21 ideas
| 18935 | Semantic theory should specify when an act of naming is successful [Sawyer] |
| Full Idea: A semantic theory of names should deliver a specification of the conditions under which a name names an individual, and hence a specification of the conditions under which a name is empty. | |
| From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 1) | |
| A reaction: Naming can be private, like naming my car 'Bertrand', but never tell anyone. I like Plato's remark that names are 'tools'. Do we specify conditions for successful spanner-usage? The first step must be individuation, preparatory to naming. |
| 18945 | Millians say a name just means its object [Sawyer] |
| Full Idea: The Millian view of direct reference says that the meaning of a name is the object named. | |
| From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 4) | |
| A reaction: Any theory that says meaning somehow is features of the physical world strikes me as totally misguided. Napoleon is a man, so he can't be part of a sentence. He delegates that job to words (such as 'Napoleon'). |
| 18934 | Sentences with empty names can be understood, be co-referential, and even be true [Sawyer] |
| Full Idea: Some empty names sentences can be understood, so appear to be meaningful ('Pegasus was sired by Poseidon'), ...some appear to be co-referential ('Santa Claus'/'Father Christmas'), and some appear to be straightforwardly true ('Pegasus doesn't exist'). | |
| From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 1) | |
| A reaction: Hang on to this, when the logicians arrive and start telling you that your talk of empty names is vacuous, because there is no object in the 'domain' to which a predicate can be attached. Meaning, reference and truth are the issues around empty names. |
| 18938 | Frege's compositional account of truth-vaues makes 'Pegasus doesn't exist' neither true nor false [Sawyer] |
| Full Idea: In Frege's account sentences such as 'Pegasus does not exist' will be neither true nor false, since the truth-value of a sentence is its referent, and the referent of a complex expression is determined by the referent of its parts. | |
| From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: We can keep the idea of 'sense', which is very useful for dealing with empty names, but tweak his account of truth-values to evade this problem. I'm thinking that meaning is compositional, but truth-value isn't. |
| 18947 | Definites descriptions don't solve the empty names problem, because the properties may not exist [Sawyer] |
| Full Idea: If it were possible for a definite description to be empty - not in the sense of there being no object that satisfies it, but of there being no set of properties it refers to - the problem of empty names would not have been solved. | |
| From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 5) | |
| A reaction: Swoyer is thinking of properties like 'is a unicorn', which are clearly just as vulnerable to being empty as 'the unicorn' was. It seems unlikely that 'horse', 'white' and 'horn' would be empty. |
| 9476 | If dispositions are more fundamental than causes, then they won't conceptually reduce to them [Bird on Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Maybe a disposition is a more fundamental notion than a cause, in which case Lewis has from the very start erred in seeking a causal analysis, in a traditional, conceptual sense, of disposition terms. | |
| From: comment on David Lewis (Causation [1973]) by Alexander Bird - Nature's Metaphysics 2.2.8 | |
| A reaction: Is this right about Lewis? I see him as reducing both dispositions and causes to a set of bald facts, which exist in possible and actual worlds. Conditionals and counterfactuals also suffer the same fate. |
| 8425 | For true counterfactuals, both antecedent and consequent true is closest to actuality [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: A counterfactual is non-vacuously true iff it takes less of a departure from actuality to make the consequent true along with the antecedent than it does to make the antecedent true without the consequent. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.197) | |
| A reaction: Almost every theory proposed by Lewis hangs on the meaning of the word 'close', as used here. If you visited twenty Earth-like worlds (watch Startrek?), it would be a struggle to decide their closeness to ours in rank order. |
| 8424 | Determinism says there can't be two identical worlds up to a time, with identical laws, which then differ [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: By determinism I mean that the prevailing laws of nature are such that there do not exist any two possible worlds which are exactly alike up to that time, which differ thereafter, and in which those laws are never violated. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.196) | |
| A reaction: This would mean that the only way an action of free will could creep in would be if it accepted being a 'violation' of the laws of nature. Fans of free will would probably prefer to call it a 'natural' phenomenon. I'm with Lewis. |
| 6382 | The 'grain problem' says physical objects are granular, where sensations appear not to be [Sellars, by Polger] |
| Full Idea: Sellars' Grain Problem contended that it was a problem for materialism that physical objects have a granularity whereas sensations are homogeneous and without grain. | |
| From: report of Wilfrid Sellars (Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind [1956], Ch. n22) by Thomas W. Polger - Natural Minds Ch.1 n22 | |
| A reaction: This doesn't strike me as a serious problem. I assume that my sensations are granular, but at a level too fine for me to introspect. There are three hundred trillion connections in the brain (Idea 2952), a lot of them involved in sensations. |
| 8420 | A proposition is a set of possible worlds where it is true [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I identify a proposition with the set of possible worlds where it is true. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.193) | |
| A reaction: As it stands, I'm baffled by this. How can 'it is raining' be a set of possible worlds? I assume it expands to refer to the truth-conditions, among possibilities as well as actualities. 'It is raining' fits all worlds where it is raining. |
| 8405 | A theory of causation should explain why cause precedes effect, not take it for granted [Lewis, by Field,H] |
| Full Idea: Lewis thinks it is a major defect in a theory of causation that it builds in the condition that the time of the cause precede that of the effect: that cause precedes effect is something we ought to explain (which his counterfactual theory claims to do). | |
| From: report of David Lewis (Causation [1973]) by Hartry Field - Causation in a Physical World | |
| A reaction: My immediate reaction is that the chances of explaining such a thing are probably nil, and that we might as well just accept the direction of causation as a given. Even philosophers balk at the question 'why doesn't time go backwards?' |
| 8427 | I reject making the direction of causation axiomatic, since that takes too much for granted [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: One might stipulate that a cause must always precede its effect, but I reject this solution. It won't solve the problem of epiphenomena, it rejects a priori any backwards causation, and it trivializes defining time-direction through causation. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.203) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Not strong arguments, I would say. Maybe apparent causes are never epiphenomenal. Maybe backwards causation is impossible. Maybe we must use time to define causal direction, and not vice versa. |
| 10392 | It is just individious discrimination to pick out one cause and label it as 'the' cause [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: We sometimes single out one among all the causes of some event and call it 'the' cause. ..We may select the abnormal causes, or those under human control, or those we deem good or bad, or those we want to talk about. This is invidious discrimination. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973]) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard view expressed by Mill - presumably the obvious empiricist line. But if we specify 'the pre-conditions' for an event, we can't just mention ANY fact prior to the effect - there is obvious relevance. So why not for 'the' cause as well? |
| 8419 | The modern regularity view says a cause is a member of a minimal set of sufficient conditions [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: In present-day regularity analyses, a cause is defined (roughly) as any member of any minimal set of actual conditions that are jointly sufficient, given the laws, for the existence of the effect. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.193) | |
| A reaction: This is the view Lewis is about to reject. It seem to summarise the essence of the Mackie INUS theory. This account would make the presence of oxygen a cause of almost every human event. |
| 8421 | Regularity analyses could make c an effect of e, or an epiphenomenon, or inefficacious, or pre-empted [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: In the regularity analysis of causes, instead of c causing e, c might turn out to be an effect of e, or an epiphenomenon, or an inefficacious effect of a genuine cause, or a pre-empted cause (by some other cause) of e. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.194) | |
| A reaction: These are Lewis's reasons for rejecting the general regularity account, in favour of his own particular counterfactual account. It is unlikely that c would be regularly pre-empted or epiphenomenal. If we build time's direction in, it won't be an effect. |
| 17525 | The counterfactual view says causes are necessary (rather than sufficient) for their effects [Lewis, by Bird] |
| Full Idea: The Humean idea, developed by Lewis, is that rather than being sufficient for their effects, causes are (counterfactual) necessary for their effects. | |
| From: report of David Lewis (Causation [1973]) by Alexander Bird - Causation and the Manifestation of Powers p.162 |
| 17524 | Lewis has basic causation, counterfactuals, and a general ancestral (thus handling pre-emption) [Lewis, by Bird] |
| Full Idea: Lewis's basic account has a basic causal relation, counterfactual dependence, and the general causal relation is the ancestral of this basic one. ...This is motivated by counterfactual dependence failing to be general because of the pre-emption problem. | |
| From: report of David Lewis (Causation [1973]) by Alexander Bird - Causation and the Manifestation of Powers p.161 | |
| A reaction: It is so nice when you struggle for ages with a topic, and then some clever person summarises it clearly for you. |
| 8397 | Counterfactual causation implies all laws are causal, which they aren't [Tooley on Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Some counterfactuals are based on non-causal laws, such as Newton's Third Law of Motion. 'If no force one way, then no force the other'. Lewis's counterfactual analysis implies that one force causes the other, which is not the case. | |
| From: comment on David Lewis (Causation [1973]) by Michael Tooley - Causation and Supervenience 5.2 | |
| A reaction: So what exactly does 'cause' my punt to move forwards? Basing causal laws on counterfactual claims looks to me like putting the cart before the horse. |
| 8423 | My counterfactual analysis applies to particular cases, not generalisations [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: My (counterfactual) analysis is meant to apply to causation in particular cases; it is not an analysis of causal generalizations. Those presumably quantify over particulars, but it is hard to match natural language to the quantifiers. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.195) | |
| A reaction: What authority could you have for asserting a counterfactual claim, if you only had one observation? Isn't the counterfactual claim the hallmark of a generalisation? For one case, 'if not-c, then not-e' is just a speculation. |
| 8426 | One event causes another iff there is a causal chain from first to second [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: One event is the cause of another iff there exists a causal chain leading from the first to the second. | |
| From: David Lewis (Causation [1973], p.200) | |
| A reaction: It will be necessary to both explain and identify a 'chain'. Some chains are extremely tenuous (Alexander could stop a barrel of beer). Go back a hundred years, and the cause of any present event is everything back then. |
| 4795 | Lewis's account of counterfactuals is fine if we know what a law of nature is, but it won't explain the latter [Cohen,LJ on Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Lewis can elucidate the logic of counterfactuals on the assumption that you are not at all puzzled about what a law of nature is. But if you are puzzled about this, it cannot contribute anything towards resolving your puzzlement. | |
| From: comment on David Lewis (Causation [1973]) by L. Jonathan Cohen - The Problem of Natural Laws p.219 | |
| A reaction: This seems like a penetrating remark. The counterfactual theory is wrong, partly because it is epistemological instead of ontological, and partly because it refuses to face the really difficult problem, of what is going on out there. |