23 ideas
| 11115 | 'All horses' either picks out the horses, or the things which are horses [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Two ways to see 'all horses are animals' are as picking out all the horses (so that it is a 'horse-quantifier'), ..or as ranging over lots of things in addition to horses, with 'horses' then restricting the things to those that satisfy 'is a horse'. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: Jubien says this gives you two different metaphysical views, of a world of horses etc., or a world of things which 'are horses'. I vote for the first one, as the second seems to invoke an implausible categorical property ('being a horse'). Cf Idea 11116. |
| 11116 | Being a physical object is our most fundamental category [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Being a physical object (as opposed to being a horse or a statue) really is our most fundamental category for dealing with the external world. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: This raises the interesting question of why any categories should be considered to be more 'fundamental' than others. I can only think that we perceive something to be an object fractionally before we (usually) manage to identify it. |
| 11117 | Haecceities implausibly have no qualities [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Properties of 'being such and such specific entity' are often called 'haecceities', but this term carries the connotation of non-qualitativeness which I don't favour. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: The way he defines it makes it sound as if it was a category, but I take it to be more like a bare individual essence. If it has not qualities then it has no causal powers, so there could be no evidence for its existence. |
| 11119 | De re necessity is just de dicto necessity about object-essences [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that the de re is to be analyzed in terms of the de dicto. ...We have a case of modality de re when (and only when) the appropriate property in the de dicto formulation is an object-essence. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 5) |
| 11118 | Modal propositions transcend the concrete, but not the actual [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Where modal propositions may once have seemed to transcend the actual, they now seem only to transcend the concrete. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: This is because Jubien has defended a form of platonism. Personally I take modal propositions to be perceptible in the concrete world, by recognising the processes involved, not the mere static stuff. |
| 11108 | Your properties, not some other world, decide your possibilities [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The possibility of your having been a playwright has nothing to do with how people are on other planets, whether in our own or in some other realm. It is only to do with you and the relevant property. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to think that this simple point is conclusive disproof of possible worlds as an explanation of modality (apart from Jubien's other nice points). What we need to understand are modal properties, not other worlds. |
| 11111 | Modal truths are facts about parts of this world, not about remote maximal entities [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Typical modal truths are just facts about our world, and generally facts about very small parts of it, not facts about some infinitude of complex, maximal entities. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: I think we should embrace this simple fact immediately, and drop all this nonsense about possible worlds, even if they are useful for the semantics of modal logic. |
| 11109 | If other worlds exist, then they are scattered parts of the actual world [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Any other realms that happened to exist would just be scattered parts of the actual world, not entire worlds at all. It would just happen that physical reality was fragmented in this remarkable but modally inconsequential way. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed explicitly at Lewis's modal realism, and strikes me as correct. Jubien's key point here is that they are irrelevant to modality, just as foreign countries are irrelevant to the modality of this one. |
| 11106 | If all possible worlds just happened to include stars, their existence would be necessary [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: If all of the possible worlds happened to include stars, how plausible is it to think that if this is how things really are, then we've just been wrong to regard the existence of stars as contingent? | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11112 | Possible worlds just give parallel contingencies, with no explanation at all of necessity [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: In the world theory, what passes for 'necessity' is just a bunch of parallel 'contingencies'. The theory provides no basis for understanding why these contingencies repeat unremittingly across the board (while others do not). | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11113 | Worlds don't explain necessity; we use necessity to decide on possible worlds [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The suspicion is that the necessity doesn't arise from how worlds are, but rather that the worlds are taken to be as they are in order to capture the intuitive necessity. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: It has always seemed to me rather glaring that you need a prior notion of 'possible' before you can start to talk about 'possible worlds', but I have always been too timid to disagree with the combination of Saul Kripke and David Lewis. Thank you, Jubien! |
| 11105 | We have no idea how many 'possible worlds' there might be [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: As soon as we start talking about 'possible world', we beg the question of their relevance to our prior notion of possibility. For all we know, there are just two such realms, or twenty-seven, or uncountably many, or even set-many. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11107 | If there are no other possible worlds, do we then exist necessarily? [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Suppose there happen to be no other concrete realms. Would we happily accept the consequence that we exist necessarily? | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11110 | We mustn't confuse a similar person with the same person [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: If someone similar to Humphrey won the election, that nicely establishes the possibility of someone's winning who is similar to Humphrey. But we mustn't confuse this possibility with the intuitively different possibility of Humphrey himself winning. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 7440 | Secondary qualities are microscopic primary qualities of physical things [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: I argue for the direct identification of the secondary qualities with microscopic primary qualities of physical things. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xxii) | |
| A reaction: This sounds a bit like the eliminativism which Armstrong rejects. This seems in danger of mixing questions about the nature of mental events with questions about the nature of externally perceived objects. |
| 7437 | Consciousness and experience of qualities are not the same [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness and experience of qualities are often run together - a serious mistake, I think. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xvii) | |
| A reaction: A difficult claim to evaluate. Can we experience redness without being conscious of it? Could there be consciousness (e.g. of concepts) which didn't involve any qualities? I suspect that qualities are more basic than intentionality or consciousness. |
| 7434 | Behaviourism is false, but mind is definable as the cause of behaviour [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourism is false, but one is not far from the truth if one defines the mind as the cause of behaviour. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xvi) | |
| A reaction: As Putnam says, if you cut all the efferent (outgoing) nerves, you would have a mind with no behaviour at all. I would say my mind is full of stuff that never affects my behaviour. However, influencing behaviour is certainly the main function of a mind. |
| 7436 | The manifestations of a disposition need never actually exist [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: The manifestations of a disposition have the particularly mysterious property (metaphysically speaking) that they need not exist - which makes them rather like intentional objects. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xvii) | |
| A reaction: His example is a brittle glass which never shatters. This problem seems to require the mention of conditional and counterfactual statements in the description of the actual world, which rather increases the workload for philosophers. |
| 7429 | Causal Functionalism says mental states are apt for producing behaviour [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: I speak of my view as the Causal version of functionalism, which asserts that mental states are states apt for the production of certain ranges of behaviour and, in some cases, apt for being produced by certain ranges of stimuli. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xiv) | |
| A reaction: This effectively makes a mental state a place in a flowdiagram (and hence the mind is software). It says nothing about what qualities the mental states have which make them apt for this role. Full explanations need more than the function. |
| 7438 | A causal theory of mentality would be improved by a teleological element [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: I now think, following Lycan, that my Causal theory of mentality would be strengthened (perhaps eliminating some potential counter-examples) by the addition of a teleological element. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xviii) | |
| A reaction: For Lycan, see Idea 6533. Armstrong has begun to realise that merely specifying the causal role of a mental state is too thin as an explanation. Teleology widens the notion of function. I also want to know about the properties that make it possible. |
| 7431 | The identity of mental states with physical properties is contingent, because the laws of nature are contingent [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Granted the contingency of the laws of nature, the identification of dispositions with their categorical bases can be contingent only. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xvi) | |
| A reaction: Personally I am not willing to grant the contingency of the laws of nature, but I suppose Armstrong is right about identity if he is right about laws. Presumably an identity could happen to be invariant across possible worlds, without being necessary. |
| 7432 | One mental role might be filled by a variety of physical types [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: If the mental is just that which plays a causal role then there is the possibility, which may even be an empirical possibility, that the causal role of tokens of the same mental type should be filled by tokens of significantly different physical types. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Pref to new 'Materialist Theory' [1992], p.xiv) | |
| A reaction: This allows for multiple realisability in a physicalist framework. Fear has the same role in all animals, but may be realised in physically different ways. I go further, and say that two mental states could differ, while playing the same role. |
| 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? |