13 ideas
| 15533 | We can quantify over fictions by quantifying for real over their names [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Substitutionalists simulate quantification over fictional characters by quantifying for real over fictional names. | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.159) | |
| A reaction: I would say that a fiction is a file of conceptual information, identified by a label. The label brings baggage with it, and there is no existence in the label. |
| 15534 | We could quantify over impossible objects - as bundles of properties [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: We can quantify over Meinongian objects by quantifying for real over property bundles (such as the bundle of roundness and squareness). | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.159) |
| 15532 | 'Allists' embrace the existence of all controversial entities; 'noneists' reject all but the obvious ones [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: An expansive friend of the controversial entities who says they all exist may be called an 'allist'; a tough desert-dweller who says that none of them exist may be called a 'noneist'. | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.152) | |
| A reaction: Lewis gives examples of the obvious and the controversial entities. Lewis implies that he himself is in between. The word 'desert' is a reference to Quine. |
| 15535 | We can't accept a use of 'existence' that says only some of the things there are actually exist [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If 'existence' is understood so that it can be a substantive thesis that only some of the things there are exist, we will have none of it. | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.163) | |
| A reaction: Lewis is a strong advocate, following Quine, of the univocal sense of the word 'exist', and I agree with them. |
| 23551 | It is necessary for a belief that it be held for a length of time [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: A mental state cannot count as a belief unless it has a reasonable life expectancy. It must be the sort of thing that one is disposed to assert not only now but in the future too. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: There are obvious counterexamples, where a firm belief is strongly formed, only to be dashed by a counterexample (such as a new witness in court) soon afterwards. That said, this idea is obviously correct. |
| 23558 | Offering knowledge needs accuracy and sincerity; receiving it needs testimonial justice [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: Accuracy and Sincerity sustain trust as regards contributing knowledge to the pool; Testimonial Justice helps sustain trust as regards acquiring knowledge from the pool. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: Fricker's contribution is to show that acquiring knowledge has its own virtues, alongside discovering and communicating it. I take the underlying virtue to be absolute respect for all possible contributors. |
| 23550 | Burge says we are normally a priori entitled to believe testimony [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: In Tyler Burge's view we have an a priori entitlement for believing what others tell us, other things being equal. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 1.3 n11) | |
| A reaction: [Burge 'Content Preservation' 1992] Close to Davidson's Charity (that without a default assumption of truth-speaking language won't work at all). Davidson is right about casual conversation, but for important testimony Burge should be more cautious. |
| 23552 | We assess testimonial probabilities by the speaker, the listener, the facts, and the circumstances [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: A person should receive the word of his interlocutor in the light of the probability that someone like that would (be able and willing to) to tell someone like him the truth about something like this in circumstances like these. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: That's a pretty good summary of the rational response to testimony. I can't think of any other factors. |
| 23553 | Testimonial judgement is not logical, but produces reasons and motivations [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: Moral/testimonial judgement is non-inferential, uncodifiable, intrinsically motivating, intrinsically reason-giving, and typically has an emotional aspect. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Fricker's compressed summary of her findings about testimony. The first words indicate her belief that assessment of testimony is a moral affair. |
| 23555 | Assessing credibility involves the impact of both the speaker's and the listener's social identity [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: For a hearer to identify the impact of identity power in their credibility judgements they must be alert to the impact not only of the speaker's social identity, but also the impact of the own social identity on their credibility judgements. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [why are all sentences in academic writing twice as long as they need to be? - that question is deeper than it looks!] This is a salutary warning. Not just 'what are my prejudices?', but also 'what is this person willing to tell a person like me?'. |
| 23554 | Judgements can be unreflective and non-inferential, yet rational, by being sensitive to experience [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: Our idea of testimonial sensibility is a spontaneous critical sensitivity permanently in training and adapting to experience. …This gives us a picture of how judgements can be rational yet unreflective, critical yet non-inferential. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: Love this. I want to connect human reasoning to good judgement by animals, and I offer the word 'sensible' to bridge the gap. Dogs and scientists can be sensible. Fricker spells out more fully what I have in mind, with reference to testimony. |
| 23557 | To judge agents in remote times and cultures we need a moral resentment weaker than blame [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: I think that identifying forms of moral resentment that fall short of blame but which are agent-directed is the key to achieving appropriate moral response across historical and cultural distance. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Very good. Simple blame for horrible actions performed in remote rather horrible societies is pointless. But switching off moral sensibilities when reading history and anthropology looks like a slippery slope, so 'moral resentment' is nice. |
| 4398 | An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either). | |
| From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro | |
| A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky. |