3 ideas
| 20947 | Thoughts are learnt through words, so language shows the limits and shape of our knowledge [Herder] |
| Full Idea: If it is true that we cannot think without thoughts, and that we learn to think through words: then language gives the whole of human knowledge its limits and outline. | |
| From: Johann Gottfried Herder (On Recent German Literature. Fragments [1767], p.373), quoted by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy | |
| A reaction: Deomonstrating that Frege's famous 1884 'linguistic turn', immortalised by Dummett, was actually the continuation of a long focus on language in German philosophy. Non-verbal animals very obviously think. |
| 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. |
| 4398 | An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either). | |
| From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro | |
| A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky. |