13 ideas
17488 | Empiricist theories are sets of laws, which give explanations and reductions [Glennan] |
Full Idea: In the empiricist tradition theories were understood to be deductive closures of sets of laws, explanations were understood as arguments from covering laws, and reduction was understood as a deductive relationship between laws of different theories. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: A lovely crisp summary of the whole tradition of philosophy of science from Comte through to Hempel. Mechanism and essentialism are the new players in the game. |
17493 | Modern mechanism need parts with spatial, temporal and function facts, and diagrams [Glennan] |
Full Idea: Modern champions of mechanisms say models should identify both the parts and their spatial, temporal and functional organisation, ...and the practical importance of diagrams in addition to or in place of linguistic representations of mechanisms. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Discover') | |
A reaction: Apparently chemists obtain much more refined models by using mathematics than they did by diagrams or 3D models (let alone verbal descriptions). For that reason, I'm thinking that 'model' might be a better term than 'mechanism'. |
17487 | Mechanistic philosophy of science is an alternative to the empiricist law-based tradition [Glennan] |
Full Idea: To a significant degree, a mechanistic philosophy of science can be seen as an alternative to an earlier logical empiricist tradition in philosophy of science that gave pride of place to laws of nature. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: Lovely! Someone who actually spells out what's going on here. Most philosophers are far too coy about explaining what their real game is. Mechanism is fine in chemistry and biology. How about in 'mathematical' physics, or sociology? |
17489 | Mechanisms are either systems of parts or sequences of activities [Glennan] |
Full Idea: There are two sorts of mechanisms: systems consist of collections of parts that interact to produce some behaviour, and processes are sequences of activities which produce some outcome. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: [compressed] The second one is important because it is more generic, and under that account all kinds the features of the world that need to be explained can be subsumed. E.g. hyperinflation in an economy is a 'mechanism'. |
17490 | 17th century mechanists explained everything by the kinetic physical fundamentals [Glennan] |
Full Idea: 17th century mechanists said that interactions governed by chemical, electrical or gravitational forces would have to be explicable in terms of the operation of some atomistic (or corpuscular) kinetic mechanism. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: Glennan says science has rejected this, so modern mechanists do not reduce mechanisms to anything in particular. |
17491 | Unlike the lawlike approach, mechanistic explanation can allow for exceptions [Glennan] |
Full Idea: One of the advantages of the move from nomological to mechanistic modes of explanation is that the latter allows for explanations involving exception-ridden generalizations. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'regular') | |
A reaction: The lawlike approach has endless problems with 'ceteris paribus' ('all things being equal') laws, where specifying all the other 'things' seems a bit tricky. |
23060 | The good is not relative, but is rooted in facts about human needs [Santayana] |
Full Idea: The good is by no means relative to opinion, but is rooted in the unconscious and fatal nature of living beings, a nature which predetermines for them the difference between foods and poisons, happiness and misery. | |
From: George Santayana (Platonism and the Spiritual Life [1927], p.3), quoted by John Gray - Seven Types of Atheism 6 | |
A reaction: That is, he concedes that the good is relative to human beings, but that the relevant facts about human beings are not relative. I think he has the correct picture. The key point is that the good is 'rooted' in something, and doesn't just float free. |
6613 | The natural kinds are objects, processes and properties/relations [Ellis] |
Full Idea: There are three hierarchies of natural kinds: objects or substances (substantive universals), events or processes (dynamic universals), and properties or relations (tropic universals). | |
From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
A reaction: Most interesting here is the identifying of natural kinds with universals, making universals into the families of nature. Universals are high-level sets of natural kinds. To grasp universals you must see patterns, and infer the underlying order. |
17494 | Since causal events are related by mechanisms, causation can be analysed in that way [Glennan] |
Full Idea: Causation can be analyzed in terms of mechanisms because (except for fundamental causal interactions) causally related events will be connected by intervening mechanisms. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'causation') | |
A reaction: This won't give us the metaphysics of causation (which concerns the fundamentals), but this strikes me as a very coherent and interesting proposal. He mentions electron interaction as non-mechanistic causation. |
6616 | Least action is not a causal law, but a 'global law', describing a global essence [Ellis] |
Full Idea: The principle of least action is not a causal law, but is what I call a 'global law', which describes the essence of the global kind, which every object in the universe necessarily instantiates. | |
From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005]) | |
A reaction: As a fan of essentialism I find this persuasive. If I inherit part of my essence from being a mammal, I inherit other parts of my essence from being an object, and all objects would share that essence, so it would look like a 'law' for all objects. |
6615 | A species requires a genus, and its essence includes the essence of the genus [Ellis] |
Full Idea: A specific universal can exist only if the generic universal of which it is a species exists, but generic universals don't depend on species; …the essence of any genus is included in its species, but not conversely. | |
From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
A reaction: Thus the species 'electron' would be part of the genus 'lepton', or 'human' part of 'mammal'. The point of all this is to show how individual items connect up with the rest of the universe, giving rise to universal laws, such as Least Action. |
6614 | A hierarchy of natural kinds is elaborate ontology, but needed to explain natural laws [Ellis] |
Full Idea: The hierarchy of natural kinds proposed by essentialism may be more elaborate than is strictly required for purposes of ontology, but it is necessary to explain the necessity of the laws of nature, and the universal applicability of global principles. | |
From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
A reaction: I am all in favour of elaborating ontology in the name of best explanation. There seem, though, to be some remaining ontological questions at the point where the explanations of essentialism run out. |
6612 | Without general principles, we couldn't predict the behaviour of dispositional properties [Ellis] |
Full Idea: It is objected to dispositionalism that without the principle of least action, or some general principle of equal power, the specific dispositional properties of things could tell us very little about how these things would be disposed to behave. | |
From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 90) | |
A reaction: Ellis attempts to meet this criticism, by placing dispositional properties within a hierarchy of broader properties. There remains a nagging doubt about how essentialism can account for space, time, order, and the existence of essences. |