17 ideas
| 22438 | Philosophy is largely concerned with finding the minimum that science could get by with [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is in large part concerned with ...what science could get along with, could be reconstructed by means of, as distinct from what science has historically made us of. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: This nicely summarises the programme for the whole of the philosophy of David Lewis, who was Quine's pupil. If you start by asking what it could 'get by with', it is not surprising that simplicity is the top intellectual virtue for both of them. |
| 22436 | Logicians don't paraphrase logic into language, because they think in the symbolic language [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The logician does not even need to paraphrase the vernacular into his logical notation, for he has learned to think directly in his logical notation, or even (which is the beauty of the thing) to let it think for him. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: See Williamson's love of logic (and his book on modal metaphysics). This idea embodies the dream of hardcore Frege-Russellian analytic philosophers. I wish someone had told me when I studied logic that the target was to actually think symbolically. |
| 22431 | Good algorithms and theories need many occurrences of just a few elements [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The power and simplicity of an algorithm, or indeed of any theory, depend on there being many occurrences of few elements rather than few occurrences of many. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], III) | |
| A reaction: Not sure how this applies to a software function. One which produces a good result from a large number of input variables sounds particularly impressive to me. Many occurrences of a single variable sounds rather inefficient. |
| 19463 | Induction assumes some uniformity in nature, or that in some respects the future is like the past [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: In all inductive reasoning we make the assumption that there is a measure of uniformity in nature; or, roughly speaking, that the future will, in the appropriate respects, resemble the past. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Problem of Knowledge [1956], 2.viii) | |
| A reaction: I would say that nature is 'stable'. Nature changes, so a global assumption of total uniformity is daft. Do we need some global uniformity assumptions, if the induction involved is local? I would say yes. Are all inductions conditional on this? |
| 22435 | The logician's '→' does not mean the English if-then [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The logician drops 'if-then' in favour of '→' without ever entertaining the mistaken idea that they are synonymous. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: [Quine uses the older horseshoe symbol] The conditional in English is not well understood, whereas the symbol is unambiguous. A warning to myself, since I have a tendency to translate symbols into English all the time. [p.156 'implies' is worse!] |
| 22433 | It is important that the quantification over temporal entities is timeless [Quine] |
| Full Idea: It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of recognising the timelessness of quantification over temporal entities. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], IV) | |
| A reaction: 'Some moments in this cricket match were crucial'. The domain is not timeless, but consists of moments in this match. Can you say the quantifier is timeless but its domain is not? Only in the sense that 'very' is a timeless word, I think. |
| 22437 | Logical languages are rooted in ordinary language, and that connection must be kept [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A logical language is not independent of ordinary language. It has its roots in ordinary language, and these roots are not to be severed. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: Music to my ears. When you study logic, no one has to teach you what the words 'or' and 'if-then' mean, but they are disambiguated by the symbolism. The roots of logic are in ordinary talk of 'and', 'or' and 'not', which is the real world. |
| 22434 | Reduction to logical forms first simplifies idioms and grammar, then finds a single reading of it [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ordinary language is reduced to logical form in two ways: reduction of the variety of idioms and grammatical constructions, and reduction of each surviving idiom to one fixed and convenient interpretation. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: Is there a conflict between a 'fixed' and a 'convenient' result? By 'fixed' I suppose he means it is a commitment (to not waver). What is the logical form of a sentence which is deliberately ambiguous? |
| 22432 | Normally conditionals have no truth value; it is the consequent which has a conditional truth value [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ordinarily the conditional is not thought of as true or false at all, but rather the consequent is thought of as conditionally true or false given the antecedent. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], III) | |
| A reaction: At first this seems obvious, but a conditional asserts a relationship between two propositions, and so presumably it is true if that relationship exists. 'Is it actually true that if it is Monday then everyone in the office is depressed?'. |
| 19461 | Knowing I exist reveals nothing at all about my nature [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: To know that one exists is not to know anything about oneself any more than knowing that 'this' exists is knowing anything about 'this'. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Problem of Knowledge [1956], 2.iii) | |
| A reaction: Descartes proceeds to define himself as a 'thinking thing', inferring that thinking is his essence. Ayer casts nice doubt on that. |
| 19459 | To say 'I am not thinking' must be false, but it might have been true, so it isn't self-contradictory [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: To say 'I am not thinking' is self-stultifying since if it is said intelligently it must be false: but it is not self-contradictory. The proof that it is not self-contradictory is that it might have been false. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Problem of Knowledge [1956], 2.iii) | |
| A reaction: If it doesn't imply a contradiction, then it is not a necessary truth, which is what it is normally taken to be. Is 'This is a sentence' necessarily true? It might not have been one, if the rules of English syntax changed recently. |
| 19460 | 'I know I exist' has no counterevidence, so it may be meaningless [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: If there is no experience at all of finding out that one is not conscious, or that one does not exist, ..it is tempting to say that sentences like 'I exist', 'I am conscious', 'I know that I exist' do not express genuine propositions. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Problem of Knowledge [1956], 2.iii) | |
| A reaction: This is, of course, an application of the somewhat discredited verification principle, but the fact that strictly speaking the principle has been sort of refuted does not mean that we should not take it seriously, and be influenced by it. |
| 19464 | We only discard a hypothesis after one failure if it appears likely to keep on failing [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Why should a hypothesis which has failed the test be discarded unless this shows it to be unreliable; that is, having failed once it is likely to fail again? There is no contradiction in a hypothesis that was falsified being more likely to pass in future. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Problem of Knowledge [1956], 2.viii) | |
| A reaction: People may become more likely to pass a test after they have failed at the first attempt. Birds which fail to fly at the first attempt usually achieve total mastery of it. There are different types of hypothesis here. |
| 19462 | Induction passes from particular facts to other particulars, or to general laws, non-deductively [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Inductive reasoning covers all cases in which we pass from a particular statement of fact, or set of them, to a factual conclusion which they do not formally entail. The inference may be to a general law, or by analogy to another particular instance. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Problem of Knowledge [1956], 2.viii) | |
| A reaction: My preferred definition is 'learning from experience' - which I take to be the most rational behaviour you could possibly imagine. I don't think a definition should be couched in terms of 'objects' or 'particulars'. |
| 19087 | The meaning or purport of a symbol is all the rational conduct it would lead to [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Issues of Pragmaticism [1905], EP ii.246), quoted by Danielle Macbeth - Pragmatism and Objective Truth p.169 n1 | |
| A reaction: Macbeth says pragmatism is founded on this theory of meaning, rather than on a theory of truth. I don't see why the causes of a symbol shouldn't be as much a part of its meaning as the consequences are. |
| 22430 | If we understand a statement, we know the circumstances of its truth [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We understand under what circumstances to say of any given statement that it is true, just as clearly as we understand the statement itself. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], II) | |
| A reaction: This probably shouldn't be taken as a theory of meaning (in which Quine doesn't really believe) but as a plausible statement of correlated facts. Hypothetical assertions might be a problem case. 'If only I could be in two places at once'? |
| 13713 | Quine holds time to be 'space-like': past objects are as real as spatially remote ones [Quine, by Sider] |
| Full Idea: Quine's view is that time is 'space-like'. Past objects are as real as present ones; they're just temporally distant, just as spatially distant objects are just as real as the ones around here. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953]) by Theodore Sider - Logic for Philosophy 7.3.1 | |
| A reaction: Something is a wrong with a view that says that a long-dead person is just as real as one currently living. Death is rather more than travelling to a distant place. Arthur Prior responded to Quine by saying 'tense operators' are inescapable. |