17 ideas
| 14767 | The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.2) |
| 14764 | I am saturated with the spirit of physical science [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: I am saturated, through and through, with the spirit of the physical sciences. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.1) |
| 14768 | Infallibility in science is just a joke [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Infallibility in scientific matters seems to me irresistibly comical. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.3) |
| 14765 | Association of ideas is the best philosophical idea of the prescientific age [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The doctrine of the association of ideas is, to my thinking, the finest piece of philosophical work of the prescientific ages. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.2) |
| 19558 | Our own intuitions about whether we know tend to vacillate [Cohen,S] |
| Full Idea: One robust feature of our intuitions about whether we know things is that they tend to vacillate. | |
| From: Stewart Cohen (Contextualism Defended (and reply) [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as important. If we were tacit invariantists (Idea 19557) we should be able to ask ourselves whether we 'really and truly' know various things, but we can't decide. I know lots about Nietzsche in a pub, and very little in a university. |
| 19561 | We shouldn't jump too quickly to a contextualist account of claims to know [Cohen,S] |
| Full Idea: Maybe contextualists are too quick to appeal to our conflicting intuitions regarding knowledge. | |
| From: Stewart Cohen (Contextualism Defended (and reply) [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: An important point (from Earl Conee). I thoroughly approve of contextualism, but the whole status of whether a witness or a teacher knows what they are talking about is in danger of collapsing into relativism. This is what peer review is all about. |
| 19563 | The context sensitivity of knowledge derives from its justification [Cohen,S] |
| Full Idea: On my own view, the context sensivity of knowledge is inherited from one of its components, i.e. justification. | |
| From: Stewart Cohen (Contextualism Defended (and reply) [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: That sounds right, and it reinforces the idea that 'justification' is a more important epistemological concept than 'knowledge'. 'Am I justified in believing p?' Answer: 'it depends how well you have researched it'. |
| 19560 | Contextualism is good because it allows knowledge, but bad because 'knowing' is less valued [Cohen,S] |
| Full Idea: Contextualism is a 'good news, bad news' theory. The good news is that we have lots of knowledge and many surfaces are 'flat'; the bad news is that knowledge and flatness are not all they were cracked up to be. | |
| From: Stewart Cohen (Contextualism Defended (and reply) [2005], 3) | |
| A reaction: That is exactly my position. I lost all interest in whether someone precisely 'knows' or 'does not know' something a long time ago (even in scientific or forensic contexts). In the case of flatness the case is even more obvious. |
| 19559 | Contextualists slightly concede scepticism, but only in extremely strict contexts [Cohen,S] |
| Full Idea: Contextualism concedes that there is some truth to skepticism, but contains the damage by holding that skeptical claims are true only relative to atypically strict contexts. | |
| From: Stewart Cohen (Contextualism Defended (and reply) [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: My attitude to scepticism is that everything we ever affirm should have a footnote saying '...but you never know...', and it should then be ignored. In the strictest context everything is doubted simultaneously (including language), and that is paralysis. |
| 14766 | Duns Scotus offers perhaps the best logic and metaphysics for modern physical science [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The works of Duns Scotus have strongly influenced me. …His logic and metaphysics, torn away from its medievalism, …will go far toward supplying the philosophy which is best to harmonize with physical science. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.2) |
| 5662 | Maybe induction could never prove the existence of something unobservable [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Some people hold that no inductive argument can give us any reason to believe in the existence of something which could not even in principle be observed. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §I) | |
| A reaction: I see nothing illogical in inferring the existence of a poltergeist from the recurrent flight of objects around my lounge. Only an excessive empiricism (which used to afflict Ayer) could lead to this claim. |
| 5664 | Consciousness must involve a subject, and only bodies identify subjects [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: It may not make sense to talk of states of consciousness except as the experiences of some conscious subject; and it may well be that this conscious subject can not be identified except by reference to his body. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §IV) | |
| A reaction: It strikes me that Ayer deserves more credit as a pioneer of this view. It tracks back to what may turn out to be the key difficulty for Descartes - how do you individuate a mental substance? I may identify me, but how do I identify you? |
| 5668 | People own conscious states because they are causally related to the identifying body [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: I think personal identity depends on the identity of the body, and that a person's ownership of states of consciousness consists in their standing in a special causal relation to the body by which he is identified. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §IV) | |
| A reaction: I think with this is right, with the slight reservation that Ayer talks as if there were two things which have a causal relationship, implying that the link is contingent. Better to think of the whole thing as a single causal network. |
| 5661 | We identify experiences by their owners, so we can't define owners by their experiences [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Normally we identify experiences in terms of the persons whose experiences they are; but this will lead to a vicious circle if persons themselves are to be analysed in terms of their experiences. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §I) | |
| A reaction: This (from a leading empiricist) is a nice basic challenge to all empiricist accounts of personal identity. One might respond my saying that the circle is not vicious. There are two interlinked concepts (experience and persons), like day and night. |
| 5665 | Memory is the best proposal as what unites bundles of experiences [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: The most promising suggestion is that the bundles are tied together by means of memory. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §IV) | |
| A reaction: This is interesting for showing how Locke was essentially trying to meet (in advance) Hume's 'bundle' scepticism. Hume proposed associations as the unifying factor, instead of memories. Ayer proposes concepts as a candidate. |
| 5666 | Not all exerience can be remembered, as this would produce an infinite regress [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: Not every experience can be remembered; otherwise each piece of remembering, which is itself an experience, would have to be remembered, and each remembering of a remembering and so ad infinitum. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §IV) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 5667. Ayer takes for granted two sorts of consciousness - current awareness, and memory. Ayer brings out a nice difficulty for Locke's proposal, but also draws attention to what may be a very basic misunderstanding about the mind. |
| 5669 | Personal identity can't just be relations of experiences, because the body is needed to identify them [Ayer] |
| Full Idea: A Humean theory, in which a person's identity is made to depend upon relations between experiences ..is not tenable unless the experiences themselves can be identified, and that is only possible through their association with the body. | |
| From: A.J. Ayer (The Concept of a Person [1963], §IV) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me a very fruitful response to difficulties with the 'bundle' view of a person - a better response than the a priori claims of Butler and Reid, or the transcendental argument of Kant. Only a philosopher could ignore the body. |