29 ideas
| 19259 | If 2-D conceivability can a priori show possibilities, this is a defence of conceptual analysis [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: Chalmers' two-dimensional conceivability account of possibility offers a defence of a priori conceptual analysis, and foundations on which a priori philosophy can be furthered. | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I think I prefer Williamson's more scientific account of possibility through counterfactual conceivability, rather than Chalmers' optimistic a priori account. Deep topic, though, and the jury is still out. |
| 12596 | Reasoning aims at increasing explanatory coherence [Harman] |
| Full Idea: In reasoning you try among other things to increase the explanatory coherence of your view. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.2) | |
| A reaction: Harman is a champion of inference to the best explanation (abduction), and I agree with him. I think this idea extends to give us a view of justification as coherence, and that extends from inner individual coherence to socially extended coherence. |
| 12599 | Reason conservatively: stick to your beliefs, and prefer reasoning that preserves most of them [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Conservatism is important; you should continue to believe as you do in the absence of any special reason to doubt your view, and in reasoning you should try to minimize change in your initial opinions in attaining other goals of reasoning. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.6) | |
| A reaction: One of those principles like Ockham's Razor, which feels right but hard to justify. It seems the wrong principle for someone who can reason well, but has been brainwashed into a large collection of daft beliefs. Japanese soldiers still fighting WWII. |
| 12595 | We have a theory of logic (implication and inconsistency), but not of inference or reasoning [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There is as yet no substantial theory of inference or reasoning. To be sure, logic is well developed; but logic is not a theory of inference or reasoning. Logic is a theory of implication and inconsistency. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.2) | |
| A reaction: One problem is that animals can draw inferences without the use of language, and I presume we do so all the time, so it is hard to see how to formalise such an activity. |
| 12597 | I might accept P and Q as likely, but reject P-and-Q as unlikely [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Principles of implication imply there is not a purely probabilistic rule of acceptance for belief. Otherwise one might accept P and Q, without accepting their conjunction, if the conjuncts have a high probability, but the conjunction doesn't. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.2) | |
| A reaction: [Idea from Scott Soames] I am told that my friend A has just won a very big lottery prize, and am then told that my friend B has also won a very big lottery prize. The conjunction seems less believable; I begin to suspect a conspiracy. |
| 12598 | Reality is the overlap of true complete theories [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Reality is what is invariant among true complete theories. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.4) | |
| A reaction: The sort of slogan that gets coined in the age of Quine. The whole manner of starting from your theories and working out to what we think reality is seems to be putting the cart before the horse. |
| 19262 | Essential properties are necessary, but necessary properties may not be essential [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: When P is an essence of O it follows that P is a necessary property of O. However, P can be a necessary property of O without being an essence of O. | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], 'Knowledge') | |
| A reaction: This summarises the Kit Fine view with which I sympathise. However, I dislike presenting essence as a mere list of properties, which is only done for the convenience of logicians. But was Jessie Owens a great athlete after he lost his speed? |
| 19267 | Define conceivable; how reliable is it; does inconceivability help; and what type of possibility results? [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: Conceivability as evidence for possibility needs four interpretations. How is 'conceivable' defined or explained? How strongly is the idea endorsed? How does inconceivability fit in? And what kind of possibility (logical, physical etc) is implied? | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], 'Application') | |
| A reaction: [some compression] Williamson's counterfactual account helps with the first one. The strength largely depends on whether your conceptions are well informed. Inconceivability may be your own failure. All types of possibility can be implied. |
| 19268 | Inconceivability (implying impossibility) may be failure to conceive, or incoherence [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: If we aim to derive impossibility from inconceivability, we may either face a failure to conceive something, or arrive at a state of incoherence in conceiving. | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], 'Application') | |
| A reaction: [summary] Thus I can't manage to conceive a multi-dimensional hypercube, but I don't even try to conceive a circular square. In both cases, we must consider whether the inconceivability results from our own inadequacy, rather than from the facts. |
| 19265 | Can you possess objective understanding without realising it? [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: Is it possible for an individual to possess objectual understanding without knowing they possess the objectual understanding? | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], 'Objections') | |
| A reaction: Hm. A nice new question to loose sleep over. We can't demand a regress of meta-understandings, so at some point you just understand. Birds understand nests. Equivalent: can you understand P, but can't explain P? Skilled, but inarticulate. |
| 19260 | Gettier deductive justifications split the justification from the truthmaker [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: In the Gettier case of deductive justification, what we have is a separation between the source of the justification and the truthmaker for the belief. | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], 'Distinction') | |
| A reaction: A very illuminating insight into the Gettier problem. As a fan of truthmakers, I'm wondering if this might quickly solve it. |
| 19266 | In a disjunctive case, the justification comes from one side, and the truth from the other [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: The disjunctive belief that 'either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona', which Smith believes, derives its justification from the left disjunct, and its truth from the right disjunct. | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], 'Application') | |
| A reaction: The example is from Gettier's original article. Have we finally got a decent account of the original Gettier problem, after fifty years of debate? Philosophical moves with delightful slowness. |
| 12602 | There is no natural border between inner and outer [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There is no natural border between inner and outer. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.4) | |
| A reaction: Perhaps this is the key idea for the anti-individualist view of mind. Subjectively I would have to accept this idea, but looking objectively at another person it seems self-evident nonsense. |
| 12603 | We can only describe mental attitudes in relation to the external world [Harman] |
| Full Idea: No one has ever described a way of explaining what beliefs, desires, and other mental states are except in terms of actual or possible relations to things in the external world. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.4) | |
| A reaction: If I pursue my current favourite idea, that how we explain things is the driving force in what ontology we adopt, then this way of seeing the mind, and taking an externalist anti-individualist view of it seems quite attractive. |
| 12601 | The way things look is a relational matter, not an intrinsic matter [Harman] |
| Full Idea: According to functionalism, the way things look to you is a relational characteristic of your experience, not part of its intrinsic character. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.3) | |
| A reaction: No, can't make sense of that. How would being in a relation determine what something is? Similar problems with the structuralist account of mathematics. If the whole family love some one cat or one dog, the only difference is intrinsic to the animal. |
| 19264 | Aboutness is always intended, and cannot be accidental [Vaidya] |
| Full Idea: A representation cannot accidentally be about an object. Aboutness is in general an intentional relation. | |
| From: Anand Vaidya (Understanding and Essence [2010], 'Objections') | |
| A reaction: 'Intentional' with a 't', not with an 's'. This strikes me as important. Critics dislike the idea of 'representation' because if you passively place a representation and its subject together, what makes the image do the representing job? Answer: I do! |
| 12592 | Concepts in thought have content, but not meaning, which requires communication [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Concepts and other aspects of mental representation have content but not (normally) meaning (unless they are also expressions in a language used in communication). | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Given his account of meaning as involving some complex 'role', he has to say this, though it seems a dubious distinction, going against the grain of a normal request to ask what some concept 'means'. What is 'democracy'? |
| 12590 | Take meaning to be use in calculation with concepts, rather than in communication [Harman] |
| Full Idea: (Nonsolipsistic) conceptual role semantics is a version of the theory that meaning is use, where the basic use is taken to be in calculation, not in communication, and where concepts are treated as symbols in a 'language of thought'. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.1) | |
| A reaction: The idea seems to be to connect the highly social Wittgensteinian view of language with the reductive physicalist account of how brains generate concepts. Interesting, thought I never like meaning-as-use. |
| 12593 | The use theory attaches meanings to words, not to sentences [Harman] |
| Full Idea: A use theory of meaning has to suppose it is words and ways of putting words together that have meaning because of their uses, not sentences. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.3) | |
| A reaction: He says that most sentences are unique, so cannot have a standard use. Words do a particular job over and over again. How do you distinguish the quirky use of a word from its standard use? |
| 12588 | Meaning from use of thoughts, constructed from concepts, which have a role relating to reality [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual role semantics involves meanings of expressions determined by used contents of concepts and thoughts, contents constructed from concepts, concepts determined by functional role, which involves relations to things in the world. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: This essay is the locus classicus for conceptual-role semantics. Any attempt to say what something IS by giving an account of its function always feels wrong to me. |
| 12589 | Some regard conceptual role semantics as an entirely internal matter [Harman] |
| Full Idea: I call my conceptual role semantics 'non-solipsistic' to contrast it with that of authors (Field, Fodor, Loar) who think of conceptual role solipsistically as a completely internal matter. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: Evidently Harman is influenced by Putnam's Twin Earth, and that meanings ain't in the head, so that the conceptual role has to be extended out into the world to get a good account. I prefer extending into the language community, rather into reality. |
| 12600 | The content of thought is relations, between mental states, things in the world, and contexts [Harman] |
| Full Idea: In (nonsolipsistic) conceptual role semantics the content of thought is not in an 'intrinsic nature', but is rather a matter of how mental states are related to each other, to things in the external world, and to things in a context understood as normal. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.3) | |
| A reaction: This is part of Harman's functional view of consciousness, which I find rather dubious. If things only have identity because of some place in a flow diagram, we must ask why that thing has that place in that diagram. |
| 12594 | If one proposition negates the other, which is the negative one? [Harman] |
| Full Idea: A relation of negation might hold between two beliefs without there being anything that determines which belief is the negative one. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.4) | |
| A reaction: [He attributes this thought to Brian Loar] This seems to give us a reason why we need a semantics for a logic, and not just a structure of inferences and proofs. |
| 12591 | Mastery of a language requires thinking, and not just communication [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If one cannot think in a language, one has not yet mastered it. A symbol system used only for communication, like Morse code, is not a language. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.2) | |
| A reaction: This invites the question of someone who has mastered thinking, but has no idea how to communicate. No doubt we might construct a machine with something like that ability. I think it might support Harman's claim. |
| 9261 | The 'Ethics' is disappointing, because it fails to try to justify our duties [Prichard] |
| Full Idea: Reading the 'Ethics' is so disappointing, because Aristotle does not try to convince us that we really ought to do what our non-reflective consciousness has hitherto believed we ought to do. | |
| From: H.A. Prichard (Does moral phil rest on a mistake? [1912]) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle didn't speak the language of 'duty' (see Idea 2172), but he could work it into his account if Prichard asked nicely. I take the truly virtuous person to be, above all, a wonderful citizen. Duties are contractual; good deeds flow from virtue. |
| 9262 | The mistake is to think we can prove what can only be seen directly in moral thinking [Prichard] |
| Full Idea: Moral Philosophy rests on the mistake of supposing the possibility of proving what can only be apprehended directly by an act of moral thinking. | |
| From: H.A. Prichard (Does moral phil rest on a mistake? [1912]) | |
| A reaction: This is a beginning of the rebellion against the Enlightenment Project in ethics, which is why Prichard has become popular. At bottom he is offering intuition ('direct moral thinking'), which is a frustratingly thin concept. |
| 9260 | Virtues won't generate an obligation, so it isn't a basis for morality [Prichard] |
| Full Idea: It is untrue to urge that, since courage is a virtue, we ought to act courageously. We feel an obligation to act, but not from a certain desire. The action is done from obligation, so isn't an act of courage. ..In fact, virtue is no basis for morality. | |
| From: H.A. Prichard (Does moral phil rest on a mistake? [1912]) | |
| A reaction: One of the few interesting and direct attacks on virtue theory, before its modern revival. Prichard urges a perception of what is valuable (or good) as the basis for obligation and right action. He is right that values come first, in virtue and elsewhere. |
| 9259 | We feel obligations to overcome our own failings, and these are not relations to other people [Prichard] |
| Full Idea: The relation involved in an obligation need not be a relation to another at all. Thus we should admit that there is an obligation to overcome our natural timidity or greediness, and this involves no relations to others. | |
| From: H.A. Prichard (Does moral phil rest on a mistake? [1912]) | |
| A reaction: An interesting un-Aristotelian and individualistic view of virtue. Why would we want to rid ourselves of timidity or greediness? Either it is self-interested, or we wish to be better citizens. See Richard Taylor on duty. |
| 9258 | If pain were instrinsically wrong, it would be immoral to inflict it on ourselves [Prichard] |
| Full Idea: If the badness of pain were the reason why we ought not to inflict pain on another, it would equally be a reason why we ought not to inflict pain on ourselves; yet, though we would call such behaviour foolish, we wouldn't think it wrong. | |
| From: H.A. Prichard (Does moral phil rest on a mistake? [1912], n4) | |
| A reaction: A very nice point. Note that it will equally well apply to 'benefit' or 'preferences', or any other ideal which utilitarians set out to maximise. It may not be bad to hurt yourself, but it might still be bad to harm yourself. |