5 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. |
| 4760 | Belief aims at knowledge (rather than truth), and mere believing is a kind of botched knowing [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowing is the best kind of believing. Mere believing is a kind of botched knowing. In short, belief aims at knowledge (not just truth). | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits [2000], §1.5) | |
| A reaction: The difference between aiming at truth and aiming at knowledge has to be in the justificiation, so beliefs aim to be justified. Believers always aim at truth, but they can be strikingly relaxed about justification. |
| 19512 | Don't analyse knowledge; use knowledge to analyse other concepts in epistemology [Williamson, by DeRose] |
| Full Idea: Williamson says that instead of being viewed as a concept to be analysed, knowledge should be seen as something useful in the analysis of all sorts of other concepts to epistemology - and to philosophy of mind as well. | |
| From: report of Timothy Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits [2000]) by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.8 | |
| A reaction: I just don't believe this, because knowledge is obviously a complex state of mind, which invites breaking it down into ingredients. How could knowledge possibly be prior to truth? |
| 10486 | If we are rebuilding our ship at sea, we should jettison some cargo [Boolos on Neurath] |
| Full Idea: If we are sailors rebuilding our ship plank by plank on the open sea, then I know of some cargo we might want to jettison. | |
| From: comment on Otto Neurath (Protocol Sentences [1932]) by George Boolos - Must We Believe in Set Theory? p.128 | |
| A reaction: This may just be an assertion of Ockham's Razor, but the interest is that the Neurath image demands internal standards of economy etc, whereas reality itself seems to be a right mess. |
| 8485 | We must always rebuild our ship on the open sea; we can't reconstruct it properly in dry-dock [Neurath] |
| Full Idea: We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship out on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in a dry-dock and reconstruct it there out of the best materials. | |
| From: Otto Neurath (Protocol Sentences [1932]), quoted by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: This is the classic statement of the anti-foundationalist picture of knowledge. It is often quoted by Quine. A tricky issue. I have a lot of sympathy with Bonjour's rationalist foundationalism. |