39 ideas
| 16512 | Semantic facts are preferable to transcendental philosophical fiction [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Semantical fact is almost always more interesting than transcendental philosophical fiction. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.1 n4) | |
| A reaction: An interesting expression of a more sophisticated recent allegiance to linguistic philosophy. There is still a strong allegiance to semantics as a major branch of philosophy, despite caution (e.g. from Nathan Salmon) about its scope. |
| 17529 | Maybe the concept needed under which things coincide must also yield a principle of counting [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: My thesis C says that to specify something or other under which a and b coincide is to specify a concept f which qualifies for this purpose only if it yields a principle of counting for fs. ...I submit that C is false, though a near miss. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 1.1) |
| 17530 | The sortal needed for identities may not always be sufficient to support counting [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: My principle C seems unnecessary ...since it is one thing to see how many fs there are...but another to have a perfectly general method. ...One could answer whether this f-compliant is the same as that one, but there are too many ways to articulate it. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.8) | |
| A reaction: His famous example is trying to count the Pope's crown, which is made of crowns. A clearer example might be a rectangular figure divided up into various overlapping rectangles. Individuation is easy, but counting is contextual. |
| 16523 | Realist Conceptualists accept that our interests affect our concepts [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The realist conceptualist may cheerfully admit that the sortal concepts of which we are possessed are the creatures of our interests; …and also that there need be no one way in which we must articulate reality. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.2) | |
| A reaction: Wiggins calls himself a 'realist conceptualist'. In his terminology, I seem to be an 'anti-conceptualist realist'. The issue concerns aspects of reality that extend beyond our concepts. The 99th d.p. of the mass of the electron. |
| 16524 | Conceptualism says we must use our individuating concepts to grasp reality [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: What Conceptualism entails is that, although horses and stars are not inventions or artefacts, in order to single out these things we must deploy a conceptual scheme which has been formed in such a way as to make singling them out possible. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't quite see why the 'singling out' role of the concepts is the only one that generates them, or makes them fit for purpose. In general, of course, our conceptual scheme is necessarily a response to our experience of the world. |
| 16526 | Animal classifications: the Emperor's, fabulous, innumerable, like flies, stray dogs, embalmed…. [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A Chinese encyclopedia classifies animals as belonging to the Emperor, embalmed, tame, sucking pigs, sirens, fabulous, stray dogs, included in this classification, frenzied, innumerable, drawn with a fine brush, etcetera, or look for afar like flies. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.7 n18) | |
| A reaction: [This glorious quotation comes from a story by Borges, first spotted by Foucault] |
| 16492 | Individuation needs accounts of identity, of change, and of singling out [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A theory of individuation must comprise at least three things: an elucidation of the primitive concept of identity or sameness; what it is to be a substance that persists through change; and what it is for a thinker to single out the same substance. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 1) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Metaphysics seems to need a theory of identity, but I am not yet convinced that it also needs a theory of 'individuation'. Never mind, press on and create one, and see how it looks. Aristotle wanted to explain predication too. |
| 16493 | Individuation can only be understood by the relation between things and thinkers [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Understanding the concepts involved in individuation can only be characterised by reference to observable commerce between things singled out and thinkers who think or find their way around the world precisely by singling them out. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 1) | |
| A reaction: I take individuation to be relatively uninteresting, because I understand identity independently of how we single things out, but Wiggins's reliance on sortals implies that the very identity of things in the world is knee deep in mental activity. |
| 16496 | Singling out extends back and forward in time [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The singling out of a substance at a time reaches backwards and forwards to time before and after that time. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this is an inferred history and persistence conditions. Sounds fine in a stable world. We assume (a priori?) that any object will have a space-time line for its duration. |
| 16495 | The only singling out is singling out 'as' something [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: There could be no singling out tout court unless there could be singling out 'as'. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 2) | |
| A reaction: I find this claim baffling. Do animals categorise everything they engage with? Are we unable to engage with something if we have not yet categorised it? Surely picking it out is prior to saying that sort of thing it is? |
| 16501 | In Aristotle's sense, saying x falls under f is to say what x is [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: To say that x falls under f - or that x is an f - is to say what x is (in the sense Aristotle isolated). | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a key claim in Wiggins's main principle. I'm not convinced. He wants one main sortal to do all the work. I don't think Aristotle at all intended the 'nature' of an individual thing to be given by a single sortal under which it falls. |
| 16506 | Every determinate thing falls under a sortal, which fixes its persistence [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: We can expect that, for every completely determinate continuant, there will be at least one sortal concept that it falls under and that determines a principle of persistence for it. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: I think he has the 'determines' relation the wrong way round! Being a tiger doesn't determine anything about persistence. It is having that nature and those persistence conditions which make it a tiger. And why does he optimistically 'expect' this? |
| 16509 | Natural kinds are well suited to be the sortals which fix substances [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Among the best candidates to play the roles of sortal and substantial predicates are the natural kind words. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: There is always a danger of circularity with this kind of approach. How do we distinguish the genuine natural kinds from the dubious ones? |
| 16514 | Artefacts are individuated by some matter having a certain function [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Ordinary artefacts are individuated, rather indeterminately and arbitrarily, by reference to a parcel of matter so organised as to subserve a certain function. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.3) |
| 16510 | Nominal essences don't fix membership, ignore evolution, and aren't contextual [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Nominal essences are unsatisfactory because they fail either of necessity or of sufficiency for membership of the intended kind, they leave unexplained how sortals can evolve, and there is no room for culture or context in our reference to kinds. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: [a compression of a paragraph] I would have thought that Locke would just say it is tough luck if nominal essences can't do all these things, because that's just the way it is, folks. |
| 16503 | 'What is it?' gives the kind, nature, persistence conditions and identity over time of a thing [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The question 'what is it?' refers to the persistence and lifespan of an entity, and so manifests the identity over time of an entity and its persistence, between persistence and existence, and between its existence and being the kind of thing it is. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: The idea that establishing the kind of a thing can do all this work strikes me as false. The lifespan of a 'human' can be between five minutes and a hundred years. Humans have a clear death, but thunderstorms don't. |
| 16499 | A restored church is the same 'church', but not the same 'building' or 'brickwork' [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: We can say of Hume's church that the present church is the same 'church' as the old parish church but not the same 'building' or the same 'stonework' as the old parish church. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Unconvinced. This seems to make a 'church' into an abstraction, which might even exist in the absence of any building. And it seems to identify a building with its stonework. Wiggins yearns for a neat solution, but it ain't here. |
| 16515 | A thing begins only once; for a clock, it is when its making is first completed [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A thing starts existing only once; and in the case of a clock its proper beginning was at about the time when its maker finished it. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: I love the example that challenges this. Take the clock's parts and use them to make other clocks, then collect them up and reassemble the first clock. If the first clock has persisted through this, you have too many clocks. Wiggins spots some of this. |
| 16517 | Priests prefer the working ship; antiquarians prefer the reconstruction [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Dispute might break out between priests who favoured the working ship and antiquarians who preferred the reconstruction. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: This captures the contextual nature of the dispute very succinctly. Wiggins, of course, thinks that sortals will settle the matter. Fat chance. |
| 16497 | Leibniz's Law (not transitivity, symmetry, reflexivity) marks what is peculiar to identity [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The principle of Leibniz's Law marks off what is peculiar to identity and differentiates it in a way in which transitivity, symmetry and reflexivity (all shared by 'exact similarity, 'equality in pay', etc.) do not. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 1.2) |
| 16502 | Identity is primitive [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Identity is a primitive notion. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: To be a true primitive it would have to be univocal, but it seems to me that 'identity' comes in degrees. The primitive concept is the minimal end of the degrees, but there are also more substantial notions of identity. |
| 16498 | Identity cannot be defined, because definitions are identities [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Since any definition is an identity, identity itself cannot be defined. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 1.2 n7) | |
| A reaction: This sounds too good to be true! I can't think of an objection, so, okay, identity cannot possibly be defined. We can give synonyms for it, I suppose. [Wrong, says Rumfitt! Definitions can also be equivalences!] |
| 16521 | A is necessarily A, so if B is A, then B is also necessarily A [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The famous proof of Barcan Marcus about necessity of identity comes down to simply this: Hesperus is necessarily Hesperus, so if Phosphorus is Hesperus, Phosphorus is necessarily Hesperus. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Since the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus was an a posteriori discovery, this was taken to be the inception of the idea that there are a posteriori necessities. The conclusion seems obvious. One thing is necessarily one thing. |
| 16505 | By the principle of Indiscernibility, a symmetrical object could only be half of itself! [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The full Identity of Indiscernibles excludes the existence in this world of a symmetrical object, which is reduced to half of itself by the principle. If symmetrical about all planes that bisect it, it is precluded altogether from existence. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: A really nice objection. Do the parts even need to be symmetrical? My eyeballs can't be identical to one another, presumably. Electrons already gave the principle big trouble. |
| 16494 | We want to explain sameness as coincidence of substance, not as anything qualitative [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The notion of sameness or identity that we are to elucidate is not that of any degree of qualitative similarity but of coincidence as a substance - a notion as primitive as predication. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 2) | |
| A reaction: This question invites an approach to identity through our descriptions of it, rather than to the thing itself. There is no problem in ontology of two substances being 'the same', because they are just one substance. |
| 16522 | It is hard or impossible to think of Caesar as not human [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: It is hard or impossible to conceive of Caesar's not being a man (human). | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: So is it 'hard' or is it 'impossible'? Older generations of philosophers simply didn't read enough science fiction. Any short story could feature Caesar's failure to be a man. His assassination was a disaster for the Martian invasion of 44 BCE. |
| 16525 | Our sortal concepts fix what we find in experience [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: What sortal concepts we can bring to bear upon experience determines what we can find there. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: Wiggins would wince at being classed among linguistic relativists of the Sapir-Whorf type, but that's where I'm putting this idea. Wiggins is a realist, who knows there are things out there our concepts miss. He compares it to a fishing net. He's wrong. |
| 16518 | We conceptualise objects, but they impinge on us [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The mind conceptualises objects, yet objects impinge upon the mind. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: A very nice statement of the relationship, and the fact that we don't just make our concepts up. |
| 16511 | A 'conception' of a horse is a full theory of what it is (and not just the 'concept') [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A 'conception' of horse is a theory of what a horse is, or what it is to be a horse. The conception is in no way the same as the concept. The conception is of the concept. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: Wiggins sounds confident about a sharp distinction here, which I doubt, but some such distinction seems to required. I quite like Williams's 'fat' and 'thin' concepts. |
| 14080 | Are causal descriptions part of the causal theory of reference, or are they just metasemantic? [Kaplan, by Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Kaplan notes that the causal theory of reference can be understood in two quite different ways, as part of the semantics (involving descriptions of causal processes), or as metasemantics, explaining why a term has the referent it does. | |
| From: report of David Kaplan (Dthat [1970]) by Jonathan Schaffer - Deflationary Metaontology of Thomasson 1 | |
| A reaction: [Kaplan 'Afterthought' 1989] The theory tends to be labelled as 'direct' rather than as 'causal' these days, but causal chains are still at the heart of the story (even if more diffused socially). Nice question. Kaplan takes the meta- version as orthodox. |
| 23418 | Liberal state legitimacy is based on a belief in justice, not in some conception of the good life [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: For liberals the basis of state legitimacy is a shared sense of justice, not a shared conception of the good. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'legitimacy') | |
| A reaction: For a liberal state to work, the citizens have to roughly believe in the core values of liberalism, which are primarily freedom and equality (and hence justice). |
| 23414 | Liberals say state intervention in culture restricts people's autonomy [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: According to liberal theory, a state which intervenes in the cultural market place to encourage any particular way of life restricts people's autonomy. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'social') | |
| A reaction: The communitarian idea is that the state should intervene, in order to foster the best aspects of communal culture. The dangers are obvious, and can be seen in any totalitarian state. A gentle hand on the tiller, perhaps? Increase the options? |
| 23410 | Modern liberals see a community as simply a society which respects freedom and equality [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Most contemporary liberal philosophers have little to say about the ideal of community. …It is often seen as derivative of liberty and equality - a society lives up to the ideal of community if its members are treated as free and equal persons. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: He cites Rawls as an example. This is the central idea which was attacked by modern communitarians. A collection of scattered self-seeking isolated individuals doesn't seem to amount to a healthy communal life. Maybe community needs further rights? |
| 23409 | Community can focus on class or citizenship or ethnicity or culture [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: In recent centuries the ideal of community has taken many forms, from class solidarity or shared citizenship to a common ethnic descent or cultural identity. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Language and religion are not explicitly mentioned, but must be implied. Supporting a major sports team is also worth mentioning. |
| 23419 | Communitarianism struggles with excluded marginalised groups [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The problem of the exclusion of historically marginalised groups is endemic to the communitarian project. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'legitimacy') | |
| A reaction: Put simply, old-fashioned styles of community are probably impossible in large modern states, some with rather arbitrary borders. |
| 23413 | Feminism has shown that social roles are far from fixed (as communitarians tend to see them) [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians say that some of our social roles must be regarded as fixed when planning our lives, …but the women's movement has shown how deeply entrenched social roles can be questioned and rejected. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Embedded') | |
| A reaction: True, but parents walking out on young children also shows that. The ideal must be some sort of balance. |
| 23415 | Participation aids the quest for the good life, but why should that be a state activity? [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians rarely distinguish between collective activities and political activities. Shared participation aids intelligent decisions about the good life, but why should that be organised through the state, rather than by free individuals? | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'need') | |
| A reaction: Kylicka points out later that local groups can be very unintelligent or prejudiced. Modern media have changed that picture, because participation can be with geographically remote people. |
| 23411 | Communitarians see justice as primarily a community matter, rather than a principle [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians believe either that community replaces the need for principles of justice, or that the community is either the source of such principles or should play a greater role in deciding their content. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The idea that a racist or chauvinist or puritanical or insular community should decide justice for all its members sounds horrible. It drives you to liberal individualism, just thinking about it. |
| 23412 | Justice resolves conflicts, but may also provoke them [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Justice can help mediate conflicts, but it also tends to creat conflicts, and to decrease the natural expression of sociability. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'limits') | |
| A reaction: [He is discussing Michael Sandel on liberalism] Family life might not go well if all of its members continually demanded justice for themselves as individuals. Maybe our concept of justice is too individualistic? Do we need a sense of 'group' justice? |