35 ideas
| 21901 | 'Difference' refers to that which eludes capture [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: 'Difference' is a term which Deleuze uses to refer to that which eludes capture. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: Presumably its ancestor is Kant's noumenon. This is one of his concepts used to 'palpate' our ossified conceptual scheme. |
| 9376 | A sentence may simultaneously define a term, and also assert a fact [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: It doesn't follow from the fact that a given sentence is being used to implicitly define one of its ingredient terms, that it is not a factual statement. 'This stick is a meter long at t' may define an ingredient terms and express something factual. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This looks like a rather good point, but it is tied in with a difficulty about definition, which is deciding which sentences are using a term, and which ones are defining it. If I say 'this stick in Paris is a meter long', I'm not defining it. |
| 19215 | Arguers often turn the opponent's modus ponens into their own modus tollens [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: There is a seasoned method of turning your opponent's modus ponens into your own modus tollens. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 5.VII) | |
| A reaction: That is, they say 'if he's coming he'll be hear by now, and he's definitely coming', to which you say 'I'm afraid he's not here, so he obviously isn't coming after all'. They say if-A-then-B, and A, so B. You say not-B, so you're wrong about A. |
| 19205 | 'Snow is white' only contingently expresses the proposition that snow is white [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: It is contingently true that 'snow is white' expresses the proposition that snow is white. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 1.V n14) | |
| A reaction: Tarski stuck to sentences, but Merricks rightly argues that truth concerns propositions, not sentences. Sentences are subservient entities - mere tools used to express what matters, which is our thoughts (say I). |
| 19209 | Simple Quantified Modal Logc doesn't work, because the Converse Barcan is a theorem [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Logical consequence guarantees preservation of truth. The Converse Barcan, a theorem of Simple Quantified Modal Logic, says that an obvious truth implies an obvious falsehood. So SQML gets logical consequence wrong. So SQML is mistaken. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 2.V) | |
| A reaction: I admire this. The Converse Barcan certainly strikes me as wrong (Idea 19208). Merricks grasps this nettle. Williamson grasps the other nettle. Most people duck the issue, I suspect. Merricks says later that domains are the problem. |
| 19208 | The Converse Barcan implies 'everything exists necessarily' is a consequence of 'necessarily, everything exists' [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The Converse Barcan Formula has a startling result. Simple Quantified Modal Logic (SQML) has the following as a theorem: □∀xFx → ∀x□Fx. So 'everything exists necessarily' is a consequence of 'necessarily, everything exists'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 2.V) | |
| A reaction: He says this is blatantly wrong. Williamson is famous for defending it. I think I'm with Merricks on this one. |
| 9375 | Conventionalism agrees with realists that logic has truth values, but not over the source [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Conventualism is a factualist view: it presupposes that sentences of logic have truth values. It differs from a realist view in its conception of the source of those truth values, not on their existence. I call the denial of truths Non-Factualism. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: It barely seems to count as truth is we say 'p is true because we say so'. It is a truth about an agreement, not a truth about logic. Driving on the left isn't a truth about which side of the road is best. |
| 19207 | Sentence logic maps truth values; predicate logic maps objects and sets [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The models for sentential logic map sentences to truth-values. The models for predicate logic map parts of sentences to objects and sets. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 2.II) | |
| A reaction: Logic books rarely tell you important things like this. That is why this database is so incredibly important! You will never understand the subject if you don't collect together the illuminating asides of discussion. They say it all so much more simply. |
| 21902 | 'Being' is univocal, but its subject matter is actually 'difference' [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968], p.36), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: This is an attempt to express the Heraclitean view of reality, as process, movement, multiplicity - something which always eludes our attempts to pin it down. |
| 21908 | Ontology can be continual creation, not to know being, but to probe the unknowable [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Ontology can be an ontology of difference ....where what is there is not the same old things but a process of continual creation, an ontology that does not seek to reduce being to the knowable, but widens thought to palpate the unknowable. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 5.05 | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to think that the first duty of ontology is to face up to the knowable. I'm not sure that probing the unknowable, with no success or prospect of it, is a good way to spend a life. Probing ('palpating') can sometimes discover things. |
| 21903 | Ontology does not tell what there is; it is just a strange adventure [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: In Deleuze's hands ontology is not a matter of telling us what there is, but of taking us on strange adventures. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: Presumably you only indulge in the strange adventure because you have no idea how to specify what there is. This sounds like the essence of post-modernism, in which life is just a game. |
| 21904 | Being is a problem to be engaged, not solved, and needs a new mode of thinking [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: In Deleuze, Being is not a puzzle to be solved but a problem to be engaged. It is to be engaged by a thought that moves as comfortably among problems as it does among solutions, as fluidly among differences as it does among identities. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 4.01 | |
| A reaction: This sounds like what I've always known as 'negative capability' (thanks to Keats). Is philosophy just a hobby, like playing darts? It seems that the aim of the process is 'liberation', about which I would like to know more. |
| 19214 | In twinning, one person has the same origin as another person [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Origin essentialists claim that parental union results in a person, and that person could not have resulted from any other union. However, if the fertilised egg undergoes twinning, at least one of the resultant persons is not the original person. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 5.V) | |
| A reaction: Merricks says that therefore that origin could have just produced the second twin, rather than the original person. This is interesting, but doesn't seem to threaten the necessity of origin thesis. Once I'm here, I have that origin, despite my twin. |
| 9369 | 'Snow is white or it isn't' is just true, not made true by stipulation [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Isn't it overwhelmingly obvious that 'Either snow is white or it isn't' was true before anyone stipulated a meaning for it, and that it would have been true even if no one had thought about it, or chosen it to be expressed by one of our sentences? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: Boghossian would have to believe in propositions (unexpressed truths) to hold this - which he does. I take the notion of truth to only have relevance when there are minds around. Otherwise the so-called 'truths' are just the facts. |
| 9367 | The a priori is explained as analytic to avoid a dubious faculty of intuition [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The central impetus behind the analytic explanation of the a priori is a desire to explain the possibility of a priori knowledge without having to postulate a special evidence-gathering faculty of intuition. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: I don't see at all why one has to postulate a 'faculty' in order to talk about intuition. I take an intuition to be an apprehension of a probable truth, combined with an inability to articulate how the conclusion was arrived at. |
| 9373 | That logic is a priori because it is analytic resulted from explaining the meaning of logical constants [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The analytic theory of the apriority of logic arose indirectly, as a by-product of the attempt to explain in what a grasp of the meaning of the logical constants consists. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: Preumably he is referring to Wittgenstein's anguish over the meaning of the word 'not' in his World War I notebooks. He first defined the constants by truth tables, then asserted that they were purely conventional - so logic is conventional. |
| 9380 | We can't hold a sentence true without evidence if we can't agree which sentence is definitive of it [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: If there is no sentence I must hold true if it is to mean what it does, then there is no basis on which to argue that I am entitled to hold it true without evidence. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: He is exploring Quine's view. Truth by convention depends on agreeing which part of the usage of a term constitutes its defining sentence(s), and that may be rather tricky. Boghossian says this slides into the 'dreaded indeterminacy of meaning'. |
| 9384 | We may have strong a priori beliefs which we pragmatically drop from our best theory [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: It is consistent with a belief's being a priori in the strong sense that we should have pragmatic reasons for dropping it from our best overall theory. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], n 6) | |
| A reaction: Does 'dropping it' from the theory mean just ignoring it, or actually denying it? C.I. Lewis is the ancestor of this view. Could it be our 'best' theory, while conflicting with beliefs that were strongly a priori? Pragmatism can embrace falsehoods. |
| 9374 | If we learn geometry by intuition, how could this faculty have misled us for so long? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: If we learn geometrical truths by intuition, how could this faculty have misled us for so long? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This refers to the development of non-Euclidean geometries, though the main misleading concerns parallels, which involves infinity. Boghossian cites 'distance' as a concept the Euclideans had misunderstood. Why shouldn't intuitions be wrong? |
| 19217 | I don't accept that if a proposition is directly about an entity, it has a relation to the entity [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The Aboutness Assumption says that necessarily, if a proposition is directly about an entity, then that proposition stands in a relation to the entity. I shall argue that the Assumption is false. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 5.VII) | |
| A reaction: This feels sort of right, though the nature of aboutness remains elusive. He cites denials of existence. I take speech to be fairly internal, even though its main role is communication. Maybe its a Cambridge relation, as far as the entity is concerned. |
| 19203 | A sentence's truth conditions depend on context [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: A sentence has truth conditions only in a context of use. And the truth conditions of many sentences can differ from one context of use to another (as in 'I am a philosopher'). | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 1.II) | |
| A reaction: He is building a defence of propositions, because they are eternal, and have their truth conditions essentially. I too am a fan of propositions. |
| 9378 | If meaning depends on conceptual role, what properties are needed to do the job? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual Role Semantics must explain what properties an inference or sentence involving a logical constant must have, if that inference or sentence is to be constitutive of its meaning. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This is my perennial request that if something is to be defined by its function (or role), we must try to explain what properties it has that make its function possible, and those properties will be the more basic explanation. |
| 9377 | 'Conceptual role semantics' says terms have meaning from sentences and/or inferences [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: 'Conceptual role semantics' says the logical constants mean what they do by virtue of figuring in certain inferences and/or sentences involving them and not others, ..so some inferences and sentences are constitutive of an expression's meaning. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: If the meaning of the terms derives from the sentences in which they figure, that seems to be meaning-as-use. The view that it depends on the inferences seems very different, and is a more interesting but more risky claim. |
| 9372 | Could expressions have meaning, without two expressions possibly meaning the same? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Could there be a fact of the matter about what each expression means, but no fact of the matter about whether they mean the same? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §II) | |
| A reaction: He is discussing Quine's attack on synonymy, and his scepticism about meaning. Boghossian and I believe in propositions, so we have no trouble with two statements having the same meaning. Denial of propositions breeds trouble. |
| 19200 | Propositions are standardly treated as possible worlds, or as structured [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The thesis that propositions are sets of possible worlds is one of the two leading accounts of the nature of propositions. The other leading account endorses structured propositions. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Merricks sets out to reject both main views. I take the idea that propositions actually are sets of possible worlds to be ridiculous (though they may offer a way of modelling them). The idea that they have no structure at all strikes me as odd. |
| 19206 | 'Cicero is an orator' represents the same situation as 'Tully is an orator', so they are one proposition [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The proposition expressed by 'Cicero is an orator' represents things as being exactly the same way as does the proposition expressed by 'Tully is an orator'. Hence two sentences express the same proposition. Fregeans about names deny this. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 2.II) | |
| A reaction: Merricks makes the situation in the world fix the contents of the proposition. I don't agree. I would expand the first proposition as 'The person I know as 'Cicero' was an orator', but I might never have heard of 'Tully'. |
| 19202 | Propositions are necessary existents which essentially (but inexplicably) represent things [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: My account says that each proposition is a necessary existent that essentially represents things as being a certain way, ...and there is no explanation of how propositions do that. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Since I take propositions to be brain events, I don't expect much of an explanation either. The idea that propositions necessarily exist strikes me as false. If there were no minds, there would have been no propositions. |
| 19204 | True propositions existed prior to their being thought, and might never be thought [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: 1,000 years ago, no sentence had ever expressed, and no one had believed, the true proposition 'a water molecule has two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms'. There are surely true propositions that have never been, and never will be, expressed or believed. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 1.V) | |
| A reaction: 'Surely'? Surely not! How many propositions exist? Where do they exist? What are they made of? If they already exist when we think them, how do we tune into them? When did his example come into existence? Before water did? No! No! |
| 19210 | The standard view of propositions says they never change their truth-value [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The standard view among philosophers nowadays seems to be that propositions do not and even cannot change in truth-value. But my own view is that some propositions can, and do, change in truth value. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 3.VII) | |
| A reaction: He gives 'that A sits' as an example of one which can change, though 'that A sits at time t' cannot change. I take Merricks to be obviously right, and cannot get my head round the 'standard' view. What on earth do they think a proposition is? |
| 19201 | Propositions can be 'about' an entity, but that doesn't make the entity a constituent of it [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: If a singular proposition is 'directly about' an entity, I argue that a singular proposition does not have the entity that it is directly about as a constituent. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This opposes the view of the early Russell, that propositions actually contain the entities they are about, thus making propositions real features of the external world. I take that view of Russell's to be absurd. |
| 19211 | Early Russell says a proposition is identical with its truthmaking state of affairs [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: I describe Russell's 1903 account of propositions as the view that each proposition is identical with the state of affairs that makes that proposition true. That is, a proposition is identical with its 'truthmaking' state of affairs. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 4.II) | |
| A reaction: Russell soon gave this view up (false propositions proving tricky), and I'm amazed anyone takes it seriously. I take it as axiomatic that if there were no minds there would be no propositions. Was the Big Bang a set of propositions? |
| 19212 | Unity of the proposition questions: what unites them? can the same constituents make different ones? [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: What binds the constituents of a structured proposition together into a single unity, a proposition? Can the very same constituents constitute two distinct propositions? These are questions about 'the unity of the proposition'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 4.II) | |
| A reaction: Merricks solves it by saying propositions have no structure. The problem is connected to the nature of predication (instantiation, partaking). You can't just list objects and their properties. Objects are united, and thus propositions are too. |
| 19213 | We want to explain not just what unites the constituents, but what unites them into a proposition [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: A successful account of the unity of the proposition tells us what unites the relevant constituents not merely into some entity or other, but into a proposition. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Propositions [2015], 4.X) | |
| A reaction: Merrickes takes propositions to be unanalysable unities, but their central activity is representation, so if they needed uniting, that would be the place to look. Some people say that we unite our propositions. Others say the world does. I dunno. |
| 17721 | There are no truths in virtue of meaning, but there is knowability in virtue of understanding [Boghossian, by Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Boghossian distinguishes metaphysical analyticity (truth purely in virtue of meaning, debunked by Quine, he says) from epistemic analyticity (knowability purely in virtue of understanding - a notion in good standing). | |
| From: report of Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996]) by Carrie Jenkins - Grounding Concepts 2.4 | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This fits with Jenkins's claim that we have a priori knowledge just through understanding and relating our concepts. She, however, rejects that idea that a priori is analytic. |
| 9368 | Epistemological analyticity: grasp of meaning is justification; metaphysical: truth depends on meaning [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The epistemological notion of analyticity: a statement is 'true by virtue of meaning' provided that grasp of its meaning alone suffices for justified belief in its truth; the metaphysical reading is that it owes its truth to its meaning, not to facts. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: Kripke thinks it is neither, but is a purely semantic notion. How could grasp of meaning alone be a good justification if it wasn't meaning which was the sole cause of the statement's truth? I'm not convinced by his distinction. |