21 ideas
20728 | Metaphysics is hopeless with its present epistemology; common-sense realism is needed [Colvin] |
Full Idea: Despair over metaphysics will not change until it has shaken off the incubus of a perverted epistemology, which has left thought in a hopeless tangle - until common-sense critical realism is made the starting point for investigating reality. | |
From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.144) | |
A reaction: It seems to me that this is what has happened to analytic metaphysics since Kripke. Careful discussions about the nature of an object, or a category, or a property, are relying on unquestioned robust realism. Quite right too. |
11115 | 'All horses' either picks out the horses, or the things which are horses [Jubien] |
Full Idea: Two ways to see 'all horses are animals' are as picking out all the horses (so that it is a 'horse-quantifier'), ..or as ranging over lots of things in addition to horses, with 'horses' then restricting the things to those that satisfy 'is a horse'. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
A reaction: Jubien says this gives you two different metaphysical views, of a world of horses etc., or a world of things which 'are horses'. I vote for the first one, as the second seems to invoke an implausible categorical property ('being a horse'). Cf Idea 11116. |
20726 | We can only distinguish self from non-self if there is an inflexible external reality [Colvin] |
Full Idea: Were there no inflexible reality outside of the individual, opposing and limiting it, knowledge of the self and the non-self would never develop. | |
From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.140) | |
A reaction: Presumably opponents would have to say that such 'knowledge' is an illusion. This is in no way a conclusive argument, but I approach the problem of realism in quest of the best explanation, and this idea is important evidence. |
20727 | Common-sense realism rests on our interests and practical life [Colvin] |
Full Idea: It is the determination of the external world from the practical standpoint, from the standpoint of interest, that may be defined as the common-sense view of reality. | |
From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.141) | |
A reaction: Probably more appropriately named the 'pragmatic' view of reality. Relying on what is 'practical' seems to offer some objectivity, but relying on 'interest' rather less so. Can I be an anti-realist when life goes badly, and a realist when it goes well? |
20730 | If objects are doubted because their appearances change, that presupposes one object [Colvin] |
Full Idea: If objects are doubted because the same object appears differently at different times and circumstances, in order that this judgement shall have weight it must be assumed that the object under question is the same in its different presentations. | |
From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.145) | |
A reaction: [compressed] Scepticism could eat into the underlying object as well. Is the underlying object a 'substrate'? If so, what's that? Is the object just a bundle of a properties? If so, there is no underlying object. |
20729 | Arguments that objects are unknowable or non-existent assume the knower's existence [Colvin] |
Full Idea: Arguments for the absolute unknowability or non-existence of an external object only works by assuming that another external object, an individual, is known completely in so far as that individual expresses a judgement about an external object. | |
From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.145) | |
A reaction: Anti-realism is a decay that eats into everything. You can't doubt all the externals without doubting all the internals as well. |
20731 | The idea that everything is relations is contradictory; relations are part of the concept of things [Colvin] |
Full Idea: The doctrine [that all we can know is the relations between subject and object] is in its essence self-contradictory, since our very idea of thing implies that it is something in relation either actually or potentially. | |
From: Stephen S. Colvin (The Common-Sense View of Reality [1902], p.150) | |
A reaction: Ladyman and Ross try to defend an account of reality based entirely on relations. I'm with Colvin on this one. All accounts of reality based either on pure relations or pure functions have a huge hole in their theory. |
11116 | Being a physical object is our most fundamental category [Jubien] |
Full Idea: Being a physical object (as opposed to being a horse or a statue) really is our most fundamental category for dealing with the external world. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
A reaction: This raises the interesting question of why any categories should be considered to be more 'fundamental' than others. I can only think that we perceive something to be an object fractionally before we (usually) manage to identify it. |
11117 | Haecceities implausibly have no qualities [Jubien] |
Full Idea: Properties of 'being such and such specific entity' are often called 'haecceities', but this term carries the connotation of non-qualitativeness which I don't favour. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
A reaction: The way he defines it makes it sound as if it was a category, but I take it to be more like a bare individual essence. If it has not qualities then it has no causal powers, so there could be no evidence for its existence. |
11119 | De re necessity is just de dicto necessity about object-essences [Jubien] |
Full Idea: I suggest that the de re is to be analyzed in terms of the de dicto. ...We have a case of modality de re when (and only when) the appropriate property in the de dicto formulation is an object-essence. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 5) |
11118 | Modal propositions transcend the concrete, but not the actual [Jubien] |
Full Idea: Where modal propositions may once have seemed to transcend the actual, they now seem only to transcend the concrete. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 4) | |
A reaction: This is because Jubien has defended a form of platonism. Personally I take modal propositions to be perceptible in the concrete world, by recognising the processes involved, not the mere static stuff. |
11108 | Your properties, not some other world, decide your possibilities [Jubien] |
Full Idea: The possibility of your having been a playwright has nothing to do with how people are on other planets, whether in our own or in some other realm. It is only to do with you and the relevant property. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
A reaction: I'm inclined to think that this simple point is conclusive disproof of possible worlds as an explanation of modality (apart from Jubien's other nice points). What we need to understand are modal properties, not other worlds. |
11111 | Modal truths are facts about parts of this world, not about remote maximal entities [Jubien] |
Full Idea: Typical modal truths are just facts about our world, and generally facts about very small parts of it, not facts about some infinitude of complex, maximal entities. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
A reaction: I think we should embrace this simple fact immediately, and drop all this nonsense about possible worlds, even if they are useful for the semantics of modal logic. |
11109 | If other worlds exist, then they are scattered parts of the actual world [Jubien] |
Full Idea: Any other realms that happened to exist would just be scattered parts of the actual world, not entire worlds at all. It would just happen that physical reality was fragmented in this remarkable but modally inconsequential way. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
A reaction: This is aimed explicitly at Lewis's modal realism, and strikes me as correct. Jubien's key point here is that they are irrelevant to modality, just as foreign countries are irrelevant to the modality of this one. |
11106 | If all possible worlds just happened to include stars, their existence would be necessary [Jubien] |
Full Idea: If all of the possible worlds happened to include stars, how plausible is it to think that if this is how things really are, then we've just been wrong to regard the existence of stars as contingent? | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
11112 | Possible worlds just give parallel contingencies, with no explanation at all of necessity [Jubien] |
Full Idea: In the world theory, what passes for 'necessity' is just a bunch of parallel 'contingencies'. The theory provides no basis for understanding why these contingencies repeat unremittingly across the board (while others do not). | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
11113 | Worlds don't explain necessity; we use necessity to decide on possible worlds [Jubien] |
Full Idea: The suspicion is that the necessity doesn't arise from how worlds are, but rather that the worlds are taken to be as they are in order to capture the intuitive necessity. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
A reaction: It has always seemed to me rather glaring that you need a prior notion of 'possible' before you can start to talk about 'possible worlds', but I have always been too timid to disagree with the combination of Saul Kripke and David Lewis. Thank you, Jubien! |
11105 | We have no idea how many 'possible worlds' there might be [Jubien] |
Full Idea: As soon as we start talking about 'possible world', we beg the question of their relevance to our prior notion of possibility. For all we know, there are just two such realms, or twenty-seven, or uncountably many, or even set-many. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
11107 | If there are no other possible worlds, do we then exist necessarily? [Jubien] |
Full Idea: Suppose there happen to be no other concrete realms. Would we happily accept the consequence that we exist necessarily? | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
11110 | We mustn't confuse a similar person with the same person [Jubien] |
Full Idea: If someone similar to Humphrey won the election, that nicely establishes the possibility of someone's winning who is similar to Humphrey. But we mustn't confuse this possibility with the intuitively different possibility of Humphrey himself winning. | |
From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
9425 | 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 |