12801
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Coherentists seek relations among beliefs that are simple, conservative and explanatory [Foley]
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Full Idea:
Coherentists try to provide an explication of epistemic rationality in terms of a set of deductive and probabilistic relations among beliefs and properties such as simplicity, conservativeness, and explanatory power.
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From:
Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.317)
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A reaction:
I have always like the coherentist view of justification, and now I see that this has led me to the question of explanation, which in turn has led me to essentialism. It's all coming together. Watch this space. 'Explanatory' is the key to everything!
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23669
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Thinkers say that matter has intrinsic powers, but is also passive and acted upon [Reid]
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Full Idea:
Those philosophers who attribute to matter the power of gravitation, and other active powers, teach us, at the same time, that matter is a substance altogether inert, and merely passive; …that those powers are impressed on it by some external cause.
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From:
Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6)
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A reaction:
This shows the dilemma of the period, when 'laws of nature' were imposed on passive matter by God, and yet gravity and magnetism appeared as inherent properties of matter.
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23666
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It is obvious that there could not be a power without a subject which possesses it [Reid]
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Full Idea:
It is evident that a power is a quality, and cannot exist without a subject to which it belongs. That power may exist without any being or subject to which that power may be attributed, is an absurdity, shocking to every man of common understanding.
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From:
Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 1)
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A reaction:
This is understandble in the 18th C, when free-floating powers were inconceivable, but now that we have fields and plasmas and whatnot, we can't rule out pure powers as basic. However, I incline to agree with Reid. Matter is active.
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12800
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Externalists want to understand knowledge, Internalists want to understand justification [Foley]
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Full Idea:
Externalists are principally interested in understanding what knowledge is, ..while internalists, by contrast, are principally interested in explicating a sense of justification ..from one's own perspective.
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From:
Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.314)
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A reaction:
I find this very helpful, since I have a strong bias towards internalism (with a social dimension), and I see now that it is because I am more interested in what a (good) justification is than what some entity in reality called 'knowledge' consists of.
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12802
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We aren't directly pragmatic about belief, but pragmatic about the deliberation which precedes it [Foley]
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Full Idea:
It is rare for pragmatic considerations to influence the rationality of our beliefs in the crass, direct way that Pascal's Wager envisions. Instead, they determine the direction and shape of our investigative and deliberative projects and practices.
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From:
Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.320)
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A reaction:
[See Idea 6684 for Pascal's Wager] Foley is evidently a full-blown pragmatist (which is bad), but this is nicely put. We can't deny the importance of the amount of effort put into an enquiry. Maybe it is an epistemic duty, rather than a means to an end.
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8383
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Day and night are constantly conjoined, but they don't cause one another [Reid, by Crane]
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Full Idea:
A famous example of Thomas Reid: day regularly follows night, and night regularly follows day. There is therefore a constant conjunction between night and day. But day does not cause night, nor does night cause day.
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From:
report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788]) by Tim Crane - Causation 1.2.2
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A reaction:
Not a fatal objection to Hume, of course, because in the complex real world there are huge numbers of nested constant conjunctions. Night and the rotation of the Earth are conjoined. But how do you tell which constant conjunctions are causal?
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23667
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Regular events don't imply a cause, without an innate conviction of universal causation [Reid]
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Full Idea:
A train of events following one another ever so regularly, could never lead us to the notion of a cause, if we had not, from our constitution, a conviction of the necessity of a cause for every event.
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From:
Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 5)
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A reaction:
Presumably a theist like Reid must assume that the actions of God are freely chosen, rather than necessities. It's hard to see why this principle should be innate in us, and hard to see why it must thereby be true. A bit Kantian, this idea.
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23670
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Scientists don't know the cause of magnetism, and only discover its regulations [Reid]
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Full Idea:
A Newtonian philosopher …confesses his ignorance of the true cause of magnetic motion, and thinks that his business, as a philosopher, is only to find from experiment the laws by which it is regulated in all cases.
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From:
Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6)
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A reaction:
Since there is a 'true cause', that implies that the laws don't actively 'regulate' the magnetism, but only describe its regularity, which I think is the correct view of laws.
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