Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Sweet Dreams', 'Barcan Formulae' and 'Intellectual Autobiography'

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15 ideas

3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 5. What Makes Truths / a. What makes truths

18901	Truthmakers are facts 'of' a domain, not something 'in' the domain [Sommers]
	Full Idea: A fact is an existential characteristic 'of' the domain; it is not something 'in' the domain. To search for truth-making facts in the world is indeed futile.
	From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Existence')
	A reaction: Attacking Austin on truth. Helpful. It is hard to see how a physical object has a mysterious power to 'make' a truth. No energy-transfer seems involved in the making. Animals think true thoughts; I suspect that concerns their mental maps of the world.

4. Formal Logic / A. Syllogistic Logic / 3. Term Logic

18904	'Predicable' terms come in charged pairs, with one the negation of the other [Sommers, by Engelbretsen]
	Full Idea: Sommers took the 'predicable' terms of any language to come in logically charged pairs. Examples might be red/nonred, massive/massless, tied/untied, in the house/not in the house. The idea that terms can be negated was essential for such pairing.
	From: report of Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005]) by George Engelbretsen - Trees, Terms and Truth 2
	A reaction: If, as Rumfitt says, we learn affirmation and negation as a single linguistic operation, this would fit well with it, though Rumfitt doubtless (as a fan of classical logic) prefers to negation sentences.

18895	Logic which maps ordinary reasoning must be transparent, and free of variables [Sommers]
	Full Idea: What would a 'laws of thought' logic that cast light on natural language deductive thinking be like? Such a logic must be variable-free, conforming to normal syntax, and its modes of reasoning must be transparent, to make them virtually instantaneous.
	From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'How We')
	A reaction: This is the main motivation for Fred Sommers's creation of modern term logic. Even if you are up to your neck in modern symbolic logic (which I'm not), you have to find this idea appealing. You can't leave it to the psychologists.

4. Formal Logic / D. Modal Logic ML / 7. Barcan Formula

15380	Barcan:nothing comes into existence; Converse:nothing goes out; Both:domain is unchanging [Vervloesem]
	Full Idea: Intuitively, the Barcan formula says that nothing comes into existence when moving from a possible world to an alternative world. The converse says that nothing goes out of existence. Together they say the domain of quantification is fixed for all worlds.
	From: Koen Vervloesem (Barcan Formulae [2010])
	A reaction: Stated so clearly, they sound absurd. The sensible idea, I suppose, is that you can refer to all the things from any world, but that doesn't mean they are possible. Shades of Meinong. 'Square circles' are not possible.

5. Theory of Logic / D. Assumptions for Logic / 4. Identity in Logic

18897	Predicate logic has to spell out that its identity relation '=' is an equivalent relation [Sommers]
	Full Idea: Because predicate logic contrues identities dyadically, its account of inferences involving identity propositions needs laws or axioms of identity, explicitly asserting that the dyadic realtion in 'x=y' possesses symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity.
	From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Syllogistic')

5. Theory of Logic / E. Structures of Logic / 1. Logical Form

18893	Translating into quantificational idiom offers no clues as to how ordinary thinkers reason [Sommers]
	Full Idea: Modern predicate logic's methods of justification, which involve translation into an artificial quantificational idiom, offer no clues to how the average person, knowing no logic and adhering to the vernacular, is so logically adept.
	From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], Intro)
	A reaction: Of course, people are very logically adept when the argument is simple (because, I guess, they can test it against the world), but not at all good when the reasoning becomes more complex. We do, though, reason in ordinary natural language.

5. Theory of Logic / E. Structures of Logic / 2. Logical Connectives / c. not

18903	Sommers promotes the old idea that negation basically refers to terms [Sommers, by Engelbretsen]
	Full Idea: If there is one idea that is the keystone of the edifice that constitutes Sommers's united philosophy it is that terms are the linguistic entities subject to negation in the most basic sense. It is a very old idea, tending to be rejected in modern times.
	From: report of Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005]) by George Engelbretsen - Trees, Terms and Truth 2
	A reaction: Negation in modern logic is an operator applied to sentences, typically writing '¬Fa', which denies that F is predicated of a, with Fa being an atomic sentence. Do we say 'not(Stan is happy)', or 'not-Stan is happy', or 'Stan is not-happy'? Third one?

5. Theory of Logic / E. Structures of Logic / 7. Predicates in Logic

18894	Predicates form a hierarchy, from the most general, down to names at the bottom [Sommers]
	Full Idea: We organise our concepts of predicability on a hierarchical tree. At the top are terms like 'interesting', 'exists', 'talked about', which are predicable of anything. At the bottom are names, and in between are predicables of some things and not others.
	From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Category')
	A reaction: The heirarchy seem be arranged simply by the scope of the predicate. 'Tallest' is predicable of anything in principle, but only of a few things in practice. Is 'John Doe' a name? What is 'cosmic' predicable of? Challenging!

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 2. Realism

18900	Unfortunately for realists, modern logic cannot say that some fact exists [Sommers]
	Full Idea: Unfortunately for the fate of realist philosophy, modern logic's treatment of 'exists' is resolutely inhospitable to facts as referents of phrases of the form 'the existence or non-existence of φ'.
	From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Realism')
	A reaction: Predicate logic has to talk about objects, and then attribute predicates to them. It tends to treat a fact as 'Fa' - this object has this predicate, but that's not really how we understand facts.

15. Nature of Minds / B. Features of Minds / 5. Qualia / c. Explaining qualia

7658	Obviously there can't be a functional anaylsis of qualia if they are defined by intrinsic properties [Dennett]
	Full Idea: If you define qualia as intrinsic properties of experiences considered in isolation from all their causes and effects, logically independent of all dispositional properties, then they are logically guaranteed to elude all broad functional analysis.
	From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.8)
	A reaction: This is a good point - it seems daft to reify qualia and imagine them dangling in mid-air with all their vibrant qualities - but that is a long way from saying there is nothing more to qualia than functional roles. Functions must be exlained too.

16. Persons / E. Rejecting the Self / 4. Denial of the Self

7655	The work done by the 'homunculus in the theatre' must be spread amongst non-conscious agencies [Dennett]
	Full Idea: All the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must be distributed among various lesser agencies in the brain, none of which is conscious.
	From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.3)
	A reaction: Dennett's account crucially depends on consciousness being much more fragmentary than most philosophers claim it to be. It is actually full of joints, which can come apart. He may be right.

17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 2. Reduction of Mind

7657	Intelligent agents are composed of nested homunculi, of decreasing intelligence, ending in machines [Dennett]
	Full Idea: As long as your homunculi are more stupid and ignorant than the intelligent agent they compose, the nesting of homunculi within homunculi can be finite, bottoming out, eventually, with agents so unimpressive they can be replaced by machines.
	From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.6)
	A reaction: [Dennett first proposed this in 'Brainstorms' 1978]. This view was developed well by Lycan. I rate it as one of the most illuminating ideas in the modern philosophy of mind. All complex systems (like aeroplanes) have this structure.

17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 3. Eliminativism

7656	I don't deny consciousness; it just isn't what people think it is [Dennett]
	Full Idea: I don't maintain, of course, that human consciousness does not exist; I maintain that it is not what people often think it is.
	From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.3)
	A reaction: I consider Dennett to be as near as you can get to an eliminativist, but he is not stupid. As far as I can see, the modern philosopher's bogey-man, the true total eliminativist, simply doesn't exist. Eliminativists usually deny propositional attitudes.

18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 6. Artificial Thought / a. Artificial Intelligence

7654	What matters about neuro-science is the discovery of the functional role of the chemistry [Dennett]
	Full Idea: Neuro-science matters because - and only because - we have discovered that the many different neuromodulators and other chemical messengers that diffuse throughout the brain have functional roles that make important differences.
	From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.1)
	A reaction: I agree with Dennett that this is the true ground for pessimism about spectacular breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, rather than abstract concerns about irreducible features of the mind like 'qualia' and 'rationality'.

19. Language / B. Reference / 1. Reference theories

18898	In standard logic, names are the only way to refer [Sommers]
	Full Idea: In modern predicate logic, definite reference by proper names is the primary and sole form of reference.
	From: Fred Sommers (Intellectual Autobiography [2005], 'Reference')
	A reaction: Hence we have to translate definite descriptions into (logical) names, or else paraphrase them out of existence. The domain only contains 'objects', so only names can uniquely pick them out.