Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance', 'The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding' and 'Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus''

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3 ideas

4. Formal Logic / A. Syllogistic Logic / 1. Aristotelian Logic
Aristotelian logic cannot express 'Everyone loves someone' [White,RM]
     Full Idea: There is no way within Aristotelian logic that you can give a proper expression for the logical form of such a proposition as 'Everyone loves someone'.
     From: Roger M. White (Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' [2006], 1 'Frege')
     A reaction: This needs a combination of two different quantifiers.
11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 2. Understanding
Understanding is seeing coherent relationships in the relevant information [Kvanvig]
     Full Idea: What is distinctive about understanding (after truth is satisfied) is the internal seeing or appreciating of explanatory and other coherence-inducing relationships in a body of information that is crucial for understanding.
     From: Jonathan Kvanvig (The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding [2003], 198), quoted by Anand Vaidya - Understanding and Essence 'Distinction'
     A reaction: For me this ticks exactly the right boxes. Coherent explanations are what we want. The hardest part is the ensure their truth. Kvanvig claims this is internal, so we can understand even if, Gettier-style, our external connections are lucky.
26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 4. Regularities / b. Best system theory
Lewis later proposed the axioms at the intersection of the best theories (which may be few) [Mumford on Lewis]
     Full Idea: Later Lewis said we must choose between the intersection of the axioms of the tied best systems. He chose for laws the axioms that are in all the tied systems (but then there may be few or no axioms in the intersection).
     From: comment on David Lewis (Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance [1980], p.124) by Stephen Mumford - Laws in Nature