17 ideas
| 20728 | Metaphysics is hopeless with its present epistemology; common-sense realism is needed [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: Despair over metaphysics will not change until it has shaken off the incubus of a perverted epistemology, which has left thought in a hopeless tangle - until common-sense critical realism is made the starting point for investigating reality. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.144) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that this is what has happened to analytic metaphysics since Kripke. Careful discussions about the nature of an object, or a category, or a property, are relying on unquestioned robust realism. Quite right too. |
| 10928 | Maybe we can quantify modally if the objects are intensional, but it seems unlikely [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps there is no objection to quantifying into modal contexts as long as the values of any variables thus quantified are limited to intensional objects, but they also lead to disturbing examples. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §3) | |
| A reaction: [Quine goes on to give his examples] I take it that possibilities are features of actual reality, not merely objects of thought. The problem is that they are harder to know than actual objects. |
| 10925 | Failure of substitutivity shows that a personal name is not purely referential [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Failure of substitutivity shows that the occurrence of a personal name is not purely referential. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §1) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I understand the notion of a name being 'purely' referential, as if it somehow ceased to be a word, and was completely transparent to the named object. |
| 10926 | Quantifying into referentially opaque contexts often produces nonsense [Quine] |
| Full Idea: If to a referentially opaque context of a variable we apply a quantifier, with the intention that it govern that variable from outside the referentially opaque context, then what we commonly end up with is unintended sense or nonsense. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §2) |
| 20726 | We can only distinguish self from non-self if there is an inflexible external reality [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: Were there no inflexible reality outside of the individual, opposing and limiting it, knowledge of the self and the non-self would never develop. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.140) | |
| A reaction: Presumably opponents would have to say that such 'knowledge' is an illusion. This is in no way a conclusive argument, but I approach the problem of realism in quest of the best explanation, and this idea is important evidence. |
| 20727 | Common-sense realism rests on our interests and practical life [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: It is the determination of the external world from the practical standpoint, from the standpoint of interest, that may be defined as the common-sense view of reality. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.141) | |
| A reaction: Probably more appropriately named the 'pragmatic' view of reality. Relying on what is 'practical' seems to offer some objectivity, but relying on 'interest' rather less so. Can I be an anti-realist when life goes badly, and a realist when it goes well? |
| 20730 | If objects are doubted because their appearances change, that presupposes one object [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: If objects are doubted because the same object appears differently at different times and circumstances, in order that this judgement shall have weight it must be assumed that the object under question is the same in its different presentations. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.145) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Scepticism could eat into the underlying object as well. Is the underlying object a 'substrate'? If so, what's that? Is the object just a bundle of a properties? If so, there is no underlying object. |
| 20729 | Arguments that objects are unknowable or non-existent assume the knower's existence [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: Arguments for the absolute unknowability or non-existence of an external object only works by assuming that another external object, an individual, is known completely in so far as that individual expresses a judgement about an external object. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.145) | |
| A reaction: Anti-realism is a decay that eats into everything. You can't doubt all the externals without doubting all the internals as well. |
| 20731 | The idea that everything is relations is contradictory; relations are part of the concept of things [Colvin] |
| Full Idea: The doctrine [that all we can know is the relations between subject and object] is in its essence self-contradictory, since our very idea of thing implies that it is something in relation either actually or potentially. | |
| From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.150) | |
| A reaction: Ladyman and Ross try to defend an account of reality based entirely on relations. I'm with Colvin on this one. All accounts of reality based either on pure relations or pure functions have a huge hole in their theory. |
| 10930 | Quantification into modal contexts requires objects to have an essence [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A reversion to Aristotelian essentialism is required if quantification into modal contexts is to be insisted on. An object must be seen as having some of its traits necessarily. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §3) | |
| A reaction: This thought leads directly to Kripke's proposal of rigid designation of objects (and Lewis response of counterparts), which really gets modal logic off the ground. Quine's challenge remains - the modal logic entails a huge metaphysical commitment. |
| 14645 | To be necessarily greater than 7 is not a trait of 7, but depends on how 7 is referred to [Quine] |
| Full Idea: To be necessarily greater than 7 is not a trait of a number, but depends on the manner of referring to the number. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §2) | |
| A reaction: The most concise quotation of Quine's objection to 'de re' modality. The point is whether the number might have been referred to as 'the number of planets'. So many of these problems are solved by fixing unambiguous propositions first. |
| 9201 | Whether 9 is necessarily greater than 7 depends on how '9' is described [Quine, by Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Quine's metaphysical argument is that if 9 is 7+2 the number 9 will be necessarily greater than 7, but when 9 is described as the number of planets, the number will not be necessarily greater than 7. The necessity depends on how it is described. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953]) by Kit Fine - Intro to 'Modality and Tense' p. 3 | |
| A reaction: Thus necessity would be entirely 'de dicto' and not 'de re'. It sounds like a feeble argument. If I describe the law of identity (a=a) as 'my least favourite logical principle', that won't make it contingent. Describe 9, or refer to it? See Idea 9203. |
| 10927 | Necessity only applies to objects if they are distinctively specified [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Necessity does not properly apply to the fulfilment of conditions by objects (such as the number which numbers the planets), apart from special ways of specifying them. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §3) | |
| A reaction: This appears to say that the only necessity is 'de dicto', and that there is no such thing as 'de re' necessity (of the thing in itself). How can Quine deny that there might be de re necessities? His point is epistemological - how can we know them? |
| 9203 | We can't quantify in modal contexts, because the modality depends on descriptions, not objects [Quine, by Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: 'Necessarily 9>7' may be true while the sentence 'necessarily the number of planets < 7' is false, even though it is obtained by substituting a coreferential term. So quantification in these contexts is unintelligible, without a clear object. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953]) by Kit Fine - Intro to 'Modality and Tense' p. 4 | |
| A reaction: This is Quine's second argument against modality. See Idea 9201 for his first. Fine attempts to refute it. The standard reply seems to be to insist that 9 must therefore be an object, which pushes materialist philosophers into reluctant platonism. |
| 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 |
| 10931 | We can't say 'necessarily if x is in water then x dissolves' if we can't quantify modally [Quine] |
| Full Idea: To say an object is soluble in water is to say that it would dissolve if it were in water,..which implies that 'necessarily if x is in water then x dissolves'. Yet we do not know if there is a suitable sense of 'necessarily' into which we can so quantify. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §4) | |
| A reaction: This is why there has been a huge revival of scientific essentialism - because Krike seems to offer exacty the account which Quine said was missing. So can you have modal logic without rigid designation? |
| 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. |