9123
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Someone standing in a doorway seems to be both in and not-in the room [Priest,G, by Sorensen]
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Full Idea:
Priest says there is room for contradictions. He gives the example of someone in a doorway; is he in or out of the room. Given that in and out are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, and neither is the default, he seems to be both in and not in.
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From:
report of Graham Priest (What is so bad about Contradictions? [1998]) by Roy Sorensen - Vagueness and Contradiction 4.3
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A reaction:
Priest is a clever lad, but I don't think I can go with this. It just seems to be an equivocation on the word 'in' when applied to rooms. First tell me the criteria for being 'in' a room. What is the proposition expressed in 'he is in the room'?
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12151
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If we replace 'I' in sentences about me, they are different beliefs and explanations of behaviour [Perry]
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Full Idea:
If I leave a trail of sugar, and realise 'that I am making a mess', ...when we replace the word 'I' with other designations of me, we no longer have an explanation of my behaviour, or an attribution of the same belief, so it is an 'essential indexical'.
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From:
John Perry (The Problem of the Essential Indexical [1979], 'Intro')
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A reaction:
[compressed] A famous observation of Perry's, which leads him to challenge traditional accounts of belief and of propositions. I don't think I see a problem, if we have a thoroughly non-linguistic account of essentially unambiguous propositions.
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5319
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Avoid punishment, then get rewards, avoid rejection, avoid guilt, accept contracts, follow conscience [Kohlberg, by Wilson,EO]
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Full Idea:
Kohlberg's six stages of ethical development are: 1) avoid punishment, 2) obtain rewards, 3) avoid rejection, 4) avoid censure and guilt, 5) recognise contracts, 6) individual conscience.
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From:
report of Lawrence Kohlberg (works [1969]) by Edmund O. Wilson - On Human Nature p.166
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A reaction:
This doesn't throw much light on philosophical problems, but the order of the six stages is interesting. Beware of oversimplification, because a situation can put pressure on any one of these six aspects of morality.
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15204
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Actual tensed sentences cannot be tenseless, because they can cite their own context [Perry, by Le Poidevin]
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Full Idea:
In the new tenseless theory, no tensed token sentence can be equivalent to a tenseless token, because the former, unlike the latter, draws attention to the context in which it is tokened.
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From:
report of John Perry (The Problem of the Essential Indexical [1979]) by Robin Le Poidevin - Past, Present and Future of Debate about Tense 3 a
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A reaction:
So the problem about indexicals was worrying fans of the tenseless B-series view of time (and so it should). I'm inclined to translate sentences containing indexicals into their actual propositions, which tend to avoid them. 'Time/person of utterance'.
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