21 ideas
9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The incremental progress which I envisage for philosophy lacks the drama after which some philosophers still hanker, and that hankering is itself a symptom of the intellectual immaturity that helps hold philosophy back. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: This could stand as a motto for the whole current profession of analytical philosophy. It means that if anyone attempts to be dramatic they can make their own way out. They'll find Kripke out there, smoking behind the dustbins. |
9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Even if talk of truth as correspondence to the facts is metaphorical, it is a bad metaphor for analytic truth in a way that it is not for synthetic truth. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 3.1) | |
A reaction: A very simple and rather powerful point. Maybe the word 'truth' should be withheld from such cases. You might say that accepted analytic truths are 'conventional'. If that is wrong, then they correspond to natural facts at a high level of abstraction. |
9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The debate between realism and anti-realism has become notorious in the rest of philosophy for its obscurity, convolution, and lack of progress. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: I find this reassuring, because fairly early on I decided that this problem was not of great interest, and quietly tiptoed away. I take the central issue to be whether nature has 'joints', to which the answer appears to be 'yes'. End of story. |
9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
Full Idea: It is sometimes argued that if there is such a thing as a mountain it would be a vague object, but it is logically impossible for an object to be vague, so there is no such thing as a mountain. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 7.2) | |
A reaction: I don't take this to be a daft view. No one is denying the existence of the solid rock that is involved, but allowing such a vague object may be a slippery slope to the acceptance of almost anything as an 'object'. |
9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The constraints of common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: Wiliamson has described himself (in my hearing) as a 'rottweiller realist', but presumably the problem of vagueness interests a lot of people precisely because it pushes us away from common sense and classical logic. |
14221 | Serious essentialism says everything has essences, they're not things, and they ground necessities [Shalkowski] |
Full Idea: Serious essentialism is the position that a) everything has an essence, b) essences are not themselves things, and c) essences are the ground for metaphysical necessity and possibility. | |
From: Scott Shalkowski (Essence and Being [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: If a house is being built, it might acquire an identity first, and only get an essence later. Essences can be physical, but if you extract them you destroy thing thing of which they were the essence. Does all of this apply to abstract 'things'. |
14222 | Essences are what it is to be that (kind of) thing - in fact, they are the thing's identity [Shalkowski] |
Full Idea: The route into essentialism is, first, a recognition that the essence of a thing is "what it is to be" that (kind of) thing; the essence of a thing is just its identity. | |
From: Scott Shalkowski (Essence and Being [2008], 'Essent') | |
A reaction: The first half sounds right, and very Aristotelian. The second half is dramatically different, controversial, and far less plausible. Slipping in 'kind of' is also highly dubious. This remark shows, I think, some confusion about essences. |
14226 | We distinguish objects by their attributes, not by their essences [Shalkowski] |
Full Idea: In ordinary contexts, we distinguish objects not by their essences but by their attributes. | |
From: Scott Shalkowski (Essence and Being [2008], 'Ess and Know') | |
A reaction: Hence we have a gap between what bestows identity intrinsically, and how we bestow identity conventionally. If you could grasp the essence of something, you might predict a new attribute, as yet unobserved. |
14225 | Critics say that essences are too mysterious to be known [Shalkowski] |
Full Idea: According to critics, the thorniest problem for essentialism is the question of our knowledge of essence. It is usually at this point that terms of abuse such as 'dark', 'mysterious', and 'occult' are wheeled out. | |
From: Scott Shalkowski (Essence and Being [2008], 'Ess and Know') | |
A reaction: I'm inclined to think that the existence of essences can be fairly conclusively inferred, but that attributing a precise identity to them is the biggest challenge. |
14223 | De dicto necessity has linguistic entities as their source, so it is a type of de re necessity [Shalkowski] |
Full Idea: De dicto necessity is a species of de re necessity. Anyone prone to countenance de dicto necessity must recognise mental and/or linguistic entities, thus counting each of them as a res to which necessity attaches. | |
From: Scott Shalkowski (Essence and Being [2008], 'Essent') | |
A reaction: This seems to rest on the Kit Fine thought that analytic necessities seem to derive from the essences of words such as 'bachelor'. I like this idea: all necessity is de re, but some of the 'things' are words. |
9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of metaphysical modality requires no dedicated faculty of intuition. It is simply a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking, a kind of thinking tightly integrated with our thinking about the spatio-temporal world. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.6) | |
A reaction: This seems to me to be spot-on, though it puts the focus increasingly on the faculty of imagination, as arguably an even more extraordinary feature of brains than the much-vaunted normal consciousness. |
16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
Full Idea: The psychological mechanism that Williamson proposes as the supposedly reliable source of our knowledge of necessities only seems applicable to counterfactuals that are distinctively causal, not metaphysical, in character. | |
From: comment on Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007]) by E.J. Lowe - What is the Source of Knowledge of Modal Truths? 5 | |
A reaction: My rough impression of Williamson's account is that it is correct but unilluminating. We have to assess necessities by counterfactual thinking, because nothing else is available (apart from evaluating the coherence of the findings). |
9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of modality often focuses on (and pours scorn on) imagination or conceivability as a test of possibility, while ignoring the role of the imagination in the assessment of mundane counterfactuals. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.4) | |
A reaction: Good point. I've been guilty of this easy scorn myself. Williamson gives our modal capacities an evolutionary context. What is needed is well-informed imagination, rather than wild fantasy. |
9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
Full Idea: There is extensive 'armchair knowledge' in which experience plays no strictly evidential role, but it may not fit the stereotype of the a priori, because the contribution of experience was more than enabling, such as armchair truths about our environment. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.5) | |
A reaction: Once this point is conceded we have no idea where to draw the line. Does 'if it is red it can't be green' derive from experience? I think it might. |
9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Crude rationalists postulate a special knowledge-generating faculty of rational intuition. Crude empiricists regard intuition as an obscurantist term of folk psychology. Linguistic/conceptual philosophy says it reveals linguistic or conceptual competence. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: Kripke seems to think that it is the basis of logical competence. I would use it as a blank term for any insight in which we have considerable confidence, and yet are unable to articulate its basis; roughly, for rational thought that evades logic. |
20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: 'Intuition' plays a major role in contemporary analytic philosophy's self-understanding. ...When contemporary analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they appeal to intuitions. ...Thus intuitions are presented as our evidence in philosophy. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], p.214-5), quoted by Herman Cappelen - Philosophy without Intuitions 01.1 | |
A reaction: Williamson says we must investigate this 'scandal', but Cappelen's book says analytic philosophy does not rely on intuition. |
9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Someone who acquires the word 'gob' just by being reliably told that it is synonymous with 'mouth' knows what 'gob' means without being fully competent to use it. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 4.7) | |
A reaction: Not exactly an argument against meaning-as-use, but a very nice cautionary example to show that 'knowing the meaning' of a word may be a rather limited, and dangerous, achievement. |
14224 | Equilateral and equiangular aren't the same, as we have to prove their connection [Shalkowski] |
Full Idea: That 'all and only equilateral triangles are equiangular' required proof, and not for mere curiosity, is grounds for thinking that being an equilateral triangle is not the same property as being an equiangular triangle. | |
From: Scott Shalkowski (Essence and Being [2008], 'Serious') | |
A reaction: If you start with equiangularity, does equilateralness then require proof? This famous example is of two concepts which seem to be coextensional, but seem to have a different intension. Does a dependence relation drive a wedge between them? |
9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Given empirical evidence for the approximate intertranslatability of all human languages, and a universal innate basis of human cognition, we may wonder how 'other' any human culture really is. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 8.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to be a fairly accurate account of the situation. In recent centuries people seem to have been over-impressed by superficial differences in cultural behaviour, but we increasingly see the underlying identity. |
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. |