3 ideas
| 18436 | Entities are truthmakers for their resemblances, so no extra entities or 'resemblances' are needed [Rodriquez-Pereyra] |
| Full Idea: A and B are the sole truthmakers for 'A and B resemble each other'. There is no need to postulate extra entities - the resembling entities suffice to account for them. There is no regress of resemblances, ...since there are no resemblances at all. | |
| From: Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Resemblance Nominalism: a solution to universals [2002], p.115), quoted by Douglas Edwards - Properties 5.5.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to flatly reject the ordinary conversational move of asking in what 'respect' the two things resemble, which may be a genuine puzzle which gets an illuminating answer. We can't fully explain resemblance, but we can do better than this! |
| 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. |
| 4398 | An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either). | |
| From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro | |
| A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky. |