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All the ideas for 'Substance and Individuation in Leibniz', 'In a Different Voice' and 'Propositions'

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23 ideas

3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 5. Truth Bearers
13941 Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: What is it that is susceptible of truth or falsity? The answers suggested constitute a bewildering variety: sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgments, propositions, statements.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 01)
     A reaction: Carwright's answer is 'statements', which seem to be the same as propositions.
13942 Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: The current fashion among logicians of taking sentences to be the bearers of truth and falsity indicates less an agreement on philosophical theory than a desire for rigor and smoothness in calculative practice.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 01)
     A reaction: A remark close to my heart. Propositions are rejected first because language offers hope of answers, then because they seem metaphysically odd, and finally because you can't pin them down rigorously. But the blighters won't lie down and die.
8. Modes of Existence / A. Relations / 1. Nature of Relations
13076 Scholastics treat relations as two separate predicates of the relata [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: The scholastics treated it as a step in the right explanatory direction to analyze a relational statement of the form 'aRb' into two subject-predicate statements, attributing different relational predicates to a and to b.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 2.2.1)
     A reaction: The only alternative seems to be Russell's view of relations as pure universals, having a life of their own, quite apart from their relata. Or you could take them as properties of space, time (and powers?), external to the relata?
9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 5. Individuation / a. Individuation
13102 If you individuate things by their origin, you still have to individuate the origins themselves [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: If we go for the necessity-of-origins view, A and B are different if the origin of A is different from the origin of B. But one is left with the further question 'When is the origin of A distinct from the origin of B?'
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1)
     A reaction: There may be an answer to this, in a regress of origins that support one another, but in the end the objection is obviously good. You can't begin to refer to an 'origin' if you can't identify anything in the first place.
13103 Numerical difference is a symmetrical notion, unlike proper individuation [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: Scholastics distinguished criteria of numerical difference from questions of individuation proper, since numerical difference is a symmetrical notion.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1)
     A reaction: This apparently old-fashioned point appears to be conclusively correct. Modern thinkers, though, aren't comfortable with proper individuation, because they don't believe in concepts like 'essence' and 'substance' that are needed for the job.
9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 5. Individuation / d. Individuation by haecceity
13104 Haecceity as property, or as colourless thisness, or as singleton set [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: There is a contemporary property construal of haecceities, ...and a Scotistic construal as primitive, 'colourless' thisnesses which, unlike singleton-set haecceities, are aimed to do some explanatory work.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.4)
     A reaction: [He associates the contemporary account with David Kaplan] I suppose I would say that individuation is done by properties, but not by some single property, so I take it that I don't believe in haecceities at all. What individuates a haecceity?
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 2. Substance / a. Substance
13100 Maybe 'substance' is more of a mass-noun than a count-noun [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: We could think of 'substance' on the model of a mass noun, rather than a count noun.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.3)
     A reaction: They offer this to help Leibniz out of a mess, but I think he would be appalled. The proposal seems close to 'prime matter' in Aristotle, which never quite does the job required of it. The idea is nice, though, and should be taken seriously.
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 2. Substance / c. Types of substance
13068 We can ask for the nature of substance, about type of substance, and about individual substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: In the 'blueprint' approach to substance, we confront at least three questions: What is it for a thing to be an individual substance? What is it for a thing to be the kind of substance that it is? What is it to be that very individual substance?
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.1)
     A reaction: My working view is that the answer to the first question is that substance is essence, that the second question is overrated and parasitic on the third, and that the third is the key question, and also reduces to essence.
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 2. Substance / d. Substance defined
13069 The general assumption is that substances cannot possibly be non-substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: There is a widespread assumption, now and in the past, that substances are essentially substances: nothing is actually a substance but possibly a non-substance.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.2)
     A reaction: It seems to me that they clearly mean, in this context, that substances are 'necessarily' substances, not that they are 'essentially' substances. I would just say that substances are essences, and leave the necessity question open.
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 7. Essence and Necessity / a. Essence as necessary properties
13072 Modern essences are sets of essential predicate-functions [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: The modern view of essence is that the essence of a particular thing is given by the set of predicate-functions essential to it, and the essence of any kind is given by the set of predicate-functions essential to every possible member of that kind.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.2.2)
     A reaction: Thus the modern view has elided the meanings of 'essential' and 'necessary' when talking of properties. They are said to be 'functions' from possible worlds to individuals. The old view (and mine) demands real essences, not necessary properties.
17080 Modern essentialists express essence as functions from worlds to extensions for predicates [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: The modern essentialist gives the same metaphysical treatment to every grammatical predicate - by associating a function from worlds to extensions for each.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 2.2)
     A reaction: I take this to mean that essentialism is the view that if some predicate attaches to an object then that predicate is essential if there is an extension of that predicate in all possible worlds. In English, essential predicates are necessary predicates.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 12. Origin as Essential
13101 Necessity-of-origin won't distinguish ex nihilo creations, or things sharing an origin [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: A necessity-of-origins approach cannot work to distinguish things that come into being genuinely ex nihilo, and cannot work to distinguish things sharing a single origin.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1)
     A reaction: Since I am deeply suspicious of essentiality or necessity of origin (and they are not, I presume, the same thing) I like these two. Twins have always bothered me with the second case (where order of birth seems irrelevant).
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 4. Type Identity
13945 A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: We cannot take a token of a word to be an occurrence of it. Suppose there is exactly one occurrence of the word 'etherized' in the whole of English poetry? Exactly one 'token'? This sort of occurrence is like the occurrence of a number in a sequence.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], Add 2)
     A reaction: This remark is in an addendum to his paper, criticising his own lax use of the idea of 'token' in the actual paper. The example nicely shows that the type/token distinction isn't neat and tidy - though I consider it very useful.
10. Modality / E. Possible worlds / 3. Transworld Objects / a. Transworld identity
13081 Even extreme modal realists might allow transworld identity for abstract objects [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: It might be suggested that even the extreme modal realist can countenance transworld identity for abstract objects.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 3.2.2 n46)
     A reaction: This may sound right for uncontroversial or well-defined abstracta such as numbers and circles, but even 'or' is ambiguous, and heaven knows what the transworld identity of 'democracy' is!
14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / c. Explanations by coherence
13071 We can go beyond mere causal explanations if we believe in an 'order of being' [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne]
     Full Idea: The philosopher comfortable with an 'order of being' has richer resources to make sense of the 'in virtue of' relation than that provided only by causal relations between states of affairs, positing in addition other sorts of explanatory relationships.
     From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.2)
     A reaction: This might best be characterised as 'ontological dependence', and could be seen as a non-causal but fundamental explanatory relationship, and not one that has to depend on a theistic world view.
19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 1. Meaning
13948 For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: It does have to be acknowledged, I think, that every statement whatever is such that there is no one meaning which any sentence used to assert it must have.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 11)
     A reaction: This feels to me like a Gricean move - that what we are really interested in is communicating one mental state to another mental state, and there are all sorts of tools that can do that one job.
13950 People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: No one ever asserts the meaning of the words he utters.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12)
     A reaction: Cartwright is using this point to drive a wedge between sentence meaning and the assertion made by the utterance. Hence he defends propositions. Presumably people utilise word-meanings, rather than asserting them. Meanings (not words) are tools.
19. Language / D. Propositions / 1. Propositions
13944 We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: We need to distinguish 1) what is asserted, 2) that assertion, 3) asserting something, 4) what is predicated, 5) what is uttered, 6) that utterance, 7) uttering something, 8) the utterance token, and 9) the meaning.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 05-06)
     A reaction: [summary of his overall analysis in the paper] It is amazingly hard to offer a critical assessment of this sort of analysis, but it gives you a foot in the door for thinking about the issues with increasing clarity.
13947 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: A person who utters 'It's raining' one day does not normally make the same statement as one who utters it the next. But these variations are not accompanied by corresponding changes of meaning. The words 'It's raining' retain the same meaning throughout.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 10)
     A reaction: This is important, because it shows that a proposition is not just the mental shadow behind a sentence, or a mental shadow awaiting a sentence. Unlike a sentence, a proposition can (and possibly must) include its own context. Very interesting!
19. Language / D. Propositions / 4. Mental Propositions
13943 We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: We do sometimes say of something to which we have referred that it is true (or false). Are we not ordinarily doing just this when we utter such sentences as 'That's true' and 'What he said was false'?
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 03)
     A reaction: This supports propositions, but doesn't clinch the matter. One could interpret this phenomenon as always being (implicitly) the reference of one sentence to another. However, I remember what he said, but I can't remember how he said it.
13946 To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: In order to assert that p it is not necessary to utter exactly those words. ...Clearly, also, in order to assert that p, it is not sufficient to utter the words that were actually uttered.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 07)
     A reaction: I take the first point to be completely obvious (you can assert one thing with various wordings), and the second seems right after a little thought (the words could be vague, ambiguous, inaccurate, contextual)
19. Language / F. Communication / 2. Assertion
13951 Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: Whereas what is asserted can be said to be accurate, exaggerated, unfounded, overdrawn, probable, improbable, plausible, true, or false, none of these can be said of the meaning of a sentence.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12)
     A reaction: That fairly firmly kicks into touch the idea that the assertion is the same as the meaning of the sentence.
22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 1. Nature of Ethics / b. Defining ethics
18665 Moral problems are responsibility conflicts, needing contextual and narrative attention to relationships [Gilligan]
     Full Idea: The moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than competing rights, and its resolution needs contextual and narrative thinking. This morality as care centers around the understanding of responsibility and relationships.
     From: Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice [1982], p.19), quoted by Will Kymlicka - Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn)
     A reaction: [Kymlicka cites her as a key voice in feminist moral philosophy] I like all of this, especially the very original thought (to me, anyway) that moral thinking should be 'narrative' in character.