16487 | Maybe the 'or' used to describe mental states is not the 'or' of logic [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It might be contended that, in describing what happens when a man believes 'p or q', the 'or' that we must use is not the same as the 'or' of logic. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the general verdict on Russell's enquiries in this chapter, but I love any attempt, however lacking in rigour etc., to connect formal logic to how we think, and thence to the world. |
| 16483 | Disjunction may also arise in practice if there is imperfect memory. [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Another situation in which a disjunction may arise is practice is imperfect memory. 'Either Brown or Jones told me that'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) |
| 16475 | A 'heterological' predicate can't be predicated of itself; so is 'heterological' heterological? Yes=no! [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A predicate is 'heterological' when it cannot be predicated of itself; thus 'long' is heterological because it is not a long word, but 'short' is homological. So is 'heterological' heterological? Either answer leads to a contradiction. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: [Grelling's Paradox] Yes: 'heterological' is heterological because it isn't heterological; No: it isn't, because it is. Russell says we therefore need a hierarchy of languages (types), and the word 'word' is outside the system. |
| 16482 | All our knowledge (if verbal) is general, because all sentences contain general words [Russell] |
| Full Idea: All our knowledge about the world, in so far as it is expressed in words, is more or less general, because every sentence contains at least one word that is not a proper name, and all such words are general. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: I really like this, especially because it addresses the excessive reliance of some essentialists on sortals, categories and natural kinds, instead of focusing on the actual physical essences of individual objects. |
| 4758 | Naïve realism leads to physics, but physics then shows that naïve realism is false [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Naïve realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naïve realism is false. Therefore naïve realism, if true, is false, therefore it is false. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], p.13) | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to agree with this, though once you have gone off and explored representation and sense data you may be driven back to naïve realism again. |
| 16476 | For simple words, a single experience can show that they are true [Russell] |
| Full Idea: So long as a man avoids words which are condensed inductions (such as 'dog'), and confines himself to words that can describe a single experience, it is possible for a single experience to show that his words are true. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: One might question whether a line can be drawn between the inductive and the non-inductive in this way. I'm inclined just to say that the simpler the proposition the less room there is for error in confirming it. |
| 16485 | Perception can't prove universal generalisations, so abandon them, or abandon empiricism? [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Propositions about 'some' may be proved empirically, but propositions about 'all' are difficult to know, and can't be proved unless such propositions are in the premisses. These aren't in perception, so forgo general propositions, or abandon empiricism? | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously related to the difficulty empiricists have with induction. You could hardly persuade logicians to give up the universal quantifier, because it is needed in mathematics. Do we actually know any universal empirical truths? |
| 23805 | Some explanations offer to explain a mystery by a greater mystery [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: An 'obscurum per obscurius' explanation is explaining something mysterious by something even more mysterious, | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 6) | |
| A reaction: Schulte's example is trying to explain mental content in terms of phenomenal experience. That is, roughly, explaining content by qualia, when the latter is the 'hard problem'. |
| 23792 | Phenomenal and representational character may have links, or even be united [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Some theorists maintain that all states with representational content or intentionality must have phenomenal character …and we can also ask whether all states with phenomenal character also have representional content. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: He mentions that beliefs could involve inner speech. And pains and moods may be phenomenal but lack content. He also asks which determines which. |
| 23795 | Naturalistic accounts of content cannot rely on primitive mental or normative notions [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: A 'naturalistic' explanation of content excludes primitive mental or normative notions, but allows causation, counterfactual dependence, probabilistic dependence or structural similarity. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4) | |
| A reaction: Apart from causation, what is permissible to naturalists (like me) all sounds rather superficial (and thus not very explanatory). I'm sure we can do better than this. How about using non-primitive mental notions? |
| 23804 | Maybe we can explain mental content in terms of phenomenal properties [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: The phenomenal intentionality approach says that the content properties of mental states can be explained in terms of the phenomenal properties of mental states. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 6) | |
| A reaction: [Searle and Loar are cited] Tends to be 'non-naturalistic'. We might decide that content derives from the phenomenal, but still without saying anything interesting about content. Mathematical content? Universally generalised content? |
| 23806 | Naturalist accounts of representation must match the views of cognitive science [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Recent naturalisation of content now also has to offer a matching account of representational explanations in cognitive science. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 08.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Cummins, Neander and Shea] This is in addition to the 'status' and 'content' questions of Idea 23796. This seems to be an interesting shift to philosophers working backwards from the theories of empirical science. Few are qualified for this job! |
| 23793 | On the whole, referential content is seen as broad, and sense content as narrow [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: We can say that non-Fregean content [reference] is (virtually) always contrued as broad, while Fregean content [sense] is usually contrued as narrow. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: I can't make sense of mental content actually being outside the mind, so I see all content as narrow - but that doesn't mean that externals are irrelevant to it. If I think that is an oak, and it's an elm, the content is oak. |
| 23796 | Naturalists must explain both representation, and what is represented [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Naturalistic accounts of content ask 1) what makes a state qualify as a representational state?, and 2) what makes a representational state have one specific content rather than another? | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4) | |
| A reaction: [As often in this collection, the author uses algebraic letters, but I prefer plain English] I would say that the first question looks more amenable to an answer than the second. Do we know the neuronal difference between seeing red and blue? |
| 23802 | Conceptual role semantics says content is determined by cognitive role [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual role semantics says the content of a representation is determined by the cognitive role it plays with a system. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: Obvious problem: if 'swordfish' is the password, its role is quite different from its content. I've never thought that the role of something tells you anything about what it is. Hearts pump blood, but how do they fulfil that role? |
| 23797 | Cause won't explain content, because one cause can produce several contents [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: A simple causal theory of content has the 'content indeterminacy' problem - that the presence of a cow causes 'a cow is present', but also 'an animal is present' and 'a biological organism is present'. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: That only rules out the 'simple' version. We just need to add that the cause (cow experience) is shaped by current knowledge and interests. Someone buying cows and someone terrified of them thereby produce different concepts. |
| 23799 | Teleosemantics explains content in terms of successful and unsuccessful functioning [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: The core idea of teleosemantics is that we need to explain how content can be accurate or inaccurate, true or false, realised or unrealised …which must appeal to the distinction between proper functioning and malfunctioning. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: My immediate reaction to this is that you don't learn about content by assessing its success. Surely (as with eyesight) you first need to understand what it does, and only then judge its success. …Though success and failure are implicit in function. |
| 23800 | Teleosemantic explanations say content is the causal result of naturally selected functions [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Teleosemantic theories usually give a causal account of mental functions …where some trait has a particular function if it was selected for that function by a process of natural selection. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This is an idea I like - that something has a specific function if without that function it wouldn't have come into existence (eyes, for example). But presumably the function of a mind is to collect content - which does nothing to explain content! |
| 23798 | Information theories say content is information, such as smoke making fire probable [Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Information theories of content [usually assume that] a column of smoke over there carries the information that fire is over there because it raises the probability of fire being over there. | |
| From: Peter Schulte (Mental Content [2023], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Theorists usually add further conditions to this basic one. Fred Dretske is the source of this approach. Not promising, in my opinion. Surely the content is just smoke, and fire is one of dozens of possible inferences from it? |
| 16478 | A mother cat is paralysed if equidistant between two needy kittens [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I once, to test the story of Buridan's Ass, put a cat exactly half-way between her two kittens, both too young to move: for a time she found the disjunction paralysing. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5) | |
| A reaction: Buridan's Ass is said to have starved between two equal piles of hay. Reason can't be the tie-breaker; reason obviously says 'choose one!', but intellectualism demands a reason for the one you choose. |
| 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. |