14 ideas
| 16062 | A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: It seems unavoidable that the facts about logically necessary relations between levels of facts are themselves logically distinct further facts, irreducible to the microphysical facts. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
| A reaction: I'm beginning to think that rejecting every theory of reality that is proposed by carefully exposing some infinite regress hidden in it is a rather lazy way to do philosophy. Almost as bad as rejecting anything if it can't be defined. |
| 16061 | If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: Logical supervenience, restricted to individuals, seems to imply strong reduction. It is said that where the B-facts logically supervene on the A-facts, the B-facts simply re-describe what the A-facts describe, and the B-facts come along 'for free'. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be taking 'logically' to mean 'analytically'. Presumably an entailment is logically supervenient on its premisses, and may therefore be very revealing, even if some people think such things are analytic. |
| 16060 | Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism. |
| 16064 | The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11) | |
| A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream. |
| 20298 | The traditional a priori is justified without experience; post-Quine it became unrevisable by experience [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Where Kant and others had traditionally assumed that the a priori concerned beliefs 'justifiable independently of experience', Quine and others of the time came to regard it as beliefs 'unrevisable in the light of experience'. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 3.7) | |
| A reaction: That throws a rather striking light on Quine's project. Of course, if the a priori is also necessary, then it has to be unrevisable. But is a bachelor necessarily an unmarried man? It is not necessary that 'bachelor' has a fixed meaning. |
| 3102 | Why don't we experience or remember going to sleep at night? [Magee] |
| Full Idea: As a child it was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience going to sleep, and never remembered it. When my sister said 'Nobody remembers that', I just thought 'How does she know?' | |
| From: Bryan Magee (Confessions of a Philosopher [1997], Ch.I) | |
| A reaction: This is actually evidence for something - that we do not have some sort of personal identity which is separate from consciousness, so that "I am conscious" would literally mean that an item has a property, which it can lose. |
| 20300 | Externalist synonymy is there being a correct link to the same external phenomena [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Externalists are typically committed to counting expressions as 'synonymous' if they happen to be linked in the right way to the same external phenomena, even if a thinker couldn't realise that they are by reflection alone. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Fodor] Externalists always try to link to concrete things in the world, but most of our talk is full of generalities, abstractions and fiction which don't link directly to anything. |
| 20294 | 'Married' does not 'contain' its symmetry, nor 'bigger than' its transitivity [Rey] |
| Full Idea: If Bob is married to Sue, then Sue is married to Bob. If x bigger than y, and y bigger than z, x is bigger than z. The symmetry of 'marriage' or transitivity of 'bigger than' are not obviously 'contained in' the corresponding thoughts. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: [Also 'if something is red, then it is coloured'] This is a Fregean criticism of Kant. It is not so much that Kant was wrong, as that the concept of analyticity is seen to have a much wider application than Kant realised. Especially in mathematics. |
| 20293 | Analytic judgements can't be explained by contradiction, since that is what is assumed [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Rejecting 'a married bachelor' as contradictory would seem to have no justification other than the claim that 'All bachelors are unmarried is analytic, and so cannot serve to justify or explain that claim. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: Rey is discussing Frege's objection to Kant (who tried to prove the necessity of analytic judgements, on the basis of the denial being a contradiction). |
| 20297 | Analytic statements are undeniable (because of meaning), rather than unrevisable [Rey] |
| Full Idea: What's peculiar about the analytic is that denying it seem unintelligible. Far from unrevisability explaining analyticity, it seems to be analyticitiy that explains unrevisability; we only balk at denying unmarried bachelors because that's what it means! | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 3.7) | |
| A reaction: This is a criticism of Quine, who attacked analyticity when it is understood as unrevisability. Obviously we could revise the concept of 'bachelor', if our marriage customs changed a lot. Rey seems right here. |
| 20301 | The meaning properties of a term are those which explain how the term is typically used [Rey] |
| Full Idea: It may be that the meaning properties of a term are the ones that play a basic explanatory role with regard to the use of the term generally, the ones in virtue ultimately of which a term is used with that meaning. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Devitt 1996, 2002, and Horwich 1998, 2005) I spring to philosophical life whenever I see the word 'explanatory', because that is the point of the whole game. They are pointing to the essence of the concept (which is explanatory, say I). |
| 20302 | An intrinsic language faculty may fix what is meaningful (as well as grammatical) [Rey] |
| Full Idea: The existence of a separate language faculty may be an odd but psychologically real fact about us, and it may thereby supply a real basis for commitments about not only what is or is not grammatical, but about what is a matter of natural language meaning. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the Chomskyan view of analytic sentences. An example from Chomsky (1977:142) is the semantic relationships of persuade, intend and believe. It's hard to see how the secret faculty on its own could do the job. Consensus is needed. |
| 20303 | Research throws doubts on the claimed intuitions which support analyticity [Rey] |
| Full Idea: The movement of 'experimental philosophy' has pointed to evidence of considerable malleability of subject's 'intuitions' with regard to the standard kinds of thought experiments on which defenses of analytic claims typically rely. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: See Cappelen's interesting attack on the idea that philosophy relies on intuitions, and hence his attack on experimental philosophy. Our consensus on ordinary English usage hardly qualifies as somewhat vague 'intuitions'. |
| 20299 | If we claim direct insight to what is analytic, how do we know it is not sub-consciously empirical? [Rey] |
| Full Idea: How in the end are we going to distinguish claims or the analytic as 'rational insight', 'primitive compulsion', inferential practice or folk belief from merely some deeply held empirical conviction, indeed, from mere dogma. | |
| From: Georges Rey (The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction [2013], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: This is Rey's summary of the persisting Quinean challenge to analytic truths, in the face of a set of replies, summarised by the various phrases here. So do we reject a dogma of empiricism, by asserting dogmatic empiricism? |