48 ideas
| 13395 | If an analysis shows the features of a concept, it doesn't seem to 'reduce' the concept [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: An analysis of a concept tells us what the concept is by telling us what its constituents are and how they are combined. ..The features of the concept are present in the analysis, making it surprising the 'reductive' analyses are sought. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: He says that there are nevertheless reductive analyses, such as David Lewis's analysis of modality. We must disentangle conceptual analysis from causal analysis (e.g. in his example of the physicalist reduction of mind). |
| 9065 | S5 collapses iterated modalities (◊□P→□P, and ◊◊P→◊P) [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: S5 collapses iterated modalities (so ◊□P → □P, and ◊◊P → ◊P). | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §5) | |
| A reaction: It is obvious why this might be controversial, and there seems to be a general preference for S4. There may be confusions of epistemic and ontic (and even semantic?) possibilities within a single string of modalities. |
| 13378 | It is a mistake to think that the logic developed for mathematics can clarify language and philosophy [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: It has often been uncritically assumed that logic that was initially a tool for clarifying mathematics could be seamlessly and uniformly applied in the effort to clarify ordinary language and philosophy, but this has been a real mistake. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I'm not saying he's right (since you need stupendous expertise to make that call) but my intuitions are that he has a good point, and he is at least addressing a crucial question which most analytical philosophers avert their eyes from. |
| 13402 | We only grasp a name if we know whether to apply it when the bearer changes [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: We cannot be said to have a full grasp of a name unless we have a definite disposition to apply it or to withhold it under whatever conceivable changes the bearer of the name might come to undergo. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: This is right, and an excellent counterproposal to the logicians' notion that names have to rigidly designate. As a bare minimum, you are not supposed to deny the identity of your parents because they have grown a bit older, or a damaged painting. |
| 13405 | The baptiser picks the bearer of a name, but social use decides the category [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The person who introduces a proper name gets to pick its bearer, but its category - and consequently the meaning of the name - is determined by social use. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 7) | |
| A reaction: New 'division of labour'. The idea that a name has some sort of meaning seems right and important. If babies were switched after baptism, social use might fix the name to the new baby. The namer could stipulate the category at the baptism. Too neat. |
| 13399 | Examples show that ordinary proper names are not rigid designators [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: There are plenty of examples to show that ordinary proper names simply are not rigid designators. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: His examples are the planet Venus and the dust of which it is formed, and a statue made of clay. In other words, for some objects, perhaps under certain descriptions (e.g. functional ones), the baptised matter can change. Rigidity is an extra topping. |
| 13398 | We could make a contingent description into a rigid and necessary one by adding 'actual' to it [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: 'The winner of the Derby' satisfies some horse, but only accidentally. But we could 'rigidify' the description by inserting 'actual' into it, giving 'the actual winner of the Derby'. Winning is a contingent property, but actually winning is necessary. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: I like this unusual proposal because instead of switching into formal logic in order to capture the ideas we are after, he is drawing on the resources of ordinary language, offering philosophers a way of speaking plain English more precisely. |
| 13392 | Philosophers reduce complex English kind-quantifiers to the simplistic first-order quantifier [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: There is a readiness of philosophers to 'translate' English, with its seeming multitude of kind-driven quantifiers, into first-order logic, with its single wide-open quantifier. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: As in example he says that reference to a statue involves a 'statue-quantifier'. Thus we say things about the statue that we would not say about the clay, which would involve a 'clay-quantifier'. |
| 13404 | To exist necessarily is to have an essence whose own essence must be instantiated [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: For a thing to exist necessarily is for it to have an entity-essence whose own entity-essence entails being instantiated. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the culmination of a lengthy discussion, and is not immediately persuasive. For Jubien the analysis rests on a platonist view of properties, which doesn't help. |
| 13386 | If objects are just conventional, there is no ontological distinction between stuff and things [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Under the Quinean (conventional) view of objects, there is no ontological distinction between stuff and things. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the bold nihilistic account of physical objects, which seems to push all of our ontology into language (English?). We could devise divisions into things that were just crazy, and likely to lead to the rapid extinction of creatures who did it. |
| 9064 | Objects such as a cloud or Mount Everest seem to have fuzzy boundaries in nature [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: A common intuition is that a vague object has indeterminate or fuzzy spatio-temporal boundaries, such as a cloud. Mount Everest can only have arbitrary boundaries placed around it, so in nature it must have fuzzy boundaries. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §5) | |
| A reaction: We would have to respond by questioning whether Everest counts precisely as an 'object'. At the microscopic or subatomic level it seems that virtually everything has fuzzy boundaries. Maybe boundaries don't really exist. |
| 9044 | If someone is borderline tall, no further information is likely to resolve the question [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: If Tek is borderline tall, the unclarity does not seem to be epistemic, because no amount of further information about his exact height (or the heights of others) could help us decide whether he is tall. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1) | |
| A reaction: One should add also that information about social conventions or conventions about the usage of the word 'tall' will not help either. It seems fairly obvious that God would not know whether Tek is tall, so the epistemic view is certainly counterintuitive. |
| 9048 | The simplest approach, that vagueness is just ignorance, retains classical logic and semantics [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: The simplest approach to vagueness is to retain classical logic and semantics. Borderline cases are either true or false, but we don't know which, and, despite appearances, vague predicates have well-defined extensions. Vagueness is ignorance. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that you must have a rather unhealthy attachment to the logicians' view of the world to take this line. It is the passion of the stamp collector, to want everything in sets, with neatly labelled properties, and inference lines marked out. |
| 9055 | The epistemic view of vagueness must explain why we don't know the predicate boundary [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: A key question for the epistemic view of vagueness is: why are we ignorant of the facts about where the boundaries of vague predicates lie? | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably there is a range of answers, from laziness, to inability to afford the instruments, to limitations on human perception. At the limit, with physical objects, how do we tell whether it is us or the object which is afflicted with vagueness? |
| 9049 | Supervaluationism keeps true-or-false where precision can be produced, but not otherwise [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: The supervaluationist view of vagueness is that 'tall' comes out true or false on all the ways in which we can make 'tall' precise. There is a gap for borderline cases, but 'tall or not-tall' is still true wherever you draw a boundary. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1) | |
| A reaction: [Kit Fine is the spokesperson for this; it preserves classical logic, but not semantics] This doesn't seem to solve the problem of vagueness, but it does (sort of) save the principle of excluded middle. |
| 9056 | Vague statements lack truth value if attempts to make them precise fail [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: The supervaluationist view of vagueness proposes that a sentence is true iff it is true on all precisifications, false iff false on all precisifications, and neither true nor false otherwise. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be just a footnote to the Russell/Unger view, that logic works if the proposition is precise, but otherwise it is either just the mess of ordinary life, or the predicate doesn't apply at all. |
| 9058 | Some of the principles of classical logic still fail with supervaluationism [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: Supervaluationist logic (now with a 'definite' operator D) fails to preserve certain classical principles about consequence and rules of inference. For example, reduction ad absurdum, contraposition, the deduction theorem and argument by cases. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §3) | |
| A reaction: The aim of supervaluationism was to try to preserve some classical logic, especially the law of excluded middle, in the face of problems of vagueness. More drastic views, like treating vagueness as irrelevant to logic, or the epistemic view, do better. |
| 9059 | The semantics of supervaluation (e.g. disjunction and quantification) is not classical [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: The semantics of supervaluational views is not classical. A disjunction can be true without either of its disjuncts being true, and an existential quantification can be true without any of its substitution instances being true. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §3) | |
| A reaction: There is a vaguely plausible story here (either red or orange, but not definitely one nor tother; there exists an x, but which x it is is undecidable), but I think I will vote for this all being very very wrong. |
| 9060 | Supervaluation misunderstands vagueness, treating it as a failure to make things precise [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: Why should we think vague language is explained away by how things would be if it were made precise? Supervaluationism misrepresents vague expressions, as vague only because we have not bothered to make them precise. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §3) | |
| A reaction: The theory still leaves a gap where vagueness is ineradicable, so the charge doesn't seem quite fair. Logicians always yearn for precision, but common speech enjoys wallowing in a sea of easy-going vagueness, which works fine. |
| 9050 | A third truth-value at borderlines might be 'indeterminate', or a value somewhere between 0 and 1 [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: One approach to predications in borderline cases is to say that they have a third truth value - 'neutral', 'indeterminate' or 'indefinite', leading to a three-valued logic. Or a degree theory, such as fuzzy logic, with infinite values between 0 and 1. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1) | |
| A reaction: This looks more like a strategy for computer programmers than for metaphysicians, as it doesn't seem to solve the difficulty of things to which no one can quite assign any value at all. Sometimes you can't be sure if an entity is vague. |
| 9061 | People can't be placed in a precise order according to how 'nice' they are [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: There is no complete ordering of people by niceness, and two people could be both fairly nice, nice to intermediate degrees, while there is no fact of the matter about who is the nicer. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §4) | |
| A reaction: This is a difficulty if you are trying to decide vague predicates by awarding them degrees of truth. Attempts to place a precise value on 'nice' seem to miss the point, even more than utilitarian attempts to score happiness. |
| 9062 | If truth-values for vagueness range from 0 to 1, there must be someone who is 'completely tall' [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: Many-valued theories still seem to have a sharp boundary between sentences taking truth-value 1 and those taking value less than 1. So there is a last man in our sorites series who counts as 'completely tall'. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §4) | |
| A reaction: Lovely. Completely nice, totally red, perfectly childlike, an utter mountain, one hundred per cent amused. The enterprise seems to have the same implausibility found in Bayesian approaches to assessing evidence. |
| 9063 | How do we decide if my coat is red to degree 0.322 or 0.321? [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: What could determine which is the correct function, settling that my coat is red to degree 0.322 rather than 0.321? | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §4) | |
| A reaction: It is not just the uncertainty of placing the coat on the scale. The two ends of the scale have all the indeterminacy of being red rather than orange (or, indeed, pink). You are struggling to find a spot on the ruler, when the ruler is placed vaguely. |
| 13403 | The category of Venus is not 'object', or even 'planet', but a particular class of good-sized object [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The category of Venus is not 'physical object' or 'mereological sum', but narrower. Surprisingly, it is not 'planet', since it might cease to be a planet and still merit the name 'Venus'. It is something like 'well-integrated, good-sized physical object'. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Jubien is illustrating Idea 13402. This is a nice demonstration of how one might go about the task of constructing categories - by showing the modal profiles of things to which names have been assigned. Categories are file names. |
| 13375 | The idea that every entity must have identity conditions is an unfortunate misunderstanding [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The pervasiveness, throughout philosophy, of the assumption that entities of various kinds need identity conditions is one unfortunate aspect of Quine's important philosophical legacy. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Lowe seems to be an example of a philosopher who habitually demands individuation conditions for everything that is referred to. Presumably the alternative is to take lots of things as primitive, but this seems to be second best. |
| 13393 | Any entity has the unique property of being that specific entity [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: For any entity of any sort, abstract or concrete, I assume there is a property of being that specific entity. For want of a better term, I will call such properties entity-essences. They are 'singulary' - not instantiable by more than one thing at a time. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Baffling. Why would someone who has mocked all sorts of bogus philosophical claims based on logic then go on to assert the existence of such weird things as these? I can't make sense of this property being added to a thing's other properties. |
| 13388 | It is incoherent to think that a given entity depends on its kind for its existence [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: It is simply far-fetched - even incoherent - to think that, given an entity, of whatever kind, its being a single entity somehow consists in its satisfying some condition involving the kind to which it belongs (or concepts related to that kind). | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Well said. I can't see how philosophers have allowed themselves to drift into such a daft view. Kinds blatantly depend on the individuals that constitute them, so how could the identity of the individuals depend on their kind? |
| 13384 | Objects need conventions for their matter, their temporal possibility, and their spatial possibility [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: We need a first convention to determine what matter constitutes objects, then a second to determine whether there are different temporal possibilities for a given object, then a third for different spatial possibilities. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: This is building up a Quinean account of objects, as mere matter in regions of spacetime, which are then precisely determined by a set of social conventions. |
| 13385 | Basically, the world doesn't have ready-made 'objects'; we carve objects any way we like [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: There is a certain - very mild - sense in which I don't think the physical world comes with ready-made objects. I think instead that we (conventionally) carve it up into objects, and this can be done any way we like. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: I have no idea how one could begin to refute such a view. Obviously there are divisions (even if only of physical density) in the world, but nothing obliges us to make divisions at those points. We happily accept objects with gaps in them. |
| 13383 | If the statue is loved and the clay hated, that is about the object first qua statue, then qua clay [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: If a sculptor says 'I love the statue but I really hate that piece of clay - it is way too hard to work with' ...the statement is partly is partly about that object qua statue and partly about that object qua piece of clay. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: His point is that identity is partly determined by the concept or category under which the thing falls. Plausible. Lots of identity muddles seem to come from our conceptual scheme not being quite up to the job when things change. |
| 13400 | If one entity is an object, a statue, and some clay, these come apart in at least three ways [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: A single entity is a physical object, a piece of clay and a statue. We seem to have that the object could be scattered, but not the other two; the object and the clay could be spherical, but not the statue; and only the object could have different matter. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 5.2) | |
| A reaction: His proposal, roughly, is to reduce object-talk to property-talk, and then see the three views of this object as referring to different sets of properties, rather than to a single thing. Promising, except that he goes platonist about properties. |
| 13401 | The idea of coincident objects is a last resort, as it is opposed to commonsense naturalism [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: I find it surprising that some philosophers accept 'coincident objects'. This notion clearly offends against commonsense 'naturalism' about the world, so it should be viewed as a last resort. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 5.2 n9) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite clear why he invokes 'naturalism', but I pass on his intuition because it seems right to me. |
| 9045 | Vague predicates involve uncertain properties, uncertain objects, and paradoxes of gradual change [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: Three interrelated features of vague predicates such as 'tall', 'red', 'heap', 'child' are that they have borderline cases (application is uncertain), they lack well-defined extensions (objects are uncertain), and they're susceptible to sorites paradoxes. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1) | |
| A reaction: The issue will partly depend on what you think an object is: choose from bundles of properties, total denial, essential substance, or featureless substance with properties. The fungal infection of vagueness could creep in at any point, even the words. |
| 9047 | Many vague predicates are multi-dimensional; 'big' involves height and volume; heaps include arrangement [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: Many vague predicates are multi-dimensional. 'Big' of people depends on both height and volume; 'nice' does not even have clear dimensions; whether something is a 'heap' depends both the number of grains and their arrangement. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1) | |
| A reaction: Anyone who was hoping for a nice tidy theory for this problem should abandon hope at this point. Huge numbers of philosophical problems can be simplified by asking 'what exactly do you mean here?' (e.g. tall or bulky?). |
| 9053 | If there is a precise borderline area, that is not a case of vagueness [Keefe/Smith] |
| Full Idea: If a predicate G has a sharply-bounded set of cases falling in between the positive and negative, this shows that merely having borderline cases is not sufficient for vagueness. | |
| From: R Keefe / P Smith (Intro: Theories of Vagueness [1997], §1) | |
| A reaction: Thus you might have 'pass', 'fail' and 'take the test again'. But there seem to be two cases in the border area: will decide later, and decision seems impossible. And the sharp boundaries may be quite arbitrary. |
| 13380 | Parts seem to matter when it is just an object, but not matter when it is a kind of object [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: When thought of just as an object, the parts of a thing seem definitive and their arrangement seems inconsequential. But when thought of as an object of a familiar kind it is reversed: the arrangement is important and the parts are inessential. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This is analogous to the Ship of Theseus, where we say that the tour operator and the museum keeper give different accounts of whether it is the same ship. The 'kind' Jubien refers to is most likely to be a functional kind. |
| 13376 | We should not regard essentialism as just nontrivial de re necessity [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: I argue against the widely accepted characterization of the doctrine of 'essentialism' as the acceptance of nontrivial de re necessity | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I agree entirely. The notion of an essence is powerful if clearly distinguished. The test is: can everything being said about essences be just as easily said by referring to necessities? If so, you are talking about the wrong thing. |
| 13381 | Thinking of them as 'ships' the repaired ship is the original, but as 'objects' the reassembly is the original [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Thinking about the original ship as a ship, we think we continue to have the 'same ship' as each part is replaced; ...but when we think of them as physical objects, we think the original ship and the outcome of the reassembly are one and the same. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that you cannot eliminate how we are thinking of the ship as influencing how we should read it. My suggestion is to think of Theseus himself valuing either the repaired or the reassembled version. That's bad for Jubien's account. |
| 13382 | Rearranging the planks as a ship is confusing; we'd say it was the same 'object' with a different arrangement [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: That the planks are rearranged as a ship elevates the sense of mystery, because arrangements matter for ships, but if they had been arranged differently we would have the same intuition - that it still counts as the same object. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: Implausible. Classic case: can I have my pen back? - smashes it to pieces and hands it over with 'there you are' - that's not my pen! - Jubien says it's the same object! - it isn't my pen, and it isn't the same object either! Where is Shelley's skylark? |
| 13379 | If two objects are indiscernible across spacetime, how could we decide whether or not they are the same? [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: If a bit of matter has a qualitatively indistinguishable object located at a later time, with a path of spacetime connecting them, how could we determine they are identical? Neither identity nor diversity follows from qualitative indiscernibility. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: All these principles expounded by Leibniz were assumed to be timeless, but for identity over time the whole notion of things retaining identity despite changing has to be rethought. Essentialism to the rescue. |
| 13394 | Entailment does not result from mutual necessity; mutual necessity ensures entailment [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Typically philosophers say that for P to entail Q is for the proposition that all P's are Q's to be necessary. I think this analysis is backwards, and that necessity rests on entailment, not vice versa. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: His example is that being a horse and being an animal are such that one entails the other. In other words, necessities arise out of property relations (which for Jubien are necessary because the properties are platonically timeless). Wrong. |
| 13391 | Modality concerns relations among platonic properties [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: I think modality has to do with relations involving the abstract part of the world, specifically with relations among (Platonic) properties. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: [Sider calls Jubien's the 'governance' view, since abstract relations govern the concrete] I take Jubien here (having done a beautiful demolition job on the possible worlds account of modality) to go spectacularly wrong. Modality starts in the concrete. |
| 13374 | To analyse modality, we must give accounts of objects, properties and relations [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The ultimate analysis of possibility and necessity depends on two important ontological decisions: the choice of an analysis of the intuitive concept of a physical object, and the other is the positing of properties and relations. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: In the same passage he adopts Quine's view of objects, leading to mereological essentialism, and a Platonic view of properties, based on Lewis's argument for taking some things at face value. One might start with processes and events instead. |
| 13389 | The love of possible worlds is part of the dream that technical logic solves philosophical problems [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: I believe the contemporary infatuation with possible worlds in philosophy stems in part from a tendency to think that technical logic offers silver-bullet solutions to philosophical problems. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: I would say that the main reason for the infatuation is just novelty. As a technical device it was only invented in the 1960s, so we are in a honeymoon period, as we would be with any new gadget. I can't imagine possible worlds figuring much in 100 years. |
| 13390 | Possible worlds don't explain necessity, because they are a bunch of parallel contingencies [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The fundamental problem is that in world theory, what passes for necessity is in effect just a bunch of parallel 'contingencies'. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Jubien's general complaint is that there is no connection between the possible worlds and the actual world, so they are irrelevant, but this is a nicely different point - that lots of contingent worlds can't add up to necessity. Nice. |
| 13396 | Analysing mental concepts points to 'inclusionism' - that mental phenomena are part of the physical [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: We have (physicalist) 'inclusionism' when the mental is included in the physical, and mental phenomena are to be found among physical phenomena. Only inclusionism is compatible with a genuine physicalist analysis of mental concepts. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: This isn't the thesis of conceptual dualism (which I like), but an interesting accompaniment for it. Jubien is offering this as an alternative to 'reductive' analysis, translating all the mental concepts into physical language. He extends 'physical'. |
| 13377 | First-order logic tilts in favour of the direct reference theory, in its use of constants for objects [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: First-order logic tilts in favor of the direct reference account of proper names by using individual constants to play the intuitive role of names, and by 'interpreting' the constants simply as the individuals that are assigned to them for truth-values. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Possibility [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is the kind of challenge to orthodoxy that is much needed at the moment. We have an orthodoxy which is almost a new 'scholasticism', that logic will clarify our metaphysics. Trying to enhance the logic for the job may be a dead end. |
| 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? |