8 ideas
| 13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism, as I shall understand it, is the doctrine that among the attributes of a thing some are essential, others merely accidental. Its essential attributes are those it has necessarily, those it could not have lacked. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.149) | |
| A reaction: The problem with this, which Cartwright does not address, is that trivial and gerrymandered properties (such as having self-identity, or being 'such that 2+2=4') seem to be necessarily, but don't seem to constitute the essence of a thing. |
| 13954 | The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: I see no reason for thinking essentialism unintelligible, but a chief perplexity is the obscurity of the grounds on which ratings of attributes as essential or accidental are to be made. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
| A reaction: In that case some of us younger philosophers will have to roll up our sleeves and tease out the grounds for essentialism, starting with Aristotle and Leibniz, and ending with the successes of modern science. |
| 13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: Apparently those who think essentialism unintelligible see support for their position in the doctrine that necessary truths are all analytic. Only relative to some mode of designation does it make sense to speak of an object as necessarily this or that. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
| A reaction: He has in mind Quine and his mathematician-cyclist (Idea 8482). Personally I have no problems with the example. No one is essentially a cyclist - that isn't what essence is. Two-legged people can be cyclists. |
| 13953 | An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: For an ostension to be successful it is surely not necessary that I gather what sort of object it is you have indicated, such as being a horse or a zebra. I may even gather which thing you have indicated without knowing that it is a mammal or even alive. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.157) | |
| A reaction: This nicely articulates the objection I have always felt to Geach's relative identity. 'Oh my God, what the hell is THAT???' is probably going to be a successful act of verbal reference, even while explicitly denying all knowledge of sortals. |
| 18699 | Carnap tried to define all scientific predicates in terms of primitive relations, using type theory [Carnap, by Button] |
| Full Idea: Carnap's ultimate ambition in the Aufbau is to provide a constitution-system within which any predicate of any scientific vocabulary can be explicitly defined in terms of primitive relations holding among basic elements, using type theory. | |
| From: report of Rudolph Carnap (The Logical Structure of the World (Aufbau) [1928]) by Tim Button - The Limits of Reason 05.2 | |
| A reaction: David Chalmers has a modern shot at the same project in 'Constructing the World'. Ramsey sentences seem to be part of the same game. |
| 12131 | All concepts can be derived from a few basics, making possible one science of everything [Carnap, by Brody] |
| Full Idea: In the 'Aufbau', Carnap tried to show how all of our concepts can be derived from a few basic concepts. ..Consequently there can be one science which studied all that existed, the science of the objects corresponding to the basic concepts. | |
| From: report of Rudolph Carnap (The Logical Structure of the World (Aufbau) [1928]) by Baruch Brody - Identity and Essence 2.2 | |
| A reaction: This is Carnap's Constructionist programme. |
| 7861 | Libet says the processes initiated in the cortex can still be consciously changed [Libet, by Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Libet himself points out that the conscious decisions still have the power to 'endorse' or 'cancel', so to speak, the processes initiated by the earlier cortical activity: no action will result if the action's execution is consciously countermanded. | |
| From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 1.4 | |
| A reaction: This is why Libet's findings do not imply 'epiphenomenalism'. It seems that part of a decisive action is non-conscious, undermining the all-or-nothing view of consciousness. Searle tries to smuggle in free will at this point (Idea 3817). |
| 6660 | Libet found conscious choice 0.2 secs before movement, well after unconscious 'readiness potential' [Libet, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Libet found that a subject's conscious choice to move was about a fifth of a second before movement, and thus later than the onset of the brain's so-called 'readiness potential', which seems to imply that unconscious processes initiates action. | |
| From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by E.J. Lowe - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Ch.9 | |
| A reaction: Of great interest to philosophers! It seems to make conscious choices epiphenomenal. The key move, I think, is to give up the idea of consciousness as being all-or-nothing. My actions are still initiated by 'me', but 'me' shades off into unconsciousness. |