40 ideas
| 18405 | A 'teepee' argument has several mutually supporting planks to it [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: In a 'teepee' argument, a number of argumentative planks intersupport each other. No plank is sufficiently strong to establish the position, but each lends credibility to the others because there is the appearance of a unified phenomenon. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.5) | |
| A reaction: To attack it, they say, you have to identify the separate planks of the argument. It is a moot point whether the teepee might be so imprecise that it is better described as 'coherence'. There is a background support, as well as the planks. |
| 10245 | One geometry cannot be more true than another [Poincaré] |
| Full Idea: One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. | |
| From: Henri Poincaré (Science and Method [1908], p.65), quoted by Stewart Shapiro - Philosophy of Mathematics | |
| A reaction: This is the culminating view after new geometries were developed by tinkering with Euclid's parallels postulate. |
| 22744 | Parts are not parts if their whole is nothing more than the parts [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: If the whole is nothing more than the sum of the parts, the parts will not be parts. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.343) | |
| A reaction: Nice. Bricks lying on the ground are not parts of a wall. For them to be parts of a wall there has to be a wall which is not just the bricks. Nihilists like Van Inwagen can deny the wall in ontology, but in thought we need walls. Conceptual dependence. |
| 22748 | Some say motion is perceived by sense, but others say it is by intellect [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Some assert that motion is perceived by sense, but others that it is not perceived at all by sense but by the intellect through sensation. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], II.062) | |
| A reaction: Descartes' wax argument defends the idea that change is perceived by intellect. The intellect has to distinguish the relative aspect of each motion, such as when someone is walking around on a moving ship. Even sense also need memory. |
| 22746 | If we try to conceive of a line with no breadth, it ceases to exist, and so has no length [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: When we have gone so far as to deprive the length of its breadth altogether, we no longer conceive even the length, but along with the removal of the breadth the conception of the length is also removed. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.392) | |
| A reaction: The only explanation of our retaining an understanding of a line even after we have removed its breadth is that we have abandoned experience and conceptualised the line - by idealising it. |
| 18422 | Prioprioception focuses on your body parts, not on your self, or indexicality [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Proprioception is not focused single-mindedly on the self, but is focused on a number of objects - the component bodily parts that belong to the self. There is no obvious need for a concept of the self, or of indexicality. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 07.2) |
| 18425 | We can acquire self-knowledge with mirrors, not just with proprioception and introspection [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Imagine a being that learns everything about itself by watching itself in mirrors, rather than by proprioception and introspection. Surely it can get wet in a storm, even though allegedly distinctive routes of self-knowledge are not available to it? | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 09.3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 18421 | Proprioception is only immune from error if you are certain that it represents the agent [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: The guarantee of immunity from error in prioprioception is only as strong as the guarantee that proprioception only ever represents the proprioceiving agent. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 07.1) | |
| A reaction: This is part of an interesting and sustained attack on the idea that self-knowledge is immune from error. They are thinking of science-fictiony situations where I am wired up to experience your leg movement. My experiences usually track me, that's all. |
| 18419 | Folk Functionalism is a Ramsification of our folk psychology [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: According to Folk Functionalism, mental states are theoretically defined by Ramsifying on our folk-psychological theory. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 06.2) |
| 22741 | The incorporeal is not in the nature of body, and so could not emerge from it [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: The incorporeal will never come into existence from body because the nature of the incorporeal does not exist in body. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.225) | |
| A reaction: So nothing high could be made of pebbles because pebbles are not high? His argument depends on incorporeality having an intrinsically incorporeal nature. Pebbles have some height which can be extended. |
| 18404 | It is assumed that indexical content is needed to represent the perspective of perception [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Because our perceptual states typically represent the world as seen from a perspective, it is sometimes thought that some distinctively indexical kind of content is needed to characterise those states. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.4) | |
| A reaction: They are summarising this view precisely so that they can oppose it, and I think they are right. |
| 18426 | All information is objective, and purely indexical information is not much use [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Fundamentally, all information is objective information. ...[176] What we want is fully portable information, and information that co-ordinates on the world, rather than on us, is best suited for the task. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
| A reaction: I agree entirely with their thesis. We just pick up information about ourselves, such as who and where we are, which is just like equivalent information about other people. It is isn't a special type of information. |
| 18427 | If some of our thought is tied to its context, it will be hard to communicate it [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: It is bad news if some of our contents are essentially tied to particular contexts. ...If information needs to be assessed relative to some ur-context, later recipients won't know what to do with it. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) |
| 18428 | You don't remember your house interior just from an experienced viewpoint [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: When you recall the look of the inside of your house ....where things are relative to one another is what persists in memory, not where they were relative to you when seen. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a very telling example, though you could postulate some system which converts perspectival input into objective information. But why bother? We seek objective information, not perspectives. |
| 18429 | Our beliefs and desires are not organised around ourselves, but around the world [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Our view on the world is not primarily a view from a perspective. Our beliefs and desires are not organized around us. They are instead organized around the world itself. Our view is a view from everywhere. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 10) | |
| A reaction: Slipping in the claim that our desires are also organised around the world is not quite as persuasive as the claim about beliefs. If you want to draw a freehand straight line, focus on the far end of it. The world will guide your hand. |
| 18407 | Indexicality is not significantly connected to agency [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: There are no interesting or distinctive explanatory connections between indexicality and agency. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.8) |
| 18413 | Fregeans can't agree on what 'senses' are [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: There is little agreement among Fregeans about what senses are. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't take this to be sufficient grounds for dismissing Fregean senses. When we look into the workings of the linguistic mind, there seems little prospect of clarity or agreement. |
| 18417 | Possible worlds accounts of content are notoriously coarse-grained [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Possible worlds accounts of content are notoriously coarse-grained. They fail to distinguish between logical or mathematical truths, ..between metaphysical equivalences, ..between coreferentials, ..and between indexicals and non-indexicals. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 05.5) | |
| A reaction: [A nice summary, very compressed] |
| 18408 | Indexicals are just non-constant in meaning, and don't involve any special concepts [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Once the non-constant characters of expressions has been characterised, there is no further need for additional devices like 'first-person concepts' or 'demonstrative concepts'. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be a wonderfully liberating attack on this issue. There is a kind of creepy mysticism that has been allowed to accrue around indexicals, and it's nonsense. |
| 18414 | Fregeans say 'I' differs in reference, so it must also differ in sense [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Fregeans tend to treat as a fundamental tenet that sense determines reference; same sense, same reference. From that it follow trivially that indexicals don't have the same sense: different uses of 'I' have different referents, so sense must differ. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 04.6) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. Since it seems implausible that 'I' is profoundly different when two people use it, this seems to be a strong argument against Frege's distinction. But I rather like Frege's distinction, while being sceptical about 'I', so I'm baffled.... |
| 18423 | All indexicals can be expressed non-indexically [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Whatever can be expressed indexically could be expressed by non-indexical means. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 08.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the best summary of the thesis of their book. Indexicality in non-essential. |
| 18406 | The basic Kaplan view is that there is truth-conditional content, and contextual character [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: In what we label 'Basic Kaplanianism', each of the sentences 'Smith is happy' and 'I am happy', as uttered by Smith, has two levels of meaning. The 'content' is a truth-conditional representation. The 'character' is a function from contexts to contents. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.6) | |
| A reaction: They give this as a minimal and plausible account of the situation, without reading huge significance into the indexical. I'm inclined to see the situation in terms of the underlying proposition containing both ingredients. |
| 18411 | It is proposed that a huge range of linguistic items are context-sensitive [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: An enormous amount has been written about whether 'all', 'know', 'might', 'delicious', 'good', 'if, then', 'and', 'red', 'just', 'justified', 'probable', 'local', 'ready', and 'left-right' are context-sensitive. | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 02.3) | |
| A reaction: The clearest way to approach these things is ask what the (informal) domain of quantification is for that particular context. The domain can shift in the course of a sentence. |
| 18420 | We deny that action involves some special class of beliefs [Cappelen/Dever] |
| Full Idea: Maybe there is a class of beliefs that plays a special role in the explanation of action. We have argued against the existence of such a class (or at least any interesting such class). | |
| From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 06.2) | |
| A reaction: The main class which has been proposed is the one that involves indexical beliefs. I agree with this idea. |
| 22747 | A man walking backwards on a forwards-moving ship is moving in a fixed place [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: If a ship moves forward and a man carries a rod backwards on it, then it is possible for an object to move without quitting its place. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], II.056) | |
| A reaction: [summary of a verbose paragraph] The point is that you cannot define movement as change of place (contrary to Russell's proposal!). The concept of a place seems to be relative. Walking on a treadmill. |
| 22749 | Time doesn't end with the Universe, because tensed statements about destruction remain true [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: It is absurd to say that when the Universe is destroyed time does not exist; for the statement that it was destroyed once and that it is being destroyed are indicative of times. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], II.188) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing. He takes it that a proposition can be true even though nothing exists. This is not merely an affirmation of the tensed A-series view of time, but he even offers tenses as evidence that the A-series is correct. That time could cease was a view. |
| 22750 | Time is divisible, into past, present and future [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Time cannot be indivisible, since it is divided into past, present and future. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], II.193) | |
| A reaction: Does the fact that you can name the parts of something prove that it is divisible? Do electrons have left and right-hand sides? |
| 22742 | Socrates either dies when he exists (before his death) or when he doesn't (after his death) [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Socrates either dies when existing, or when not existing. …He does not die when he exists, for he is alive, and he does not die when he has died, for then he will be dying twice, which is absurd. So then, Socrates does not die. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.269) | |
| A reaction: A nice dramatisation of a major dilemma. The present moment is just the boundary between the past and the future, and so has no magnitude, and hence nothing can occur during the present. Perhaps my favourite philosophical dilemma. |
| 22751 | If the present is just the limit of the past or the future, it can't exist because they don't exist [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: If the present is the limit of the past, and the limit of the past has passed away together with that of which it is the limit, the present no longer exists. And if the present begins the future, which doesn't exist, the present does not yet exist. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], II.201) | |
| A reaction: If I mark a line on the ground where the wall will begin, the limit seems prior to the object. The gun starts the race, but is not part of it. That said, I cannot think of any more mysterious entity than the present moment. It isn't a line or a bang. |
| 22730 | All men agree that God is blessed, imperishable, happy and good [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: All men have one common preconception about God, according to which he is a blessed creature and imperishable and perfect in happiness and receptive of nothing evil. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.033) | |
| A reaction: He observes this after he has pointed the enormous variety of religious beliefs. He offers this unanimity as a reason to believe that it is true. |
| 22739 | God must suffer to understand suffering [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: God cannot have a notion of suffering if he has not experience it. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.163) | |
| A reaction: Christians like to portray God as suffering because of his son's horrible death. We can imagine experiences we have never had, and presumably God is better at that than we are. |
| 22738 | The Divine must lack the virtues of continence and fortitude, because they are not needed [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: If the Divine is all-virtuous, it possesses all the virtues. But it does not possess the virtues of continence and fortitude unless there are certain things which are hard for God to abstain from and hard to endure. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.151) | |
| A reaction: Courage would also be unnecessary, we assume. Good people are not tempted to steal, and hence do not need to resist it. It is a mistake to attribute human virtues to the Divine. Humans lack the virtues of a good frog. |
| 22734 | God is defended by agreement, order, absurdity of denying God, and refutations [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Arguments for God have four modes: from universal agreement, from the orderly arrangement of the universe, from the absurd consequences of denying God, and from undermining the opposing arguments. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.060) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The loss of status of the argument from universal agreement has had a huge influence. We now realise that a very wide consensus is no guarantee of truth in anything. |
| 22736 | God's sensations imply change, and hence perishing, which is absurd, so there is no such God [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: If God has sensation he is altered, …so he is receptive of change, including change for the worse. If so, he is also perishable, but that is absurd; therefore it is absurd also to claim that God exists. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.146) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] It is certainly paradoxical to think that God is eternal and unchanging, but also capable of perception and thought, which necessitate change. Some theological ingenuity is needed to explain this. |
| 22740 | God without virtue is absurd, but God's virtues will be better than God [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: If the Divine exists it either has or has not virtue. If it has not it is base and unhappy, which is absurd. But if it has it, there will exist something which is better than God, just as a virtue of a horse is better than the horse itself. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.176) | |
| A reaction: It is obviously better to think of a virtue as some mode of a thing, rather than as a separate attachment. This is an ontological argument, because it is inferred from the concept of God. |
| 22735 | The original substance lacked motion or shape, and was given these by a cause [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: They say that the substance of existing things being of itself motionless and shapeless must be put in motion and shape by some cause. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.075) | |
| A reaction: Interestingly, Sextus doesn't seem to think that the existence of the original substance also needs a cause. This substance sounds like a relative of Aristotle's Prime Matter. The source of motion isn't really a 'design' argument. |
| 22732 | The perfections of God were extrapolations from mankind [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: It is said that …the idea that God is eternal and imperishable and perfect in happiness was introduced by way of transference from mankind. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.045) | |
| A reaction: This view is found in Hume, and in Feuerbach. I presume 'transference' means extrapolation and idealisation. If God exists, we may have no option but to think of God anthropomorphically. |
| 22728 | Gods were invented as watchers of people's secret actions [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: It is asserted that those who first led mankind …invented gods as watchers of all the sinful and righteous acts of men, so that none should dare to do wrong even in secret. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.016) | |
| A reaction: Sextus is a sceptic about everything, so this scepticism about the gods is nothing special. I'm not sure if this is why the gods were invented, but it seems to be the main role assigned to God by the Christian church, as the basis of religious morality. |
| 22737 | An incorporeal God could do nothing, and a bodily god would perish, so there is no God [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: The Divine is not incorporeal, since that is inanimate and insensitive and incapable of any action; nor is it a body, since that is subject to change and perishable; so the Divine does not exist. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.151) | |
| A reaction: I find this quite persuasive. An incorporeal God has to be ascribed magical powers in order to interact with what is corporeal. A corporeal God is subject to entropy and all the depredations of the physical world. |
| 22731 | It is mad to think that what is useful to us, like lakes and rivers, are gods [Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: To suppose that lakes and rivers, and whatsoever else is of a nature to be useful to us, are gods surpasses the height of lunacy. | |
| From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Physicists (two books) [c.180], I.040) | |
| A reaction: He also points out the what is useful to us decays and changes. Sextus lived in a time when monotheism was becoming dominant. |