58 ideas
| 6123 | Empirical investigation can't discover if holes exist, or if two things share a colour [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Ontology is not empirical, but ontologists do make discoveries; empirical investigation won't discover that holes exist; we see that two things are the same colour, but a philosopher must resolve whether one universal is present in both. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is one of the best, simplest and clearest statements I have encountered of the autonomy of philosophy. One may, of course, respond by saying 'who cares?', but then who cares about quarks, or the economy of the Spanish Empire? |
| 1618 | We study bound variables not to know reality, but to know what reality language asserts [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We look to bound variables in connection with ontology not in order to know what there is, but in order to know what a given remark or doctrine, ours or someone else's, says there is. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.15) |
| 8455 | Canonical notation needs quantification, variables and predicates, but not names [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: Quine says that names need not be part of one's canonical notation; in fact, whatever scientific purposes are accomplished by names can be carried out just as well by the devices of quantification, variables and predicates. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This is part of Quine's analysis of where the ontological commitment of a language is to be found. Kripke's notion that a name baptises an item comes as a challenge to this view. |
| 8456 | Quine extended Russell's defining away of definite descriptions, to also define away names [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: Quine extended Russell's theory for defining away definite descriptions, so that he could also define away names. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Quine also gets rid of universals and properties, so his ontology is squeezed from both the semantic and the metaphysical directions. Quine seems to be the key figure in modern ontology. If you want to expand it (E.J. Lowe), justify yourself to Quine. |
| 1611 | Names can be converted to descriptions, and Russell showed how to eliminate those [Quine] |
| Full Idea: I have shown that names can be converted to descriptions, and Russell has shown that descriptions can be eliminated. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.12) |
| 17743 | De Morgan introduced a 'universe of discourse', to replace Boole's universe of 'all things' [De Morgan, by Walicki] |
| Full Idea: In 1846 De Morgan introduced the enormously influential notion of a possibly arbitrary and stipulated 'universe of discourse'. It replaced Boole's original - and metaphysically a bit suspect - universe of 'all things'. | |
| From: report of Augustus De Morgan (works [1846]) by Michal Walicki - Introduction to Mathematical Logic History D.1.1 | |
| A reaction: This not only brings formal logic under control, but also reflects normal talk, because there is always an explicit or implicit domain of discourse when we talk. Of virtually any conversation, you can say what it is 'about'. |
| 1613 | Logicists cheerfully accept reference to bound variables and all sorts of abstract entities [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The logicism of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Church and Carnap condones the use of bound variables or reference to abstract entities known and unknown, specifiable and unspecifiable, indiscriminately. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 1616 | Formalism says maths is built of meaningless notations; these build into rules which have meaning [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The formalism of Hilbert keeps classical maths as a play of insignificant notations. Agreement is found among the rules which, unlike the notations, are quite significant and intelligible. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.15) |
| 1615 | Intuitionism says classes are invented, and abstract entities are constructed from specified ingredients [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The intuitionism of Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl and others holds that classes are invented, and accepts reference to abstract entities only if they are constructed from pre-specified ingredients. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 1614 | Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 10241 | For Quine, there is only one way to exist [Quine, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Quine takes 'existence' to be univocal, with a single ontology for his entire 'web of belief'. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Stewart Shapiro - Philosophy of Mathematics 4.9 | |
| A reaction: Thus, there can be no 'different way of existing' (such as 'subsisting') for abstract objects such as those of mathematics. I presume that Quine's low-key physicalism is behind this. |
| 4064 | The idea of a thing and the idea of existence are two sides of the same coin [Quine, by Crane] |
| Full Idea: According to Quine's conception of existence, the idea of a thing and the idea of existence are two sides of the same coin. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Tim Crane - Elements of Mind 1.5 | |
| A reaction: I suspect that Quine's ontology is too dependent on language, but this thought seems profoundly right |
| 19277 | Quine rests existence on bound variables, because he thinks singular terms can be analysed away [Quine, by Hale] |
| Full Idea: It is because Quine holds constant singular terms to be always eliminable by an extension of Russell's theory of definite descriptions that he takes the bound variables of first-order quantification to be the sole means by which we refer to objects. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Bob Hale - Necessary Beings 01.2 | |
| A reaction: Hale defends a Fregean commitment to existence based on the reference of singular terms in true statements. I think they're both wrong. If you want to know what I am committed to, ask me. Don't infer it from my use of English, or logic. |
| 6143 | Prolonged events don't seem to endure or exist at any particular time [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: That events endure is difficult to reconcile with the claim that, say, the American Civil War existed; for such an event seems never to have been 'wholly present' at any single time. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §3 n14) | |
| A reaction: A nice problem example for those who, like Kim, want their ontology to include events. Personally I am happy to allow some vagueness here. The Civil War only became an 'event' on the day it finished. An event's time need not be an instant. |
| 12210 | Quine's ontology is wrong; his question is scientific, and his answer is partly philosophical [Fine,K on Quine] |
| Full Idea: Quine's approach to ontology asks the wrong question, a scientific rather than philosophical question, and answers it in the wrong way, by appealing to philosophical considerations in addition to ordinary scientific considerations. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Kit Fine - The Question of Ontology p.161 | |
| A reaction: He goes on to call Quine's procedure 'cockeyed'. Presumably Quine would reply with bafflement that scientific and philosophical questions could be considered as quite different from one another. |
| 6135 | A crumbling statue can't become vague, because vagueness is incoherent [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Some would say that annihilating grains of stone from the statue of David (playing the 'Sorites Game') could never make its identity vague, because metaphysical vagueness is simply unintelligible. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: He cites Russell, Dummett and Lewis in support. But Russell is a logical atomist, and Lewis says identity is composition. It strikes me as obvious that identity can be vague; the alternative is the absurdities of the Sorites paradox. |
| 8496 | What actually exists does not, of course, depend on language [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ontological controversy tends into controversy over language, but we must not jump to the conclusion that what there is depends on words. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.16) | |
| A reaction: An important corrective to my constant whinge against philosophers who treat ontology as if it were semantics, of whom Quine is the central villain. Quine was actually quite a sensible chap. |
| 1610 | To be is to be the value of a variable, which amounts to being in the range of reference of a pronoun [Quine] |
| Full Idea: To be assumed as an entity is to be reckoned as the value of a variable. This amounts roughly to saying that to be is to be in the range of reference of a pronoun. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.13) | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 7784. |
| 8459 | Fictional quantification has no ontology, so we study ontology through scientific theories [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: In fiction, 'Once upon a time there was an F who...' obviously does not make an ontological commitment, so Quine says the question of which ontology we accept must be dealt with in terms of the role an ontology plays in a scientific worldview. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This seems to invite questions about the ontology of people who don't espouse a scientific worldview. If your understanding of the outside world and of the past is created for you by storytellers, you won't be a Quinean. |
| 8497 | An ontology is like a scientific theory; we accept the simplest scheme that fits disorderly experiences [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Our acceptance of ontology is similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory; we adopt the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.16) | |
| A reaction: Quine (who says he likes 'desert landscapes') is the modern hero for anyone who loves Ockham's Razor, and seeks extreme simplicity. And yet he finds himself committed to the existence of sets to achieve this. |
| 16261 | If commitment rests on first-order logic, we obviously lose the ontology concerning predication [Maudlin on Quine] |
| Full Idea: If Quine restricts himself to first-order predicate calculus, then the ontological implications concern the subjects of predicates. The nature of predicates, and what must be true for the predication, have disappeared from the radar screen. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Tim Maudlin - The Metaphysics within Physics 3.1 | |
| A reaction: Quine's response, I presume, is that the predicates can all be covered extensionally (red is a list of the red objects), and so a simpler logic will do the whole job. I agree with Maudlin though. |
| 7698 | If to be is to be the value of a variable, we must already know the values available [Jacquette on Quine] |
| Full Idea: To apply Quine's criterion that to be is to be the value of a quantifier-bound variable, we must already know the values of bound variables, which is to say that we must already be in possession of a preferred existence domain. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], Ch.6) by Dale Jacquette - Ontology | |
| A reaction: [A comment on Idea 1610]. Very nice to accuse Quine, of all people, of circularity, given his attack on analytic-synthetic with the same strategy! The values will need to be known extra-lingistically, to avoid more circularity. |
| 6145 | Intrinsic properties are those an object still has even if only that object exists [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Intrinsic properties are, by and large, those properties that an object can exemplify even if that object and its parts (if any) are the only objects that exist. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.I) | |
| A reaction: This leads to all sorts of properties that seemed intrinsic turning out to be relational. In what sense would a single object have mass, or impenetrability? |
| 1612 | Realism, conceptualism and nominalism in medieval universals reappear in maths as logicism, intuitionism and formalism [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The three medieval views on universals (realism, conceptualism and nominalism) reappear in the philosophy of maths as logicism, intuitionism and formalism. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 15402 | There is no entity called 'redness', and that some things are red is ultimate and irreducible [Quine] |
| Full Idea: There is not any entity whatever, individual or otherwise, which is named by the word 'redness'. ...That the houses and roses and sunsets are all of them red may be taken as ultimate and irreducible. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to invite the 'ostrich' charge (Armstrong), that there is something left over that needs explaining. If the reds are ultimate and irreducible, that seems to imply that they have no relationship at all to one another. |
| 4443 | Quine has argued that predicates do not have any ontological commitment [Quine, by Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Quine has attempted to bypass the problem of universals by arguing for the ontological innocence of predicates, since it is the application conditions of predicates which furnish the Realists with much of their case. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by David M. Armstrong - Universals p.503 | |
| A reaction: Presumably this would be a claim that predicates appear to commit us to properties, but that properties are not natural features, and can be reduced to something else. Tricky.. |
| 8498 | Treating scattered sensations as single objects simplifies our understanding of experience [Quine] |
| Full Idea: By bringing together scattered sense events and treating them as perceptions of one object, we reduce the complexity of our stream of experience to a manageable conceptual simplicity. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.17) | |
| A reaction: If, however, our consideration of tricky cases, such as vague objects, or fast-changing objects, or spatially coinciding objects made it all seem too complex, then Quine's argument would be grounds for abandoning objects. See Merricks. |
| 6124 | I say that most of the objects of folk ontology do not exist [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: I argue against the existence of most of the objects alleged to exist by what we might call 'folk ontology'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1) | |
| A reaction: This is the programme for Merricks's heroic book, denying (quite plausibly) the need for large objects in our ontology. It seems that ontology must multiply its entities prodigiously, or else be austere in the extreme. Is there no middle way? |
| 6134 | Is swimming pool water an object, composed of its mass or parts? [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Some - such as those who endorse unrestricted composition or those who believe in a kind of entity called 'a mass' - say that 'the water in the swimming pool' refers to a big material object. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: A well-chosen example to support his thesis that large objects don't (strictly) exist. We certainly must not say (in Quine fashion) that we must accept the ontology of our phrases. I cut nature at the joints, and I say a pool is an obvious joint. |
| 6125 | We can eliminate objects without a commitment to simples [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Eliminativism about physical objects does not require a commitment to (or against) simples. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.I) | |
| A reaction: His strategy is to eliminate objects in favour of whatever it is (an unknown) to which objects actually reduce. His point seems to be clearly correct, just as I might eliminate 'life' from my ontology, without quite knowing what it is. |
| 14229 | Merricks agrees that there are no composite objects, but offers a different semantics [Merricks, by Liggins] |
| Full Idea: Merricks agrees with van Inwagen that there are no composite objects, but disagrees with him about the semantics of talk about material objects. | |
| From: report of Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003]) by David Liggins - Nihilism without Self-Contradiction 4 | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen has one semantics for folk talk, and another semantics 'for the philosophy room'. Merricks seems to have an error theory of folk semantics (i.e. the folk don't understand what they are saying). |
| 6142 | The 'folk' way of carving up the world is not intrinsically better than quite arbitrary ways [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: It is hard to see why the folk way of carving up the material world should - barring further argument - be elevated to a loftier status than the unrestricted compositionist way. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §3.III) | |
| A reaction: There are some right ways to carve up the world, though there is also the capacity to be quite arbitrary, if it is useful, or even amusing. Thus Cyprus is an island (fact), Britons are a nation (useful), and Arsenal fans are sad (amusing). |
| 14472 | If atoms 'arranged baseballwise' break a window, that analytically entails that a baseball did it [Merricks, by Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Given the proper understanding of 'arranged baseballwise', the fact that atoms arranged baseballwise are causally relevant to a shattering analytically entails that a baseball is. | |
| From: report of Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], 3) by Amie L. Thomasson - Ordinary Objects 01.3 | |
| A reaction: This is the key argument of Thomasson's book. Presumably, following Idea 14471, 'I bought some atoms arranged baseballwise' is held to entail 'I bought a baseball'. That seems to beg the question against Van Inwagen and Merricks. |
| 14469 | Overdetermination: the atoms do all the causing, so the baseball causes no breakage [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The Overdetermination Argument: a baseball is irrelevant to whether its atoms shatter a window, the shattering is caused by the atoms in concert, the shattering is not overdetermined, so if the baseball exists it doesn't cause the shattering. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], 3) | |
| A reaction: An obvious thought is that no individual atom does any sort of breaking at all - it is only when they act as a team, and an appropriate name for the team is a 'baseball', and the team is real. |
| 6137 | Clay does not 'constitute' a statue, as they have different persistence conditions (flaking, squashing) [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: A statue is not identical with its constituent lump of clay because they have different persistence conditions; the statue, but not the lump, could survive the loss of a few smallish bits, and the lump, but not the statue, could survive being squashed. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.III) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why a lump can't survive losing a few bits (if the lump never had a precise identity), but it is hard to argue that squashing is a problem. However, presumably the identity (or constitution) between lump and statue is not a necessity. |
| 6127 | 'Unrestricted composition' says any two things can make up a third thing [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: If my dog and the top half of my tree compose an object, this is defended under the title of 'unrestricted (universal) composition', the thesis that any two things compose something. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.II) | |
| A reaction: David Lewis is cited amongst those defending this thesis. My intuition is against this thesis, because I think identity is partly dictated by nature, and is not entirely conventional. You can force an identity, but you feel the 'restriction'. |
| 6131 | Composition as identity is false, as identity is never between a single thing and many things [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: One of the most obvious facts about identity is that it holds one-one (John and Mr Smith) and perhaps many-many (John+Mary and Mr Smith+Miss Jones), but never one-many. It follows that composition as identity (things are their parts) is false. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.IV) | |
| A reaction: This assumes that 'having identity' and 'being identical to' are the same concept. I agree with his conclusion, but am not convinced by the argument. I'm not even quite clear why John and May can't be identical to the Smiths. |
| 6132 | Composition as identity is false, as it implies that things never change their parts [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Composition as identity implies that no persisting object ever changes its parts, which is clearly false, so composition as identity is false. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.IV) | |
| A reaction: Presumably Lewis can say that when a thing subtly changes its parts, it really does lose its strict identity, but becomes another 'time-slice' or close 'counterpart' of the original object. This is a coherent view, but I disagree. I'm a believer. |
| 6141 | There is no visible difference between statues, and atoms arranged statuewise [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: If we imagine a world like ours except that, while there are atoms arranged statuewise in that world, there are no statues, ...no amount of looking around could distinguish that imagined world from ours. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.V) | |
| A reaction: This is one of his arguments for ontological eliminativism about physical objects. If we accept the argument, it will wreak havoc with our entire ontology, and we will end up anti-realists. I say you have to see statues - you just can't miss them. |
| 6130 | 'Composition' says things are their parts; 'constitution' says a whole substance is an object [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Composition as identity claims that a single object is identical with the many parts it comprises; constitution as identity says that a single object (a statue) is identical with a single object (clay) that 'constitutes' it. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1 n11) | |
| A reaction: The constitution view has been utilised (by Lynn Rudder Baker) to give an account of personal identity as constituted by a human body. Neither sounds quite right to me; the former view misses something about reality; the latter doesn't explain much. |
| 6138 | It seems wrong that constitution entails that two objects are wholly co-located [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers deny that two numerically distinct physical objects could be 'wholly co-located'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.III) | |
| A reaction: A fish can be located in a river; the Appenines can be located in Italy. If you accept the objection you will probably have to accept identity-as-composition, or object-eliminativism. One object can have two causal roles, supporting two identities. |
| 6128 | Objects decompose (it seems) into non-overlapping parts that fill its whole region [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Intuitively, an object's parts at one level of decomposition are parts of that object that do not overlap and that, collectively, fill the whole region the object fills. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.II) | |
| A reaction: A nice case where 'intuition' must be cited as the basis for the claim, and yet it is hard to see how anyone could possibly disagree. Exhibit 73 in favour of rationalism. This ideas shows the structure of nature and the workings of our minds. |
| 6136 | Eliminativism about objects gives the best understanding of the Sorites paradox [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: I say we should endorse eliminativism about physical objects, because it offers the most plausible understanding of what occurs during the Sorites Game (eliminating grains of a thing one at a time). | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: That is one route to go in explaining the paradox (i.e. by saying there never was a 'heap' in the first place). I suspect a better route is to say that heaps really exist as natural phenomena, but they suffer from vague identity and borderline cases. |
| 8856 | Quine's indispensability argument said arguments for abstracta were a posteriori [Quine, by Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Fifty years ago, Quine convinced everyone who cared that the argument for abstract objects, if there were going to be one, would have to be a posteriori in nature; an argument that numbers, for example, are indispensable entities for 'total science'. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], §1) by Stephen Yablo - Apriority and Existence | |
| A reaction: This sets the scene for the modern debate on the a priori. The claim that abstractions are indispensable for a factual account of the physical world strikes me as highly implausible. |
| 12443 | Can an unactualized possible have self-identity, and be distinct from other possibles? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? But what sense can be found in talking of entities which cannot meaningfully be said to be identical with themselve and distinct from one another. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.4) | |
| A reaction: Can he seriously mean that we are not allowed to talk about possible objects? If I design a house, it is presumably identical to the house I am designing, and distinct from houses I'm not designing. |
| 6133 | If my counterpart is happy, that is irrelevant to whether I 'could' have been happy [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The existence of someone in another world who is a lot like me, but happier, is irrelevant to whether I - this very person - could have been happier, even if we call that other-worldly someone 'my counterpart'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.IV) | |
| A reaction: He says this is a familiar objection. I retain a lingering deterministic doubt about whether it ever makes to sense to say that I 'could' have been happy, given that I am not. It does seem to make sense to say that I was close to happiness, but missed it. |
| 18209 | We can never translate our whole language of objects into phenomenalism [Quine] |
| Full Idea: There is no likelihood that each sentence about physical objects can actually be translated, however deviously and complexly, into the phenomenalistic language. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.18), quoted by Penelope Maddy - Naturalism in Mathematics III.2 |
| 6150 | The 'warrant' for a belief is what turns a true belief into knowledge [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The 'warrant' for a belief is that, whatever it is, that makes the difference between mere true belief and knowledge. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §7.II) | |
| A reaction: Hence a false belief could be well justified, but it could never be warranted. This makes warrant something like the externalist view of justification, a good supporting situation for a belief, rather than an inner awareness of support for it. |
| 6144 | You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: When you hold your child, you do exactly that - hold the child himself or herself - and not some stand-in. This implies that we are not two substances, and we are not mental states nor akin to software. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4) | |
| A reaction: And it is not just a brain, either. This is a nice simple example to support the sensible view that a person is a type of animal. Like all other physical objects that is a bit vague, so we should not be distracted by borderline cases like brain bisection. |
| 6140 | Maybe the word 'I' can only refer to persons [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: One might say that the word 'I' can only have a person as its reference. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.IV) | |
| A reaction: To infer the existence of persons from this would be to commit what I think of as the Linguistic Fallacy, of deducing ontology directly from language. We might allow (Dennett fashion) that folk categories require the fiction of persons. |
| 6149 | Free will and determinism are incompatible, since determinism destroys human choice [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The main recent support for incompatibilism is the 'no choice' argument: we have no choice that the past and the laws of nature entail human actions, we have no choice about what the past or the laws are like, so we have no choice about our actions. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §6.III) | |
| A reaction: Since I consider free will to be an absurd chimera, I think this argument involves a total misunderstanding of what a 'choice' is. Since the human brain is a wonderfully sophisticated choosing machine, our whole life consists of choices. |
| 6148 | Human organisms can exercise downward causation [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Human organisms have non-redundant causal powers, and so can exercise downward causation. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.VII) | |
| A reaction: The hallmark of property dualism. This notion needs a lot more expansion and exploration than Merricks gives it, and I don't think it will be enough to provide 'free will', or even, as Merricks hopes, to place humans in a distinct ontological category. |
| 6146 | Before Creation it is assumed that God still had many many mental properties [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The belief of theists that God might never have created implies that there is a possible world that contains just a single entity with many conscious mental properties. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.II) | |
| A reaction: So if we believe content is wide, we must believe that God was incapable of thought before creation, and thus couldn't plan creation, and so didn't create, and so the Creator is a logical impossibility. Cool. |
| 6147 | The hypothesis of solipsism doesn't seem to be made incoherent by the nature of mental properties [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The hypothesis of solipsism, that I - an entity with many conscious mental properties - am all that exists, while surely false, is not rendered incoherent simply by the nature of the mental properties. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.II) | |
| A reaction: This, along with the thought of a pre-Creation God, is a nice intuitive case for showing that we strongly believe in some degree of narrow content. |
| 1619 | There is an attempt to give a verificationist account of meaning, without the error of reducing everything to sensations [Dennett on Quine] |
| Full Idea: This essay offered a verificationist account of language without the logical positivist error of supposing that verification could be reduced to a mere sequence of sense-experiences. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Daniel C. Dennett - works | |
| A reaction: This is because of Quine's holistic view of theory, so that sentences are not tested individually, where sense-data might be needed as support, but as whole teams which need to be simple, coherent etc. |
| 1609 | I do not believe there is some abstract entity called a 'meaning' which we can 'have' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers construe meaningfulness as the having (in some sense of 'having') of some abstract entity which he calls a meaning, whereas I do not. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.11) | |
| A reaction: To call a meaning an 'entity' is to put a spin on it that makes it very implausible. Introspection shows us a gap between grasping a word and grasping its meaning. |
| 1617 | The word 'meaning' is only useful when talking about significance or about synonymy [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The useful ways in which ordinary people talk about meanings boil down to two: the having of meanings, which is significance, and sameness of meaning, or synonymy. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.11) | |
| A reaction: If the Fregean criterion for precise existence is participation in an identity relation, then synonymy does indeed pinpoint what we mean by 'meaning. |
| 19159 | Quine relates predicates to their objects, by being 'true of' them [Quine, by Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Quine relates predicates to the things of which they can be predicated ...and hence predicates are 'true of' each and every thing of which the predicate can be truly predicated. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Donald Davidson - Truth and Predication 5 | |
| A reaction: Davidson comments that the virtue of Quine's view is negative, in avoiding a regress in the explanation of predication. I'm not sure about true 'of' as an extra sort of truth, but I like dropping predicates from ontology, and sticking to truths. |