7 ideas
| 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. |
| 19540 | Don't confuse justified belief with justified believers [Dougherty/Rysiew] |
| Full Idea: Much theorizing about justification conflates issues of justified belief with issues of justified/blameless believers. | |
| From: Dougherty,T/Rysiew,P (What is Knowledge-First Epistemology? [2014], p.12) | |
| A reaction: [They cite Kent Bach 1985] Presumably the only thing that really justifies a belief is the truth, or the actual facts. You could then say 'p is a justified belief, though no one actually believes it'. E.g. the number of stars is odd. |
| 19539 | If knowledge is unanalysable, that makes justification more important [Dougherty/Rysiew] |
| Full Idea: If knowledge is indeed unanalyzable, that could be seen as a liberation of justification to assume importance in its own right. | |
| From: Dougherty,T/Rysiew,P (What is Knowledge-First Epistemology? [2014], p.11) | |
| A reaction: [They cite Kvanvig 2003:192 and Greco 2010:9-] See Scruton's Idea 3897. I suspect that we should just give up discussing 'knowledge', which is a woolly and uninformative term, and focus on where the real epistemological action is. |
| 7522 | A full neural account of qualia will give new epistemic access to them, beyond private experience [Churchlands] |
| Full Idea: When the hidden neurophysiological structure of qualia (if there is any) gets revealed by unfolding research, then we will automatically gain a new epistemic access to qualia, beyond each person's native and exclusive capacity for internal discrimination. | |
| From: Churchland / Churchland (Recent Work on Consciousness [1997]) | |
| A reaction: Carefully phrased and hard to deny, but something is impenetrable. What experience does an insect have when it encounters ultra-violet light? Nothing remotely interesting about their qualia is likely to emerge from the study of insect brains. |
| 7521 | It is question-begging to assume that qualia are totally simple, hence irreducible [Churchlands] |
| Full Idea: One of the crucial premises of the antireductionists - concerning the intrinsic, nonrelational, metaphysical simplicity of our sensory qualia - is a question-begging and unsupported assumption. | |
| From: Churchland / Churchland (Recent Work on Consciousness [1997]) | |
| A reaction: This is a key point for reductionists, with emphasis on the sheer numbers of connections involved in a simple quale (I estimate a billion involved in one small patch of red). |
| 7523 | The qualia Hard Problem is easy, in comparison with the co-ordination of mental states [Churchlands] |
| Full Idea: The so-called Hard Problem (of qualia) appears to be one of the easiest, in comparison with the problems of short-term memory, fluid and directable attention, the awake state vs sleep, and the unity of consciousness. | |
| From: Churchland / Churchland (Recent Work on Consciousness [1997]) | |
| A reaction: Most of their version of the Hard Problems centre on personal identity, and the centralised co-ordination of mental events. I am inclined to agree with them. Worriers about qualia should think more about the complexity of systems of neurons. |
| 19538 | Entailment is modelled in formal semantics as set inclusion (where 'mammals' contains 'cats') [Dougherty/Rysiew] |
| Full Idea: Entailment is modelled in formal semantics as set inclusion. 'Cat' entails 'mammal' because the cats are a subset of the mammals. | |
| From: Dougherty,T/Rysiew,P (What is Knowledge-First Epistemology? [2014], p.10) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that this was only one type of entailment. 'Travelling to Iceland entails flying'. Travelling includes flying, the reverse of cats/mammals, to a very complex set-theoretic account is needed. Interesting. |