25 ideas
| 22438 | Philosophy is largely concerned with finding the minimum that science could get by with [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is in large part concerned with ...what science could get along with, could be reconstructed by means of, as distinct from what science has historically made us of. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: This nicely summarises the programme for the whole of the philosophy of David Lewis, who was Quine's pupil. If you start by asking what it could 'get by with', it is not surprising that simplicity is the top intellectual virtue for both of them. |
| 22436 | Logicians don't paraphrase logic into language, because they think in the symbolic language [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The logician does not even need to paraphrase the vernacular into his logical notation, for he has learned to think directly in his logical notation, or even (which is the beauty of the thing) to let it think for him. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: See Williamson's love of logic (and his book on modal metaphysics). This idea embodies the dream of hardcore Frege-Russellian analytic philosophers. I wish someone had told me when I studied logic that the target was to actually think symbolically. |
| 22431 | Good algorithms and theories need many occurrences of just a few elements [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The power and simplicity of an algorithm, or indeed of any theory, depend on there being many occurrences of few elements rather than few occurrences of many. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], III) | |
| A reaction: Not sure how this applies to a software function. One which produces a good result from a large number of input variables sounds particularly impressive to me. Many occurrences of a single variable sounds rather inefficient. |
| 22435 | The logician's '→' does not mean the English if-then [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The logician drops 'if-then' in favour of '→' without ever entertaining the mistaken idea that they are synonymous. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: [Quine uses the older horseshoe symbol] The conditional in English is not well understood, whereas the symbol is unambiguous. A warning to myself, since I have a tendency to translate symbols into English all the time. [p.156 'implies' is worse!] |
| 22433 | It is important that the quantification over temporal entities is timeless [Quine] |
| Full Idea: It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of recognising the timelessness of quantification over temporal entities. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], IV) | |
| A reaction: 'Some moments in this cricket match were crucial'. The domain is not timeless, but consists of moments in this match. Can you say the quantifier is timeless but its domain is not? Only in the sense that 'very' is a timeless word, I think. |
| 22437 | Logical languages are rooted in ordinary language, and that connection must be kept [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A logical language is not independent of ordinary language. It has its roots in ordinary language, and these roots are not to be severed. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: Music to my ears. When you study logic, no one has to teach you what the words 'or' and 'if-then' mean, but they are disambiguated by the symbolism. The roots of logic are in ordinary talk of 'and', 'or' and 'not', which is the real world. |
| 22434 | Reduction to logical forms first simplifies idioms and grammar, then finds a single reading of it [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ordinary language is reduced to logical form in two ways: reduction of the variety of idioms and grammatical constructions, and reduction of each surviving idiom to one fixed and convenient interpretation. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], V) | |
| A reaction: Is there a conflict between a 'fixed' and a 'convenient' result? By 'fixed' I suppose he means it is a commitment (to not waver). What is the logical form of a sentence which is deliberately ambiguous? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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). |
| 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). |
| 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. |
| 22432 | Normally conditionals have no truth value; it is the consequent which has a conditional truth value [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ordinarily the conditional is not thought of as true or false at all, but rather the consequent is thought of as conditionally true or false given the antecedent. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], III) | |
| A reaction: At first this seems obvious, but a conditional asserts a relationship between two propositions, and so presumably it is true if that relationship exists. 'Is it actually true that if it is Monday then everyone in the office is depressed?'. |
| 16002 | The self is a combination of pairs of attributes: freedom/necessity, infinite/finite, temporal/eternal [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: A human being is essentially spirit, but what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the Self? In short, it is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (Sickness unto Death [1849], p.59) | |
| A reaction: The dense language of his first paragraph was to poke fun at fashionable Hegelian writing. The book gets very lucid afterwards! [SY] |
| 22430 | If we understand a statement, we know the circumstances of its truth [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We understand under what circumstances to say of any given statement that it is true, just as clearly as we understand the statement itself. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953], II) | |
| A reaction: This probably shouldn't be taken as a theory of meaning (in which Quine doesn't really believe) but as a plausible statement of correlated facts. Hypothetical assertions might be a problem case. 'If only I could be in two places at once'? |
| 13713 | Quine holds time to be 'space-like': past objects are as real as spatially remote ones [Quine, by Sider] |
| Full Idea: Quine's view is that time is 'space-like'. Past objects are as real as present ones; they're just temporally distant, just as spatially distant objects are just as real as the ones around here. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953]) by Theodore Sider - Logic for Philosophy 7.3.1 | |
| A reaction: Something is a wrong with a view that says that a long-dead person is just as real as one currently living. Death is rather more than travelling to a distant place. Arthur Prior responded to Quine by saying 'tense operators' are inescapable. |