24 ideas
| 16435 | Plantinga proposes necessary existent essences as surrogates for the nonexistent things [Plantinga, by Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: Plantinga proposes surrogates for nonexistent things - individual essences that are themselves necessary existents and that correspond one-to-one with all the 'things' that might exist. | |
| From: report of Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970]) by Robert C. Stalnaker - Mere Possibilities 1 | |
| A reaction: There are an awful lot of competing concepts of essence flying around these days. This one seems to require some abstract 'third realm' (or worse) in which these essences can exist, awaiting the arrival of thinkers. Not for me. |
| 14655 | The 'identity criteria' of a name are a group of essential and established facts [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: What we might call 'identity criteria' associated with a name such as 'Aristotle' are what the users of the name regard as essential and established facts about him. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], I) | |
| A reaction: The problem here is that identifying something is superficial, whereas essences run deep. Plantinga is, in fact, talking about Lockean 'nominal essence' (and seems unaware of the fact, and never mentions the Lockean real/nominal distinction). |
| 14658 | 'Being Socrates' and 'being identical with Socrates' characterise Socrates, so they are among his properties [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Surely it is true of Socrates that he is Socrates and he is identical with Socrates. If these are true of him, then 'being Socrates' and 'being identical with Socrates' characterize him; they are among his properties or attributes. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], II) | |
| A reaction: As far as I can see (if you insist on accepting self-identity as meaningful) the most you get here is that these are predicates that can attach to Socrates. If you identify predicates with properties you are in deep metaphysical trouble. |
| 14656 | Does Socrates have essential properties, plus a unique essence (or 'haecceity') which entails them? [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Does Socrates have, in addition to his essential properties, an 'essence' or 'haecceity' - a property essential to him that entails each of his essential properties and that nothing distinct from him has in the world? | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], II) | |
| A reaction: Plantinga says yes, and offers 'Socrateity' (borrowed from Boethius) as his candidate. This is a very odd use of the word 'essence'. I take an essence to be a complex set of fundamental properties. I am also puzzled by his use of the word 'entails'. |
| 14654 | Properties are 'trivially essential' if they are instantiated by every object in every possible world [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Let us call properties that enjoy the distinction of being instantiated by every object in every possible world 'trivially essential properties'. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], I) | |
| A reaction: These would appear to be trivially 'necessary' rather than 'essential'. This continual need for the qualifier 'trivial' shows that they are not talking about proper essences. |
| 14653 | X is essentially P if it is P in every world, or in every X-world, or in the actual world (and not ¬P elsewhere) [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Socrates has P essentially if he has P in every world, or has it in every world in which he exists, or - most plausible of all - has P in the actual world and has its complement [non-P] in no world. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], Intro) | |
| A reaction: These strike me as mere necessary properties, which are not the same thing at all. Essences give rise to the other properties, but Plantinga offers nothing to do the job (and especially not 'Socrateity'!). Essences must explain, say I! |
| 14660 | If a property is ever essential, can it only ever be an essential property? [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Is it the case that any property had essentially by anything is had essentially by everything that has it? | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], III) | |
| A reaction: Plantinga says it is not true, but the only example he can give is Socrates having the property of 'being Socrates or Greek'. I take it to be universally false. There are not two types of property here. Properties sometimes play an essential role. |
| 14661 | Essences are instantiated, and are what entails a thing's properties and lack of properties [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: E is an essence if and only if (a) 'has E essentially' is instantiated in some world or other, and (b) for any world W and property P, E entails 'has P in W' or 'does not have P in W'. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], IV) | |
| A reaction: 'Entail' strikes me as a very odd word when you are talking about the structure of the physical world (or are we??). Why would a unique self-identity (his candidate for essence) do the necessary entailing? |
| 14657 | Does 'being identical with Socrates' name a property? I can think of no objections to it [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Is there any reason to suppose that 'being identical with Socrates' names a property? Well, is there any reason to suppose that it does not? I cannot think of any, nor have I heard any that are at all impressive. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], II) | |
| A reaction: Is there any reason to think that a planet somewhere is entirely under the control of white mice? Extraordinary. No wonder Plantinga believes in God and the Ontological Argument, as well as the existence of 'Socrateity' etc. |
| 14652 | 'De re' modality is as clear as 'de dicto' modality, because they are logically equivalent [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: The idea of modality 'de re' is no more (although no less) obscure that the idea of modality 'de dicto'; for I think we can see that any statement of the former type is logically equivalent to some statement of the latter. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], Intro) | |
| A reaction: If two things are logically equivalent, that doesn't ensure that they are equally clear! Personally I am on the side of de re modality. |
| 14659 | We can imagine being beetles or alligators, so it is possible we might have such bodies [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: We easily understand Kafka's story about the man who wakes up to discover that he now has the body of a beetle; and in fact the state of affairs depicted is entirely possible. I can imagine being an alligator, so Socrates could have had an alligator body. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (World and Essence [1970], III) | |
| A reaction: This really is going the whole hog with accepting whatever is conceivable as being possible. I take this to be shocking nonsense, and it greatly reduces Plantinga in my esteem, despite his displays of intelligence and erudition. |
| 19527 | We don't acquire evidence and then derive some knowledge, because evidence IS knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When we acquire new evidence in perception, we do not first acquire unknown evidence and then somehow base knowledge on it later. Rather, acquiring new is evidence IS acquiring new knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: This makes his point much better than Idea 19526 does. |
| 19528 | Knowledge is prior to believing, just as doing is prior to trying to do [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowing corresponds to doing, believing to trying. Just as trying is naturally understood in relation to doing, so believing is naturally understood in relation to knowing. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: An interesting analogy. You might infer that there can be no concept of 'belief' without the concept of 'knowledge', but we could say that it is 'truth' which is indispensible, and leave out knowledge entirely. Belief is to truth as trying is to doing? |
| 19529 | Belief explains justification, and knowledge explains belief, so knowledge explains justification [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: If justification is the fundamental epistemic norm of belief, and a belief ought to constitute knowledge, then justification should be understood in terms of knowledge too. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5) | |
| A reaction: If we are looking for the primitive norm which motivates the whole epistemic game, then I am thinking that truth might well play that role better than knowledge. TW would have to reply that it is the 'grasped truth', rather than the 'theoretical truth'. |
| 19530 | A neutral state of experience, between error and knowledge, is not basic; the successful state is basic [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A neutral state covering both perceiving and misperceiving (or remembering and misrembering) is not somehow more basic than perceiving, for what unifies the case of each neutral state is their relation to the successful state. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5-6) | |
| A reaction: An alternative is Disjunctivism, which denies the existence of a single neutral state, so that there is nothing to unite the two states, and they don't have a dependence relation. Why can't there be a prior family of appearances, some of them successful? |
| 19531 | Internalism about mind is an obsolete view, and knowledge-first epistemology develops externalism [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A postulated underlying layer of narrow mental states is a myth, whose plausibility derives from a comfortingly familiar but obsolescent philosophy of mind. Knowledge-first epistemology is a further step in the development of externalism. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson is a real bruiser, isn't he? I don't take internalism about mind to be obsolescent at all, but now I feel so inferior for clinging to such an 'obsolescent' belief. ...But then I cling to Aristotle, who is (no doubt) an obsolete philosopher. |
| 19536 | Knowledge-first says your total evidence IS your knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge-first equate one's total evidence with one's total knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.8) | |
| A reaction: Couldn't lots of evidence which merely had a high probability be combined together to give a state we would call 'knowledge'? Many dubious witnesses confirm the truth, as long as they are independent, and agree. |
| 19526 | Surely I am acquainted with physical objects, not with appearances? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When I ask myself what I am acquainted with, the physical objects in front of me are far more natural candidates than their appearances. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.3) | |
| A reaction: Not very impressive. The word 'acquainted' means the content of the experience, not the phenomena. Do I 'experience' the objects, or the appearances? The answer there is less obvious. If you apply it to colours, it is even less obvious. |
| 19534 | How does inferentialism distinguish the patterns of inference that are essential to meaning? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Inferentialism faces the grave problem of separating patterns of inference that are to count as essential to the meaning of an expression from those that will count as accidental (a form of the analytic/synthetic distinction). | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a rather persuasive objection to inferentialism, though I don't personally take that as a huge objection to all internalist semantics. |
| 19535 | Internalist inferentialism has trouble explaining how meaning and reference relate [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The internalist version of inferentialist semantics has particular difficulty in establishing an adequate relation between meaning and reference. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that this was a big problem for referentialist semantics too, though evidently Williamson doesn't think so. If he is saying that the meaning is in the external world, dream on. |
| 19533 | Inferentialist semantics relies on internal inference relations, not on external references [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: On internalist inferential (or conceptual role) semantics, the inferential relations of an expression do not depend on what, if anything, it refers to, ...rather, the meaning is something like its place in a web of inferential relations. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson says the competition is between externalist truth-conditional referential semantics (which he favours), and this internalist inferential semantics. He is, like, an expert, of course, but I doubt whether that is the only internalist option. |
| 19532 | Truth-conditional referential semantics is externalist, referring to worldly items [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Truth-conditional referential semantics is an externalist programme. In a context of utterance the atomic expressions of a language refer to worldly items, from which the truth-conditions of sentences are compositionally determined. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I just don't see how a physical object can be part of the contents of a sentence. 'Dragons fly' is atomic, and meaningful, but its reference fails. 'The cat is asleep' is just words - it doesn't contain a live animal. |
| 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. |