7 ideas
| 23277 | Modern pragmatism sees objectivity as possible, despite its gradual evolution [Misak] |
| Full Idea: One of the pillars of the new pragmatism is the thought that the standards of objectivity come into being and evolve over time, but that being historically situated in this way does not detract from their objectivity. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Introduction to 'New Pragmatists' [2007], p.2) | |
| A reaction: This looks to me like pragmatism finally coming to its senses. I would say that being any sort of 'social construct' (beloved of cultural relativists) in no way detracts from its capacity for objectivity and truth. |
| 12394 | If the result is bad, we change the rule; if we like the rule, we reject the result [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.64) | |
| A reaction: This is clearly in tune with Quine's assertion that logic is potentially revisable, and the idea is pragmatist in spirit. It is hard to deny that intuitions about what makes a good argument control our logic. I say the world controls our intuitions. |
| 14292 | Dispositions seem more ethereal than behaviour; a non-occult account of them would be nice [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Dispositions of a thing are as important to us as overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. So we are moved to enquire whether we can bring them down to earth, and explain disposition terms without reference to occult powers. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], II.3) | |
| A reaction: Mumford quotes this at the start of his book on dispositions, as his agenda. I suspect that the 'occult' aspect crept in because dispositions were based on powers, and the dominant view was that these were the immediate work of God. |
| 18749 | Goodman argued that the confirmation relation can never be formalised [Goodman, by Horsten/Pettigrew] |
| Full Idea: Goodman constructed arguments that purported to show that a satisfactory syntactic analysis of the confirmation relation can never be found. In response, philosophers of science tried to model it in probabilistic terms. | |
| From: report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R - Mathematical Methods in Philosophy 4 | |
| A reaction: I take this idea to say that Bayesianism was developed in response to the grue problem. This is an interesting light on 'grue', which never bothered me much. The point is it scuppered formal attempts to model induction. |
| 17646 | Goodman showed that every sound inductive argument has an unsound one of the same form [Goodman, by Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Goodman has shown that no purely formal criterion can distinguish arguments that are intuitively sound inductive arguments for unsound ones: for every sound one there is an unsound one of the same form. The predicates in the argument make the difference. | |
| From: report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Hilary Putnam - Why there isn't a ready-made world 'Causation' | |
| A reaction: This is to swallow grue whole. I think a bit more chewing is called for. By this date Putnam strikes me as a crazy relativist who has lost his grip on the world. Note the word 'formal' - but Putnam seems to think the argument is important. |
| 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. |
| 4794 | We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Rather than a sentence being used for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.21), quoted by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §5.4 | |
| A reaction: This smacks of dodgy pragmatism, and sounds deeply wrong. The perception of a law has to be prior to making the prediction. Why do we make the prediction, if we haven't spotted a law. Goodman is mesmerised by language instead of reality. |