21 ideas
| 17311 | Real definitions don't just single out a thing; they must also explain its essence [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: A statement expressing a real definition must also accomplish more than simply to offer two different ways of singling out the same entity, since the definiens must also be explanatory of the essential nature of the definiendum. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.4) | |
| A reaction: This is why Aristotelian definitions are not just short lexicographical definitions, but may be quite length. Effectively, a definition IS an explanation. |
| 19108 | Truth is proper assertion, but that has varying standards [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The pragmatist will say that truth is proper assertion, but different discourses have different standards for proper assertion. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: This remark shows that there is a pragmatic attitude towards truth behind most attempts to analyse the concept of assertion. When and why is assertion legitimate, and what motivates it? |
| 19094 | For pragmatists the loftiest idea of truth is just a feature of what remains forever assertible [Misak] |
| Full Idea: For pragmatists there is an unseverable connection between making an assertion and claiming that it is true. ...Were we to get to a belief that is forever assertible...then we would have a true belief. There is nothing higher or better we could ask of it. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: She is particularly drawing on Peirce. She says his 'ideal end of enquiry' idea is a small aspect of his view of truth, which is mainly given here. I had taken the pragmatic view of truth to be silly, but I may rethink. |
| 19105 | Truth isn't a grand elusive property, if it is just the aim of our assertions and inquiries [Misak] |
| Full Idea: If truth is what satisfies our aims in first-order assertion and inquiry (as the pragmatist says), then there is no search for an elusive property, or a metaphysical property, or a property which we cannot grasp. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 3) | |
| A reaction: This pragmatic approach is much more persuasive than the usual caricature of pragmatic truth (Idea 19097), but I'm beginning to wonder how you distinguish an 'inquiry' (or 'assertion') from other modes of thought. Do I smell a circularity? |
| 19100 | Truth makes disagreements matter, or worth settling [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The role of truth is to make disagreements matter, or to make sense of wanting to resolve disagreements. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Huw Price 2003] This suggests that the most important use of 'truth' is forensic. It is hard to make any sense of a law court without a robust sense of truth. Trial by jury, rather than some great personage, shows this value. |
| 19099 | 'True' is used for emphasis, clarity, assertion, comparison, objectivity, meaning, negation, consequence... [Misak] |
| Full Idea: 'P is true' is used to emphasise p, and avoid logic problems. The pragmatists says there are plenty of other uses: the aim of assertion or deliberation, the improvement of our views, distinguishing objectivity, explaining meaning, negation, consequence... | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: Pragmatism seems to break 'true' down into its many uses, rather than having a specific theory of truth. This might be where ordinary language philosophy (how is the word 'true' used) meets pragmatism (how is the concept [true] used). |
| 19103 | 'That's true' doesn't just refer back to a sentence, but implies sustained evidence for it [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The pragmatist says 'That's so' or 'that's true' are not just 'pro-sentential', but carry with them the thought that evidence does currently speak in favour of the statement asserted, and the prediction that it will continue to speak in favour. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is a very nice point made by a pragmatist against the flimsy view of truth held by various deflationary views. You ought to believe what is true, and stand by what you hold to be true. |
| 19101 | Disquotation is bivalent [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The disquotational schema entails bivalence. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2 n10) | |
| A reaction: A simple but interesting observation. Critics of Tarski observe that he depends on a bivalent logic. |
| 19096 | Disquotationalism resembles a telephone directory [Misak] |
| Full Idea: Disquotationalism is more like a telephone directory than a theory. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2 n7) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Wilfred Sellars 1962:33] The idea is that there is a schema - 'p' is true iff p - and that all the acceptable sentences of a language can be expressed in this way, making a vast but finite list. It seems to replace 'theories'. |
| 19106 | Disquotations says truth is assertion, and assertion proclaims truth - but what is 'assertion'? [Misak] |
| Full Idea: The point of the disquotational schema is that to say that a sentence is true is to assert it, and to assert a sentence is to say that it is true. We must then ask what it is to assert or endorse a proposition. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: [She is referring to the views of Crispin Wright] Most people would say that we assert something because we think it is true, and truth is obviously prior. Clearly if it has been asserted, that was because someone thought it was true. |
| 19098 | Deflating the correspondence theory doesn't entail deflating all the other theories [Misak] |
| Full Idea: We must not move seamlessly from the thought that the correspondence theory must be deflated to the thought that any theory of truth must be deflated. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: This rather good essay offers the idea that Peircean pragmatic approaches to truth can meet the deflationary desires of the opponents of correspondence, without jettisoning all the crucial naturalistic connections with reality. Interesting. |
| 19104 | Deflationism isn't a theory of truth, but an account of its role in natural language [Misak] |
| Full Idea: Deflationist theories are not theories of truth, or theories of what truth is. ...They are theories which try to explain the role that 'true' plays in natural languages. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 3) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Dorothy Grover 2001,2002] If so, then the modern axiomatic theory of truth sounds appealing, because it tries to give a fuller and more precise account than a mere list is disquotations could possibly give. |
| 17312 | It is more explanatory if you show how a number is constructed from basic entities and relations [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Being the successor of the successor of 0 is more explanatory than being predecessor of 3 of the nature of 2, since it mirrors more closely the method by which 2 is constructed from a basic entity, 0, and a relation (successor) taken as primitive. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.4) | |
| A reaction: This assumes numbers are 'constructed', which they are in the axiomatised system of Peano Arithmetic, but presumably the numbers were given in ordinary experience before 'construction' occurred to anyone. Nevertheless, I really like this. |
| 17314 | The relata of grounding are propositions or facts, but for dependence it is objects and their features [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: The relata of the grounding relation are typically taken to be facts or propositions, while the relata of ontological dependence ...are objects and their characteristics, activities, constituents and so on. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.5 n25) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. Good riddance to propositions here, but this seems a bit unfair to facts, since I take facts to be in the world. Audi's concept of 'worldly facts' is what we need here. |
| 19109 | The anti-realism debate concerns whether indefeasibility is a plausible aim of inquiry [Misak] |
| Full Idea: If indefeasibility turns out to be something we can't sensibly aim at in a kind of inquiry, then the judgements that arise from that kind of 'inquiry' are not truth-apt. It is here that the realism/anti-realism debate resides. | |
| From: Cheryl Misak (Pragmatism and Deflationism [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: A very interesting way of presenting the issue, one that makes the debate sound (to me) considerably more interesting than hitherto. I may start using the word 'indefeasible' rather a lot, in my chats with the anti-realist philosophical multitude. |
| 17313 | Modern views want essences just to individuate things across worlds and times [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: According to the approach of Plantinga, Forbes and Mackie, the primary job of essences is to individuate the entities whose essences they are across worlds and times at which these entities exist. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.4 n13) | |
| A reaction: A helpful simplification of what is going on. I wish those authors would just say this one their first pages. They all get in a right tangle, because individuation is either too easy, or hopeless. 'Tracking' is a good word for this game. |
| 17309 | For Fine, essences are propositions true because of identity, so they are just real definitions [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Fine assumes that essences can be identified with collections of propositions that are true in virtue of the identity of a particular object, or objects. ...There is not, on this approach, much of a distinction between essences and real definitions. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.4) | |
| A reaction: This won't do, because the essence of a physical object is not a set of propositions, it is some aspects of the object itself, which are described in a definition. Koslicki notes that psuché is an essence, and the soul is hardly a set of propositions! |
| 17315 | We need a less propositional view of essence, and so must distinguish it clearly from real definitions [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: To make room for a less propositional conception of essence than that assumed by Fine, I urge that we distinguish more firmly between essences and real definitions (which state these essences in the form of propositions). | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.6) | |
| A reaction: Yes. The idea that essence is just a verbal or conceptual entity would be utterly abhorrent to Aristotle (a hero for Fine), and it is anathema to me too. We intend essences to be in the world (even if we are deceived about that). They explain! |
| 17317 | A good explanation captures the real-world dependence among the phenomena [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: It is plausible to think that an explanation, when successful, captures or represents (by argument, or a why? question) an underlying real-world relation of dependence which obtains among the phenomena cited. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.6) | |
| A reaction: She cites causal dependence as an example. I'm incline to think that 'grounding' is a better word for the target of good explanations than is 'dependence' (which can, surely, be mutual, where ground has the directionality needed for explanation). |
| 17316 | We can abstract to a dependent entity by blocking out features of its bearer [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: In 'feature dependence', the ontologically dependent entity may be thought of as the result of a process of abstraction which takes the 'bearer' as its starting point and arrives at the abstracted entity by blocking out all the irrelevant features. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Varieties of Ontological Dependence [2012], 7.6) | |
| A reaction: She seems unaware that this is traditional abstraction, found in Aristotle, and a commonplace of thought until Frege got his evil hands on abstraction and stole it for other purposes. I'm a fan. |
| 19399 | Prime matter is nothing when it is at rest [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Primary matter is nothing if considered at rest. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Aristotle and Descartes on Matter [1671], p.90) | |
| A reaction: This goes with Leibniz's Idea 13393, that activity is the hallmark of existence. No one seems to have been able to make good sense of prime matter, and it plays little role in Aristotle's writings. |