3 ideas
| 8460 | Philosophers have given precise senses to deduction, probability, computability etc [Quine/Ullian] |
| Full Idea: Successful explications (giving a precise sense to a term) have been found for the concepts of deduction, probability and computability, to name just three. | |
| From: W Quine / J Ullian (The Web of Belief [1970], 65), quoted by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: Quine also cites the concept of an 'ordered pair'. Orenstein adds Tarski's definition of truth, Russell's definite descriptions, and the explication of existence in terms of quantifications. Cf. Idea 2958. |
| 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. |
| 21131 | Democracy is competition for support of the people, guided by self-interest on all sides [Posner] |
| Full Idea: Democratic politics is a competition among self-interested politicians, constituting a ruling class, for the support of the people, also assumed to be self-interested, and none too interested or well informed about politics. | |
| From: Richard Posner (Law, Pragmatism and Democracy [2003], p.144), quoted by Andrew Shorten - Contemporary Political Theory 05 | |
| A reaction: This articulates the 'competitive' view of democracy, as simply a technique for establishing legitimacy. Posner is also an economist, and they also assume that everyone is wholly self-interested, which may be why they are so frequently wrong. |