21 ideas
| 18928 | If maximalism is necessary, then that nothing exists has a truthmaker, which it can't have [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: I think truthmaker theory is contingently true. [n24] If there could have been nothing, what makes that true? But if truthmaker maximalism is a necessary truth, there's necessarily something. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 4 n24) | |
| A reaction: Truthmaking is beginning to feel like Gödel's Theorems. You can 'make' lots and lots of truths ('prove' in Gödel), but there will be truths that elude the making. Truthmaker theory itself will be one example. So is Maximalism another one? |
| 18931 | Determinate truths don't need extra truthmakers, just truthmakers that are themselves determinate [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: I reject saying there must be an additional truthmaker for 'Determinately, p': rather, I say that the truthmaker for p must simply be a determinate existent rather than a mere existent. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 6) | |
| A reaction: As he puts it (quite persuasively), God doesn't need to add an extra truthmaker for a determinate truth. Cameron rejects Necessitarianism. He uses 'determinate' fairly uncritically. What makes the truth of the truthmaker's determinacy? |
| 18932 | The facts about the existence of truthmakers can't have a further explanation [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: The orthodox truthmaker theorist thinks the facts concerning the existence of the truthmakers do not admit of further explanation. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 6) | |
| A reaction: It is fairly obvious, I suppose, that not every truth can have a truthmaker, just as the verification principle could not be verified, and you can't perceive your perception in order to check it. Could God withdraw the power of truthmaking? |
| 18923 | The present property 'having been F' says nothing about a thing's intrinsic nature [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: The property 'being such as to have been a child' is suspicious because it points beyond its instances in the sense that a thing's presently having that property tells us nothing about the present intrinsic nature of the thing. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 2) | |
| A reaction: This is his objection to what he calls the 'Lucretian' strategy, which tries to make history into a property of present reality. That is implausible, I think, because there is no test for the property, apart from knowledge of the past. Reality is tensed? |
| 18926 | One temporal distibution property grounds our present and past truths [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: Temporal distributional properties are fundamental - it is exactly the same property that is grounding the truth about how the bearer now is that is grounding truths about how the bearer was. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 4) | |
| A reaction: Some kind of slight of hand is going on here, though he does a nice job of confronting all possible objections. This is the sort of metaphysics you come up with when you stake everything on the dubious notion of a 'property'. |
| 18929 | We don't want present truthmakers for the past, if they are about to cease to exist! [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: Whilst not logically inconsistent, it would be bad if it could now be true that ten years ago there was a sea battle, but that five years ago it wasn't true that five years before that there was a sea battle. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 4) | |
| A reaction: Nicely makes the point that you can't let the past rely on truthmakers in the present, if those truthmakers are about to go out of existence. So you need a sustained truthmaker, without giving up presentism. Enter 'temporally distributed properties'? |
| 18924 | Being polka-dotted is a 'spatial distribution' property [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: Spatial distribution properties say how things are across a region of space, such as being polka-dotted. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 3) | |
| A reaction: I think the routine fallacy of inferring properties from predicates is buried here. We truthfully describe it as 'polka-dotted', but that doesn't mean we must reify polka-dottedness, and see it as a feature of the world. What is a 'jumbled' space? |
| 18930 | Change is instantiation of a non-uniform distributional property, like 'being red-then-orange' [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: What change is on the account being offered is to instantiate a non-uniform distributional property. Being red at one time and orange at a later time is to be analysed as instantiating the distributional property 'being red-then-orange'. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 4) | |
| A reaction: One of those moments when you begin to doubt whether 'being analysed' successfully actually adds much to our wisdom. His property sounds suspiciously 'gruesome' - i.e. subject to the vagaries of how we chose to describe the thing. |
| 19682 | Internalists are much more interested in evidence than externalists are [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: The notion of evidence generally plays a much more significant role in internalist epistemologies than it does in various forms of externalism. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that this is because evidence needs a certain amount of interpretation, whereas raw facts (which externalists seem to rely on) may never even enter a mind. |
| 19687 | Absence of evidence proves nothing, and weird claims need special evidence [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Two well know slogans (popularised by Carl Sagan) are 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence', ...and 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Absence') | |
| A reaction: [Sagan was a popular science writer and broadcaster] The second one is something like Hume's argument against miracles. The old problem of the 'missing link' for human evolution embodied the first idea. |
| 19684 | Does spotting a new possibility count as evidence? [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Does the sudden realization of a heretofore unrecognized possibility count as evidence? | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Evid..') | |
| A reaction: [Nice use of 'heretofore'! Why say 'previously' when you can keep these wonderful old English words alive?] This means that we can imagine new evidence ('maybe the murderer was a snake'!). Wrong. The evidence is what suggests the possibility. |
| 19688 | Every event is highly unlikely (in detail), but may be perfectly plausible [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: At a certain level of detail, almost any claim is unprecedented. How likely is 'Matilda won at Scrabble on Thursday with a score of 438 while drinking mint tea'? But there is nothing particularly unbelievable about the claim. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Extraordinary') | |
| A reaction: A striking idea, which rules out the simplistic idea that we can just assess evidence by its isolated likelihood. Context is crucial. How good is 438? What if she smoked opium? What if there is no Scrabble set on her island? |
| 19686 | Criminal law needs two separate witnesses, but historians will accept one witness [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: An ancient rule in law is that a criminal conviction needs evidence of two independent witnesses, but in history it is assumed that a document deserves the benefit of the doubt if it cannot be independently verified. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Interp..') | |
| A reaction: [compressed; McGrew's full account qualifies it a bit] A nice observation. One might even be suspicious of the two 'independent' witnesses, if there were lots of other reasons to doubt someon's guilt. A single weird document is also dubious. |
| 19680 | Maybe all evidence consists of beliefs, rather than of facts [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers have been attracted to the view that, strictly speaking, what counts as evidence is not a set of physical objects or even experiences, but rather a set of believed propositions. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: This may be right. However, as always, I think animals are a key test. Do animals respond to evidence? Even if they did, they might need to 'make sense' of what they experienced, and even formulate a non-linguistic proposition. |
| 19681 | If all evidence is propositional, what is the evidence for the proposition? Do we face a regress? [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Taking evidence as propositional may trade one problem for another. If the bloodstain isn't evidence, but 'this is a bloodstain' is evidence, then what serves as evidence for the belief about the bloodstain? Is there an infinite regress? | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Prop..') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I quite like evidence being propositional, but then find this. I'll retreat to my beloved coherence. I do not endorse Sellars's 'only a belief can justify a belief', because raw experience has to be part of what is coherent. |
| 19689 | Several unreliable witnesses can give good support, if they all say the same thing [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: The testimony of a number of independent witnesses, none of them particularly reliable, who give substantially the same account of some event, may provide a strong argument in its favor. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Testimonial') | |
| A reaction: A striking point. It obviously works well for panicking people in a crowd during an incident. Does it also apply to independent scientists who are known to cheat? They may not collaborate, but may all want the same result. |
| 19683 | Narrow evidentialism relies wholly on propositions; the wider form includes other items [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Evidentialism comes in both narrow and wide forms depending on whether evidence is taken to consist only of propositions or of a wider range of items. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Evid..') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Conee and Feldman for the wide view, which is not restricted to beliefs] You can hardly rely on occurrent beliefs as evidence, so we often have good knowledge with forgotten justification. But such knowledge has been 'weakened'. |
| 19685 | Falsificationism would be naive if even a slight discrepancy in evidence killed a theory [McGrew] |
| Full Idea: Data do not quite speak for themselves, which speaks against a naive form of falsificationism according to which even the slightest mismatch between theory and evidence suffices to overturn a theory. | |
| From: Timothy McGrew (Evidence [2011], 'Interp..') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Robert Boyle wisely ignoring some data to get a good fit for his graph] |
| 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 |
| 18927 | Surely if things extend over time, then time itself must be extended? [Cameron] |
| Full Idea: If there are temporally extended entities - and there are - then there must be extended regions of time for those entities to extend in. Hence presentism is false. | |
| From: Ross P. Cameron (Truthmaking for Presentists [2011], 4) | |
| A reaction: [Cameron is playing devil's advocate] Something has to be weird here, and I take it to be the fact that the past no longer exists, and yet it is fixed and supports truths. Get over it. My childhood has gone. Totally. Irrevocably. |
| 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. |