34 ideas
| 18543 | Do aesthetic reasons count as reasons, if they are rejectable without contradiction? [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The judgement of beauty makes a claim about its object, and can be supported by reasons. But the reasons do not compel the judgement and can be rejected without contradiction. So are they reasons or aren't they? | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 1) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that what he is really referring to is evidence rather than reasons. |
| 18542 | Defining truth presupposes that there can be a true definition [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: How can you define truth, without already assuming the distinction between a true definition and a false one? | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 1) | |
| A reaction: Don't say we have to accept truth as yet another primitive! Philosophers are out of business if all the basic concepts are primitive. The axiomatic approach to truth is an alternative - by specifying how the primitive should be used. |
| 7306 | If the only property of a name was its reference, we couldn't explain bearerless names [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: If having a reference were the only semantic property in terms of which we could explain the functioning of names, we would be in trouble with respect to names that simply have no bearer. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 2.1.1) | |
| A reaction: (Miller is discussing Frege) 'Odysseus' is given as an example. Instead of switching to a bundle of descriptions, we could say that we just imagine an object which is stamped with the name. Names always try to refer. |
| 4444 | One moderate nominalist view says that properties and relations exist, but they are particulars [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: There is a 'moderate' nominalism (found in G.F.Stout, for example) which says that properties and relations do exist, but that they are particulars rather than universals. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.504) | |
| A reaction: Both this view and the 'mereological' view seem to be ducking the problem. If you have two red particulars and a green one, how do we manage to spot the odd one out? |
| 4445 | If properties and relations are particulars, there is still the problem of how to classify and group them [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: The view that properties exist, but are particulars rather than universals, is still left with the problem of classification. On what basis do we declare that different things have the same property? | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.504) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a fairly crucial objection. The original problem was how we manage to classify things (group them into sets), and it looks as if this theory leaves the problem untouched. |
| 4448 | Should we decide which universals exist a priori (through words), or a posteriori (through science)? [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Should we decide what universals exist a priori (probably on semantic grounds, identifying them with the meanings of general words), or a posteriori (looking to our best general theories about nature to give revisable conjectures about universals)? | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.505) | |
| A reaction: Nice question for a realist. Although the problem is first perceived in the use of language, if we think universals are a real feature of nature, we should pursue them scientifically, say I. |
| 4446 | It is claimed that some universals are not exemplified by any particular, so must exist separately [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: There are some who claim that there can be uninstantiated universals, which are not exemplified by any particular, past, present or future; this would certainly imply that those universals have a Platonic transcendent existence outside time and space. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.504) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this is potentially circular or defeasible, because one can deny the universal simply because there is no particular. |
| 4439 | 'Resemblance Nominalism' says properties are resemblances between classes of particulars [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Resemblance Nominalists say that to have a property is to be a member of a class which is part of a network of resemblance relations with other classes of particulars. ..'Resemblance' is taken to be a primitive notion, though one that admits of degrees. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: Intuition suggests that this proposal has good prospects, as properties are neither identical, nor just particulars, but have a lot in common, which 'resemblance' captures. Hume saw resemblance as a 'primitive' process. |
| 4440 | 'Resemblance Nominalism' finds that in practice the construction of resemblance classes is hard [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: It is difficult for Resemblance Nominalists to construct their interconnected classes in practice. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: Given the complexity of the world this is hardly surprising, but it doesn't seem insuperable for the theory. It is hard to decide whether an object is white, or hot, whatever your theory of universals. |
| 4431 | 'Predicate Nominalism' says that a 'universal' property is just a predicate applied to lots of things [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: For a Predicate Nominalist different things have the same property, or belong to the same kind, if the same predicates applies to, or is 'true of', the different things. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: This immediately strikes me as unlikely, because I think the action is at the proposition level, not the sentence level. And why do some predicates seem to be synonymous? |
| 4433 | Concept and predicate nominalism miss out some predicates, and may be viciously regressive [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: The standard objections to Predicate and Concept Nominalism are that some properties have no predicates or concepts, and that predicates and concepts seem to be types rather than particulars, and it is types the theory is seeking to analyse. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: The claim that some properties have no concepts is devastating if true, but may not be. The regress problem is likely to occur in any explanation of universals, I suspect. |
| 4432 | 'Concept Nominalism' says a 'universal' property is just a mental concept applied to lots of things [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Concept Nominalism says different things have the same property, or belong to the same kind, if the same concept in the mind is applied to different things. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: This is more appealing than Predicate Nominalism, and may be right. Our perception of the 'properties' of a thing may be entirely dictated by human interests, not by nature. |
| 4436 | 'Class Nominalism' may explain properties if we stick to 'natural' sets, and ignore random ones [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Class Nominalism can be defended (by Quinton) against the problem of random sets (with nothing in common), by giving an account of properties in terms of 'natural' classes, where 'natural' comes in degrees, but is fundamental and unanalysable. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: This still seems to beg the question, because you still have to decide whether two things have anything 'naturally' in common before you assign them to a set. |
| 4435 | 'Class Nominalism' cannot explain co-extensive properties, or sets with random members [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Class Nominalism cannot explain co-extensive properties (which qualify the same things), and also a random (non-natural) set has particulars with nothing in common, thus failing to capture an essential feature of a general property. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: These objections strike me as conclusive, since we can assign things to a set quite arbitrarily, so membership of a set may signify no shared property at all (except, say, 'owned by me', which is hardly a property). |
| 4434 | 'Class Nominalism' says that properties or kinds are merely membership of a set (e.g. of white things) [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Class Nominalists substitute classes or sets for properties or kinds, so that being white is just being a member of the set of white things; relations are treated as ordered sets. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: This immediately seems wrong, because it invites the question of why something is a member of a set (unless membership is arbitrary and whimsical - which it usually isn't). |
| 4437 | 'Mereological Nominalism' sees whiteness as a huge white object consisting of all the white things [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Mereological Nominalism views a property as the omnitemporal whole or aggregate of all the things said to have the property, so whiteness is a huge white object whose parts are all the white things. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: A charming proposal, in which bizarre and beautiful unities thread themselves across the universe, but white objects may also be soft and warm. |
| 4438 | 'Mereological Nominalism' may work for whiteness, but it doesn't seem to work for squareness [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Mereological Nominalism has some plausibility for a case like whiteness, but breaks down completely for other universals, such as squareness. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Universals [1995], p.503) | |
| A reaction: A delightful request that you attempt a hopeless feat of imagination, by seeing all squares as parts of one supreme square. A nice objection. |
| 7322 | Constitutive scepticism is about facts, and epistemological scepticism about our ability to know them [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: We should distinguish 'constitutive scepticism' (about the existence of certain sorts of facts) from the traditional 'epistemological scepticism' (which concedes that the sort of fact in question exists, but questions our right to claim knowledge of it). | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 4.7) | |
| A reaction: I would be inclined to call the first type 'ontological scepticism'. Miller is discussing Quine's scepticism about meaning. Atheists fall into the first group, and agnostics into the second. An important, and nicely simple, distinction. |
| 7325 | Dispositions say what we will do, not what we ought to do, so can't explain normativity [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Dispositional facts are facts about what we will do, not about what we ought to do, and as such cannot capture the normativity of meaning. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: Miller is discussing language, but this raises a nice question for all behaviourist accounts of mental events. Perhaps there is a disposition to behave in a guilty way if you do something you think you shouldn't do. (Er, isn't 'guilt' a mental event?) |
| 7324 | Explain meaning by propositional attitudes, or vice versa, or together? [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Grice wants to explain linguistic meaning in terms of the content of propositional attitudes, Dummett has championed the view that propositional attitudes must be explained by linguistic meaning, while Davidson says they must be explained together. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: A useful map. My intuition says propositional attitudes come first, for evolutionary reasons. We are animals first, and speakers second. Thought precedes language. A highly social animal flourishes if it can communicate. |
| 7323 | If truth is deflationary, sentence truth-conditions just need good declarative syntax [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: On a deflationary concept of truth, for a sentence to possess truth-conditions it is sufficient that it be disciplined by norms of correct usage, and that it possess the syntax distinctive of declarative sentences. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Idea 6337 gives the basic deflationary claim. He mentions Boghossian as source of this point. So much the worse for the deflationary concept of truth, say I. What are the truth-conditions of "Truth rotates"? |
| 7315 | 'Jones is a married bachelor' does not have the logical form of a contradiction [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: The syntactic notion of contradiction (p and not-p) is well understood, but is no help in explaining analyticity, since "Jones is a married bachelor" is not of that syntactic form. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: This point is based on Quine. This means we cannot define analytic sentences as those whose denial is a contradiction, even though that seems to be true of them. Both the Kantian and the modern logical versions of analyticity are in trouble. |
| 7328 | The principle of charity is holistic, saying we must hold most of someone's system of beliefs to be true [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Properly construed, the principle of charity is a holistic constraint applying, not to individual beliefs, but rather to systems of belief: we must interpret a speaker so that most of the beliefs in his system are, by our lights, true. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: This is a lot more plausible than applying the principle to individual sentences, particularly if you are in the company of habitual ironists or constitutional liars. |
| 7329 | Maybe we should interpret speakers as intelligible, rather than speaking truth [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: A more sophisticated version of the principle of charity holds that we interpret speakers not as necessarily having beliefs that are true by our own lights, but as having beliefs that are intelligible by our own lights. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: Consider Idea 4161 in the light of this. Presumably this means that we treat them as having a coherent set of beliefs, even if they seem to us to fail to correspond to reality. I prefer the stronger version that there has to be some proper truth in there. |
| 18546 | The pleasure taken in beauty also aims at understanding and valuing [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Like the pleasure in friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 1) | |
| A reaction: At least he is trying to pin down the way in which aesthetic pleasure is phenomenologically different from other kinds of pleasure. |
| 18550 | Art gives us imaginary worlds which we can view impartially [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: One aim of art is to present imaginary worlds, towards which we can adopt, as part of the integral aesthetic attitude, a posture of impartial concern. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 5) | |
| A reaction: It connects to the pleasure of watching people when they don't know they are being watched (such as watching the street from a restaurant window). Scruton's suggestion makes art resemble examples in philosophy. Cf the Frege-Geach problem in ethics. |
| 18544 | Maybe 'beauty' is too loaded, and we should talk of fittingness or harmony [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Maybe we can understand the 'beauty' of a building better if we describe it in another and less loaded way, as a form of fittingness or harmony. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 1) | |
| A reaction: Almost everyone accepts the word 'beauty' for some things, such as a beautiful face, or goal, or steak. I remember a female interviewer writing that, reluctantly, the only appropriate word she could find for Nureyev's face was 'beautiful'. |
| 18553 | Beauty shows us what we should want in order to achieve human fulfilment [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Beauty speaks to us of human fulfilment: not of things that we want, but of things that we ought to want, because human nature requires them. Such, at least, is my belief. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 7) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure how this works with a beautiful natural landscape. And what should I see that I ought to desire after viewing a great Rembrandt self-portrait? That I don't want to end up looking as bleak as that? Hm. Lofty words. |
| 18556 | Beauty is rationally founded, inviting meaning, comparison and self-reflection [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Beauty is rationally founded; it challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 9) | |
| A reaction: This is the Kantian tradition, and I'm not finding it very persuasive. It seems to place the value of beauty in what we do with it afterwards, and he seems to make beauty a necessary stepping stone to virtue. I see beauty as more sui generis. |
| 18548 | Natural beauty reassures us that the world is where we belong [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The experience of natural beauty is not a sense of 'how nice!' or 'how pleasant!' It contains a reassurance that this world is a right and fitting place to be - a home in which our human powers and prospects find confirmation. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 2) | |
| A reaction: To call it a 'reassurance' and 'confirmation' sounds like theism, anthropomorphism, or the pathetic fallacy. That said, this is certainly a heart-warming idea, and hence must contain a grain of truth. |
| 18551 | Croce says art makes inarticulate intuitions conscious; rival views say the audience is the main concern [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The Croce model is of an inarticulate inner state (an 'intuition') becoming articulate and conscious through artistic expression. The rival model is fitting thing together so as to create links which resonate in the audience's feelings. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 5) | |
| A reaction: The first model tells you nothing about how the artist imagines the audience reacting. The second model tells you nothing about what matters personally to the artist. A good theory must do both! |
| 7333 | The Frege-Geach problem is that I can discuss the wrongness of murder without disapproval [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: The main problem faced by non-cognitivism is known as the Frege-Geach problem: if I say "If murder is wrong, then getting your brother to murder people is wrong", that is an unasserted context, and I don't necessarily express disapproval of murder. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 9.2) | |
| A reaction: The emotivist or non-cognitivist might mount a defence by saying there is some second-order or deep-buried emotion involved. Could a robot without feelings even understand what humans meant when they said "It is morally wrong"? |
| 18541 | Beauty (unlike truth and goodness) is questionable as an ultimate value [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The status of beauty as an ultimate value is questionable, in the way that the status of truth and goodness are not. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 1) | |
| A reaction: We suspect that a love of beauty may be a bit parochial, where it is hard to conceive of living creatures anywhere in the cosmos who don't value the other two. |
| 18554 | Prostitution is wrong because it hardens the soul, since soul and body are one [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden your soul. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Beauty: a very short introduction [2011], 7) | |
| A reaction: No one, I imagine, who condones or even enthuses about prostitution would hope that their own daughter followed the profession, so there is something wrong with it. But must an enthusiastic and cheerful prostitute necessarily have a hard soul? |