17 ideas
| 22102 | Arguing with opponents uncovers truths, and restrains falsehoods [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: There is no better way of uncovering the truth and keeping falsity in check than by arguing with people who disagree with you. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (On the spiritual perfection of life [1268], 26), quoted by Kretzmann/Stump - Aquinas, Thomas 05 | |
| A reaction: Not the sort of attitude you associate with medieval scholastics, who are presumed to be dogmatists. How many modern philosophers actually have the courage to follow this advice? |
| 10653 | Maybe set theory need not be well-founded [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: There are some proposals for non-well-founded set theory (tolerating cases of self-membership and membership circularities). | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Aczel 1988, and Barwise and Moss 1996] |
| 10648 | Mereology need not be nominalist, though it is often taken to be so [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: While mereology was originally offered with a nominalist viewpoint, resulting in a conception of mereology as an ontologically parsimonious alternative to set theory, there is no necessary link between analysis of parthood and nominalism. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 1) | |
| A reaction: He cites Lesniewski and Leonard-and-Goodman. Do you allow something called a 'whole' into your ontology, as well as the parts? He observes that while 'wholes' can be concrete, they can also be abstract, if the parts are abstract. |
| 10655 | Are there mereological atoms, and are all objects made of them? [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: It is an open question whether there are any mereological atoms (with no proper parts), and also whether every object is ultimately made up of atoms. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 3) | |
| A reaction: Such a view would have to presuppose (metaphysically) that the divisibility of matter has limits. If one follows this route, then are there only 'natural' wholes, or are we 'unrestricted' in our view of how the atoms combine? I favour the natural route. |
| 10659 | There is something of which everything is part, but no null-thing which is part of everything [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: It is common in mereology to hold that there is something of which everything is part, but few hold that there is a 'null entity' that is part of everything. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: This comes out as roughly the opposite of set theory, which cannot do without the null set, but is not keen on the set of everything. |
| 10661 | 'Composition is identity' says multitudes are the reality, loosely composing single things [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: The thesis known as 'composition is identity' is that identity is mereological composition; a fusion is just the parts counted loosely, but it is strictly a multitude and loosely a single thing. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: [He cites D.Baxter 1988, in Mind] It is not clear, from this simple statement, what the difference is between multitudes that are parts of a thing, and multitudes that are not. A heavy weight seems to hang on the notion of 'composed of'. |
| 10647 | Parts may or may not be attached, demarcated, arbitrary, material, extended, spatial or temporal [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: The word 'part' can used whether it is attached, or arbitrarily demarcated, or gerrymandered, or immaterial, or unextended, or spatial, or temporal. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 1) |
| 10651 | If 'part' is reflexive, then identity is a limit case of parthood [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: Taking reflexivity as constitutive of the meaning of 'part' amounts to regarding identity as a limit case of parthood. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: A nice thought, but it is horribly 'philosophical', and a long way from ordinary usage and common sense (which is, I'm sorry to say, a BAD thing). |
| 10649 | 'Part' stands for a reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive relation [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: It seems obvious that 'part' stands for a partial ordering, a reflexive ('everything is part of itself'), antisymmetic ('two things cannot be part of each other'), and transitive (a part of a part of a thing is part of that thing) relation. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: I'm never clear why the reflexive bit of the relation should be taken as 'obvious', since it seems to defy normal usage and common sense. It would be absurd to say 'I'll give you part of the cake' and hand you the whole of it. See Idea 10651. |
| 10654 | The parthood relation will help to define at least seven basic predicates [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: With a basic parthood relation, we can formally define various mereological predicates, such as overlap, underlap, proper part, over-crossing, under-crossing, proper overlap, and proper underlap. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: [Varzi offers some diagrams, but they need interpretation] |
| 10658 | Sameness of parts won't guarantee identity if their arrangement matters [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: We might say that sameness of parts is not sufficient for identity, as some entities may differ exclusively with respect to the arrangement of the parts, as when we compare 'John loves Mary' with 'Mary loves John'. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably wide dispersal should also prevent parts from fixing wholes, but there is so much vagueness here that it is tempting to go for unrestricted composition, and then work back to the common sense position. |
| 10652 | Conceivability may indicate possibility, but literary fantasy does not [Varzi] |
| Full Idea: Conceivability may well be a guide to possibility, but literary fantasy is by itself no evidence of conceivability. | |
| From: Achille Varzi (Mereology [2003], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: Very nice. People who cite 'conceivability' in this context often have a disgracefully loose usage for the word. Really, really conceivable is probably our only guide to possibility. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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'. |