38 ideas
| 13917 | Metaphysics aims to identify categories of being, and show their interdependency [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The central task of metaphysics is to chart the possibilities of existence by identifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency in which beings of different categories stand to one another. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I am beginning to think that he is right about the second one, and that dependency and grounding relations are the name of the game. I don't have Lowe's confidence that philosophers can parcel up reality in neat and true ways. |
| 13919 | Philosophy aims not at the 'analysis of concepts', but at understanding the essences of things [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The central task of philosophy is the cultivation of insights into natures or essences, and not the 'analysis of concepts', with which it is apt to be confused. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: This immediately strikes me as a false dichotomy. I like the idea of trying to understand the true natures of things, but how are we going to do it in our armchairs? |
| 6420 | Only by analysing is progress possible in philosophy [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I remain firmly persuaded, in spite of some modern tendencies to the contrary, that only by analysing is progress possible, …for example, by analysing physics and perception, the problem of mind and matter can be completely solved. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I don't share his confidence in the second part of this, but I subscribe to the maxim that 'analsis is the path to wisdom'. It is a very western view, and lots of people (mostly of a mystical disposition) hate it, but I see no better path. |
| 6432 | Analysis gives new knowledge, without destroying what we already have [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me evident that, as in the case of impure water, analysis gives new knowledge without destroying any of the previously existing knowledge. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: I agree. On the whole, opponents of analysis are sentimental mystics who are reluctant to think carefully about life. I'm not sure what careful and concentrated thought is capable of, apart from analysis. |
| 22358 | Scientific objectivity lies in inter-subjective testing [Popper] |
| Full Idea: The objectivity of scientific statements lies in the fact that they can be inter-subjectively tested. | |
| From: Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934], p.22), quoted by Reiss,J/Spreger,J - Scientific Objectivity 2.4 | |
| A reaction: Does this mean that objectivity is the same as consensus? A bunch of subjective prejudiced fools can reach a consensus. And in the middle of that bunch there can be one person who is objecfive. Sounds wrong. |
| 6437 | The theory of types makes 'Socrates and killing are two' illegitimate [Russell] |
| Full Idea: 'Socrates and killing are two' would be an illegitimate sentence according to the doctrine of types. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: This nicely shows how Ryle's notion of a 'category mistake', although it is a commonsense observation of bogus reasoning, arises out of Russell's logical analysis of sets. Of course, the theory of types has its critics. |
| 6442 | Truth belongs to beliefs, not to propositions and sentences [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Truth and falsehood both belong primarily to beliefs, and only derivatively to propositions and sentences. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure why a proposition which is date/place stamped ('it is raining, here and now') could not be considered a truth, even if no one believed it. Is not the proposition 'squares have four sides' true? |
| 6436 | I gradually replaced classes with properties, and they ended as a symbolic convenience [Russell] |
| Full Idea: My original use of classes was gradually more and more replaced by properties, and in the end disappeared except as a symbolic convenience. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: I wish I knew what properties are. On the whole, though, I agree with this, because it is more naturalistic. We may place things in classes because of their properties, and this means there are natural classes, but classes can't have a life of their own. |
| 7528 | Leibniz bases everything on subject/predicate and substance/property propositions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The metaphysics of Leibniz was explicitly based upon the doctrine that every proposition attributes a predicate to a subject and (what seemed to him almost the same thing) that every fact consists of a substance having a property. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: I think it is realised now that although predicates tend to attribute properties to things, they are far from being the same thing. See Idea 4587, for example. Russell gives us an interesting foot in the door of Leibniz's complex system. |
| 6439 | Names are meaningless unless there is an object which they designate [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Unlike descriptions, names are meaningless unless there is an object which they designate. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: This interests Russell because of its ontological implications. If we reduce language to names, we can have a pure ontology of 'objects'. We need a system for saying whether a description names something - which is his theory of definite descriptions. |
| 6423 | We tried to define all of pure maths using logical premisses and concepts [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The primary aim of our 'Principia Mathematica' was to show that all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premisses and uses only concepts definable in logical terms. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This spells out the main programme of logicism, by its great hero, Russell. The big question now is whether Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems have succeeded in disproving logicism. |
| 6424 | Formalists say maths is merely conventional marks on paper, like the arbitrary rules of chess [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The Formalists, led by Hilbert, maintain that arithmetic symbols are merely marks on paper, devoid of meaning, and that arithmetic consists of certain arbitrary rules, like the rules of chess, by which these marks can be manipulated. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I just don't believe that maths is arbitrary, and this view pushes me into the arms of the empiricists, who say maths is far more likely to arise from experience than from arbitrary convention. The key to maths is patterns. |
| 6425 | Formalism can't apply numbers to reality, so it is an evasion [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Formalism is perfectly adequate for doing sums, but not for the application of number, such as the simple statement 'there are three men in this room', so it must be regarded as an unsatisfactory evasion. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me a powerful and simple objection. The foundation of arithmetic is that there are three men in the room, not that one plus two is three. Three men and three ties make a pattern, which we call 'three'. |
| 6426 | Intuitionism says propositions are only true or false if there is a method of showing it [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The nerve of the Intuitionist theory, led by Brouwer, is the denial of the law of excluded middle; it holds that a proposition can only be accounted true or false when there is some method of ascertaining which of these it is. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: He cites 'there are three successive sevens in the expansion of pi' as a case in point. This seems to me an example of the verificationism and anti-realism which is typical of that period. It strikes me as nonsense, but Russell takes it seriously. |
| 6419 | In 1899-1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism [Russell] |
| Full Idea: In the years 1899-1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This is interesting (about Russell) because he only labelled it as 'logical atomism' in about 1912, and only wrote about it as such in 1918. It is helpful to understand that the theory of definite descriptions was part of his logical atomism. |
| 6438 | Complex things can be known, but not simple things [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I have come to think that, although many things can be known to be complex, nothing can be known to be simple. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be a rejection of his logical atomism. It goes with a general rebellion against foundationalist epistemology, because the empiricists foundations (e.g. Hume's impressions) seem devoid of all content. |
| 6434 | Facts are everything, except simples; they are either relations or qualities [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Facts, as I am using the word, consist always of relations between parts of a whole or qualities of single things; facts, in a word, are whatever there is except what (if anything) is completely simple. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This is the view that goes with Russell's 'logical atomism', where the 'completely simple' is used to build up the 'facts'. If World War One was a fact, was it a 'relation' or a 'quality'. Must events then be defined in terms of those two? |
| 6440 | Universals can't just be words, because words themselves are universals [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Those who dislike universals have thought that they could be merely words; the trouble with this view is that a word itself is a universal. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.14) | |
| A reaction: Russell gradually lost his faith in most things, but never in universals. I find it unconvincing that we might dismiss nominalism so easily. I'm not sure why the application of the word 'cat' could not just be conventional. |
| 13918 | Holes, shadows and spots of light can coincide without being identical [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Holes are things of such a kind that they can coincide without being identical - as are, for example, shadows and spots of light. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: His point is that they thereby fail one of the standard tests for being an 'object'. |
| 13921 | All things must have an essence (a 'what it is'), or we would be unable to think about them [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Things must have an essence, in the sense of 'what it is to be the individual of that kind', or it would make no sense to say we can talk or think comprehendingly about things at all. If we don't know what it is, how can we think about it? | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: Lowe presents this as a sort of Master Argument for essences. I think he is working with the wrong notion of essence. All he means is that things must have identities to be objects of thought. Why equate identity with essence, and waste a good concept? |
| 13922 | Knowing an essence is just knowing what the thing is, not knowing some further thing [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: To know something's essence is not to be acquainted with some further thing of a special kind, but simply to understand what exactly that thing is. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: I think he is wrong about this, or at least is working with an unhelpful notion of essence. Identity is one thing, and essence is another. I take essences to be certain selected features of things, which explain their nature. |
| 13920 | Each thing has to be of a general kind, because it belongs to some category [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Any individual thing must be a thing of some general kind - because, at the very least, it must belong to some ontological category. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: Where does the law that 'everything must have a category' come from? I'm baffled by remarks of this kind. Where do we get the categories from? From observing the individuals. So which has priority? Not the categories. Is God a kind? |
| 6430 | In epistemology we should emphasis the continuity between animal and human minds [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me desirable in the theory of knowledge to emphasise the continuity between animal and human minds. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: I strongly agree with this, mainly because it avoids overemphasis on language in epistemology. It doesn't follow that animals know a lot, and there is a good case for saying that they don't actually 'know' anything, despite having true beliefs. |
| 6441 | Pragmatism judges by effects, but I judge truth by causes [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism holds that a belief is to be judged if it has certain effects, whereas I hold that an empirical belief is to be judged true if it has certain kinds of causes. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: I'm with Russell here, and this seems to me a convincing objection to pragmatism. The simple problem is that falsehoods can occasionally have very beneficial effects. Beliefs are made true by the facts, not by their consequences. |
| 6431 | Empiricists seem unclear what they mean by 'experience' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When I began to think about theory of knowledge, I found that none of the philosophers who emphasise 'experience' tells us what they mean by the word. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: A very significant comment about empiricism. Hume does not seem very clear about what an 'impression' is. Russell's problem has been dealt with intensively by modern empiricists, who discuss 'the given', and conceptualised perception. |
| 6444 | True belief about the time is not knowledge if I luckily observe a stopped clock at the right moment [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Not all true beliefs are knowledge; the stock example to the contrary is that of a clock which has stopped by which I believe to be going and which I happen to look at when, by chance, it shows the right time. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: [in his 1948:112] Russell had spotted Gettier-type problems long before Gettier. The problem of lucky true beliefs dates back to Plato (Idea 2140). This example is also a problem for reliabilism, if the clock is usually working fine. |
| 22188 | Give Nobel Prizes for really good refutations? [Gorham on Popper] |
| Full Idea: Popper implies that we should be giving Nobel Prizes to scientists who use severe tests to show us what the world is not like! | |
| From: comment on Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by Geoffrey Gorham - Philosophy of Science 2 | |
| A reaction: A lovely simple point. The refuters are important members of the scientific team, but not the leaders. |
| 7780 | Falsification is the criterion of demarcation between science and non-science [Popper, by Magee] |
| Full Idea: According to Popper, falsification is the criterion of demarcation between science and non-science. | |
| From: report of Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by Bryan Magee - Popper Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: If I propose something which might be falsified in a hundred years, is it science NOW? Suppose my theory appeared to be falsifiable, but (after much effort) it turned out not to be? Suppose I just see a pattern (like quark theory) in a set of facts? |
| 16830 | We don't only reject hypotheses because we have falsified them [Lipton on Popper] |
| Full Idea: Popper's mistake is to hold that disconfirmation and elimination work exclusively through refutation. | |
| From: comment on Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by Peter Lipton - Inference to the Best Explanation (2nd) 05 'Explanation' | |
| A reaction: The point is that we reject hypotheses even if they have not actually been refuted, on the grounds that they don't give a good explanation. I agree entirely with Lipton. |
| 6794 | If falsification requires logical inconsistency, then probabilistic statements can't be falsified [Bird on Popper] |
| Full Idea: In Popper's sense of the word 'falsify', whereby an observation statement falsifies a hypothesis only by being logically inconsistent with it, nothing can ever falsify a probabilistic or statistical hypothesis, which is therefore unscientific. | |
| From: comment on Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: In general, no prediction can be falsified until the events occur. This seems to be Aristotle's 'sea fight' problem (Idea 1703). |
| 6795 | When Popper gets in difficulties, he quietly uses induction to help out [Bird on Popper] |
| Full Idea: It is a feature of Popper's philosophy that when the going gets tough, induction is quietly called upon to help out. | |
| From: comment on Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: This appears to be the central reason for the decline in Popper's reputation as the saviour of science. It would certainly seem absurd to say that you know nothing when you have lots of verification but not a glimmer of falsification. |
| 3856 | Good theories have empirical content, explain a lot, and are not falsified [Popper, by Newton-Smith] |
| Full Idea: Popper's principles are roughly that one theory is superior to another if it has greater empirical content, if it can account for the successes of the first theory, and if it has not been falsified (unlike the first theory). | |
| From: report of Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by W.H. Newton-Smith - The Rationality of Science I.6 |
| 7779 | There is no such thing as induction [Popper, by Magee] |
| Full Idea: According to Popper, induction is a dispensable concept, a myth. It does not exist. There is no such thing. | |
| From: report of Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by Bryan Magee - Popper Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This is a nice bold summary of the Popper view - that falsification is the underlying rational activity which we mistakenly think is verification by repeated observations. Put like this, Popper seems to be wrong. We obviously learn from experiences. |
| 3860 | Science cannot be shown to be rational if induction is rejected [Newton-Smith on Popper] |
| Full Idea: If Popper follows Hume in abandoning induction, there is no way in which he can justify the claims that there is growth of scientific knowledge and that science is a rational activity. | |
| From: comment on Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery [1934]) by W.H. Newton-Smith - The Rationality of Science III.3 |
| 6433 | Behaviourists struggle to explain memory and imagination, because they won't admit images [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourists refuse to admit images because they cannot be observed from without, but this causes them difficulties when they attempt to explain either memory or imagination. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This is a striking objection to behaviourism, and it is rarely mentioned in modern discussions of the topic. They might try denying the existence of private 'images', but that wouldn't be very plausible. |
| 6443 | Surprise is a criterion of error [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Surprise is a criterion of error. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: Russell is not too precise about this, but it is a nice point. Surprise is thwarted expectation, which implies prior misjudgement. |
| 6427 | Unverifiable propositions about the remote past are still either true or false [Russell] |
| Full Idea: There is no conceivable method by which we can discover whether the proposition 'It snowed on Manhattan Island on the 1st January in the year 1 A.D.' is true or false, but it seems preposterous to maintain that it is neither. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I love this example, which seems so simple and so clear-cut. It criticises verificationism, and gives strong intuitive support for realism, and supports the law of excluded middle. |
| 6435 | You can believe the meaning of a sentence without thinking of the words [Russell] |
| Full Idea: If you have just heard a loud clap of thunder, you believe what is expressed by 'there has just been a loud clap of thunder' even if no words come into your mind. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (My Philosophical Development [1959], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me important, and accurate. We should not be too mesmerised by language. Animals have beliefs, and this is a nice example of an undeniable non-linguistic human belief. |