9 ideas
| 10735 | Abstraction from objects won't reveal an operation's being performed 'so many times' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: For an understanding of arithmetic the grasp of an operation's being performed 'so many times' is quite indispensable; and abstraction of a feature from groups of nuts cannot give us this grasp. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.170) | |
| A reaction: I end up defending the empirical approach to arithmetic because remarks like this are so patently false. Geach seems to think we arrive ready-made in the world, just raring to get on with some counting. He lacks the evolutionary perspective. |
| 10732 | If concepts are just recognitional, then general judgements would be impossible [Geach] |
| Full Idea: If concepts were nothing but recognitional capacities, then it is unintelligible that I can judge that cats eat mice when neither of them are present. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.164) | |
| A reaction: Having observed the importance of recognition for the abstractionist (Idea 10731), he then seems to assume that there is nothing more to their concepts. Geach fails to grasp levels of abstraction, and cross-reference, and generalisation. |
| 8872 | It is widely supposed that externalism cannot be reconciled with first-person authority [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: It has been widely supposed that externalism, which holds that the contents of a person's propositional attitudes are partly determined by factors of which the person may be ignorant, cannot be reconciled with first-person authority. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Epistemology Externalized [1990], p.197) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly a bit puzzling if you go around saying 'Actually, people don't know their own thoughts'. Davidson aims to defend first-person authority. The full story is developed in Tyler Burge's views on 'anti-individualism'. |
| 8874 | It is hard to interpret a speaker's actions if we take a broad view of the content [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: It will explain a speaker's actions far better if we interpret him as he intended to be interpreted, than if we suppose he means and thinks what someone else might mean and think who used the same words 'correctly'. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Epistemology Externalized [1990], p.199) | |
| A reaction: This comes down to the fact that our actions have to be motivated by internal meanings. If I defer to experts on the essence of gold, I still buy gold according to how I myself understand it. So meaning has two components? |
| 10731 | For abstractionists, concepts are capacities to recognise recurrent features of the world [Geach] |
| Full Idea: For abstractionists, concepts are essentially capacities for recognizing recurrent features of the world. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.163) | |
| A reaction: Recognition certainly strikes me as central to thought (and revelatory of memory, since we continually recognise what we cannot actually recall). Geach dislikes this view, but I see it as crucial to an evolutionary view of thought. |
| 10733 | The abstractionist cannot explain 'some' and 'not' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: The abstractionist cannot give a logically coherent account of the features that are supposed to be reached by discriminative attention, corresponding to the words 'some' and 'not'. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.167) | |
| A reaction: I understand 'some' in terms of mereology, because that connects to experience, and 'not' I take to derive more from psychological experience than from the physical world, building on thwarted expectation, which even animals experience. |
| 10734 | Only a judgement can distinguish 'striking' from 'being struck' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: To understand the verb 'to strike' we must see that 'striking' and 'being struck' are different, but necessarily go together in event and thought; only in the context of a judgment can they be distinguished, when we think of both together. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.168) | |
| A reaction: Geach seems to have a strange notion that judgements are pure events which can precede all experience, and are the only ways we can come to understand experience. He needs to start from animals (or 'brutes', as he still calls them!). |
| 4366 | We can't accept Aristotle's naturalism about persons, because it is normative and unscientific [Williams,B, by Hursthouse] |
| Full Idea: Williams has expressed pessimism about the project of Aristotelian naturalism on the grounds that his conception of nature, and thereby of human nature, was normative, and that, in a scientific age, this is not a conception that we can take on board. | |
| From: report of Bernard Williams (works [1971]) by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.11 | |
| A reaction: I think there is a compromise here. The existentialist denial of intrinsic human nature seems daft, but Aristotelians must grasp the enormous flexibility that is possible to human behaviour because of the open nature of rationality. |
| 8873 | The cause of a usage determines meaning, but why is the microstructure of water relevant? [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: While I agree that the usual cause of the use of the word determines what it means, I do not see why sameness of microstructure is necessarily the relevant similarity that determines my reference of the word 'water'. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Epistemology Externalized [1990], p.198) | |
| A reaction: This is a problem for essentialists who build their views on semantic considerations. But the stability of what causes 'water' thoughts is the microstructure of water. However, that is an explantion of meaning, not a definition of it. |