10 ideas
| 12772 | Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise; philosophy is in false consciousness when it sees itself otherwise. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: It is one thing to be permeated with values, and another to be value-driven. Truth, reason and logic are (I take it) granted a high value in philosophy, just as the offside rule is in football. I am trying to place reality in charge, not humanity. |
| 12771 | Is it likely that a successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: How likely is it that a truly successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Van Fraassen announces "I reject metaphysic" (p.3), so we know where he stands. Anything becomes less certain as it moves to a higher level of generality. Should we abandon generalisation? There is much illumination in metaphysics. |
| 12773 | Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: Analytical philosophy can rightly pride itself on having produced the greatest critical arsenal the world has ever known. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.6) | |
| A reaction: This is, of course, in the context of a scathing attack on the desire to use analytical methods to do speculative metaphysics. I say that if these are the best tools, then we should push forward with them to see how far we can get. |
| 12770 | We may end up with a huge theory of carefully constructed falsehoods [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The specter that faces us is that we may end up having explained all that is dreamt of in our philosophies by intricately crafted postulates that are false. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: This is more persuasive that Idea 12769. People who cannot bear to live with a total absence of explanation (with Keats's 'negative capability') are most in danger from this threat. |
| 8463 | Maths can be reduced to logic and set theory [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Researches in the foundations of mathematics have made it clear that all of (interpreted) mathematics can be got down to logic and set theory, and the objects needed for mathematics can be got down to the category of classes (and classes of classes..). | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Scope and Language of Science [1954], §VI) | |
| A reaction: This I take to be a retreat from pure logicism, presumably influenced by Gödel. So can set theory be reduced to logic? Crispin Wright is the one the study. |
| 8461 | The category of objects incorporates the old distinction of substances and their modes [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The category of objects embraces indiscriminately what would anciently have been distinguished as substances and as modes or states of substances. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Scope and Language of Science [1954], §6) | |
| A reaction: This nicely captures Quine's elimination of properties, by presenting them as inseparable from their objects/substances. Armstrong calls this 'Ostrich Nominalism' (for refusing to address the universals problem) but Quineans are unshaken. |
| 12769 | Inference to best explanation contains all sorts of hidden values [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The very phrase 'inference to the best explanation' should wave a red flag for us. What is good, better, best? What values are slipped in here, under a common name, and where do they come from? | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: A point worth making, but overstated. If we are going to refuse to make judgements for fear that some wicked 'value' might creep in, our lives will be reduced to absurdity. |
| 12768 | We accept many scientific theories without endorsing them as true [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The choice among theories in science may be a choice to accept in some sense falling far short of endorsement as true. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: When put like this, it is hard to deny the force of Van Fraassen's reservations about science. Lots of people, including me, use scientific theories as working assumptions for life, with nothing like full confidence in their truth. |
| 8462 | A hallucination can, like an ague, be identified with its host; the ontology is physical, the idiom mental [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A physical ontology has a place for states of mind. An inspiration or a hallucination can, like the fit of ague, be identified with its host for the duration. It leaves our mentalistic idioms fairly intact, but reconciles them with a physical ontology. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Scope and Language of Science [1954], §VI) | |
| A reaction: Quine is employing the same strategy that he uses for substances and properties (Idea 8461): take the predication as basic, rather than reifying the thing being predicated. The ague analogy suggests that Quine is an incipient functionalist. |
| 468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
| Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
| From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |