41 ideas
| 6267 | A culture needs to admit that knowledge is more extensive than just 'science' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The acknowledgement that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of 'science' seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A very nice remark, with which I intuitively agree, but then you are left with the problem of explaining how something can qualify as knowledge when it can't pass the stringent tests of science. How wide to we spread, and why? |
| 6272 | 'True' and 'refers' cannot be made scientically precise, but are fundamental to science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Some non-scientific knowledge is presupposed by science; for example, I have been arguing that 'refers' and 'true' cannot be made scientifically precise; yet truth is a fundamental term in logic - a precise science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: We might ask whether we 'know' what 'true' and 'refers' mean, as opposed to being able to use them. If their usage doesn't count as knowledge, then we could still end up with all actual knowledge being somehow 'scientific'. |
| 19504 | My modus ponens might be your modus tollens [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: One philosopher's modus ponens is another philosopher's modus tollens. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§2) | |
| A reaction: [Anyone know the originator of this nice thought?] You say A is true, and A proves B, so B is true. I reply that if A proves something as daft as B, then so much the worse for A. Ain't it the truth? |
| 6276 | 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: The word 'warranted' seems to be ambiguous in modern philosophy. See Idea 6150. There seem to be internalist and externalist versions. It seems clear to say that a belief could be well-justified and yet false. |
| 6266 | We need the correspondence theory of truth to understand language and science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A correspondence theory of truth is needed to understand how language works, and how science works. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Putnam retreated from this position to a more pragmatic one later on, but all my sympathies are with the present view, despite being repeatedly told by modern philosophers that I am wrong. See McGinn (Idea 6085) and Searle (Idea 3508). |
| 6277 | Correspondence between concepts and unconceptualised reality is impossible [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The great nineteenth century argument against the correspondence theory of truth was that one cannot think of truth as correspondence to facts (or 'reality') because one would need to compare concepts directly with unconceptualised reality. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the criticism was offered by idealists, who preferred a coherence theory. The defence is to say that there is a confusion here between a concept and the contents of a concept. The contents of a concept are designed to be facts. |
| 6264 | In Tarski's definition, you understand 'true' if you accept the notions of the object language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Anyone who accepts the notions of whatever object language is in question - and this can be chosen arbitrarily - can also understand 'true' as defined by Tarski for that object language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Thus if we say "'snow is white' is true iff snow is white", then if you 'accept the notion' that snow is white in English, you understand what 'true' means. This seems to leave you with the meaning of 'snow is white' being its truth conditions. |
| 6265 | Tarski has given a correct account of the formal logic of 'true', but there is more to the concept [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What Tarski has done is to give us a perfectly correct account of the formal logic of the concept 'true', but the formal logic of the concept is not all there is to the notion of truth. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find this refreshing. A lot of modern philosophers seem to think that truth is no longer an interesting philosophical topic, because deflationary accounts have sidelined it, but I take the concept to be at the heart of metaphysics. |
| 6269 | Only Tarski has found a way to define 'true' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: There is only one way anyone knows how to define 'true' and that is Tarski's way. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.5) | |
| A reaction: However, Davidson wrote a paper called 'On the Folly of Trying to Define Truth', which seems to reject even Tarski. Also bear in mind Putnam's earlier remark (Idea 6265) that there is more to truth than Tarski's definition. Just take 'true' as primitive. |
| 9406 | A class is natural when everybody can spot further members of it [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: To say that a class is natural is to say that when some of its members are shown to people they pick out others without hesitation and in agreement. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: He concedes a number of problems with his view, but I admire his attempt to at least begin to distinguish the natural (real!) classes from the ersatz ones. A mention of causal powers would greatly improve his story. |
| 6280 | Realism is a theory, which explains the convergence of science and the success of language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Realism is an empirical theory; it explains the convergence of scientific theories, where earlier theories are often limiting cases of later theories (which is why theoretical terms preserve their reference); and it explains the success of language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: I agree. Personally, I think of Plato's Theory of Forms and all religions as empirical theories. The response from anti-realists is generally to undermine confidence in the evidence which these 'empirical theories' are said to explain. |
| 15730 | Extreme nominalists say all classification is arbitrary convention [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: Pure, extreme nominalism sees all classification as the product of arbitrary convention. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure what the word 'arbitrary' is doing there. Nominalists are not daft, and if they can classify any way they like, they are not likely to choose an 'arbitrary' system. Pragmatism tells the right story here. |
| 15728 | The naturalness of a class depends as much on the observers as on the objects [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: The naturalness of a class depends as essentially on the nature of the observers who classify as it does on the nature of the objects that they classify. ...It depends on our perceptual apparatus, and on our relatively mutable needs and interests. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: This seems to translate 'natural' as 'natural for us', which is not much use to scientists, who spend quite a lot of effort combating folk wisdom. Do desirable sports cars constitute a natural class? |
| 9407 | Properties imply natural classes which can be picked out by everybody [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: To say there are properties is to say there are natural classes, classes introduction to some of whose members enables people to pick out others without hesitation and in agreement. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: Aristotle would like this approach, but it doesn't find many friends among modern logician/philosophers. We should go on to ask why people agree on these things. Causal powers will then come into it. |
| 15729 | Uninstantiated properties must be defined using the instantiated ones [Quinton] |
| Full Idea: Properties that have no concrete instances must be defined in terms of those that have. | |
| From: Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], 9 'Nat') | |
| A reaction: I wonder what the dodo used to smell like? |
| 8520 | An individual is a union of a group of qualities and a position [Quinton, by Campbell,K] |
| Full Idea: Quinton proposes that an individual is a union of a group of qualities and a position. | |
| From: report of Anthony Quinton (The Nature of Things [1973], Pt I) by Keith Campbell - The Metaphysic of Abstract Particulars §5 | |
| A reaction: This seems the obvious defence of a bundle account of objects against the charge that indiscernibles would have to be identical. It introduces, however, 'positions' into the ontology, but maybe that price must be paid. Materialism needs space. |
| 19503 | An improbable lottery win can occur in a nearby possible world [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: Low probability events such as lottery wins can occur in nearby possible worlds. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.n2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to ruin any chance of mapping probabilities and counterfactuals in the neat model of nested possible worlds (like an onion). [Lewis must have thought of this, surely? - postcards, please] |
| 19505 | Moore begs the question, or just offers another view, or uses 'know' wrongly [Pritchard,D, by PG] |
| Full Idea: The three main objections to Moore's common-sense refutation of scepticism is that it either begs the question, or it just offers a rival view instead of a refutation, or it uses 'know' in a conversationally inappropriate way. | |
| From: report of Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§2) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: [I deserve applause for summarising two pages of Pritchard's wordy stuff so neatly] |
| 6284 | If a tautology is immune from revision, why would that make it true? [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: If we held, say, 'All unmarried men are unmarried' as absolutely immune from revision, why would this make it true? | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question. Like most American philosophers, Putnam accepts Quine's attack on the unrevisability of analytic truths. His point here is that defenders of analytic truths are probably desperate to preserve basic truths, but it won't work. |
| 19499 | We can have evidence for seeing a zebra, but no evidence for what is entailed by that [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: The closure principle forces us to regard Zula as knowing that what she is looking at is not a cleverly disguised mule, and yet she doesn't appear to have any supporting evidence for this knowledge. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§3) | |
| A reaction: [Zula observes a zebra in the zoo] Entailment is a different type of justification from perception. If we add fallibilism to the mix, then fallibility can increase as we pursue a string of entailments. But proper logic, of course, should not be fallible. |
| 19500 | Favouring: an entailment will give better support for the first belief than reason to deny the second [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: The Favouring Principle says that if S knows two things, and that the first entails the second, then S has better evidence in support of her belief in the first than she has for denying the second. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§3) | |
| A reaction: [his version is full of Greek letters, but who wants that stuff?] Pritchard concludes that if you believe in the closure principle then you should deny the favouring principle. |
| 19502 | Maybe knowledge just needs relevant discriminations among contrasting cases [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: According to the 'contrastivist' proposal knowledge is to be understood as essentially involving discrimination, such that knowing a proposition boils down to having the relevant discriminatory capacities. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§6) | |
| A reaction: Pritchard says this isn't enough, and we must also to be aware of supporting favouring evidence. I would focus on the concept of coherence, even for simple perceptual knowledge. If I see a hawk in England, that's fine. What if I 'see' a vulture? |
| 19498 | Epistemic internalism usually says justification must be accessible by reflection [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: Typically, internal epistemic conditions are characterised in terms of a reflective access requirement. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 1.§6) | |
| A reaction: If your justification is straightforwardly visual, it is unclear what the difference would be between seeing the thing and having reflective access to the seeing. |
| 19506 | Externalism is better than internalism in dealing with radical scepticism [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: Standard epistemic internalism faces an uphill struggle when it comes to dealing with radical scepticism, which points in favour of epistemic externalist neo-Mooreanism. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§3) | |
| A reaction: I incline towards internalism. I deal with scepticism by being a fallibilist, and adding 'but you never know' to every knowledge claim, and then getting on with life. |
| 19496 | Disjunctivism says perceptual justification must be both factual and known by the agent [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: Slogan for disjunctivism: perceptual knowledge is paradigmatically constituted by a true belief whose epistemic support is both factive (i.e. it entails the truth of the propositions believed) and reflectively accessible to the agent. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I'm not a fan of externalism, but it could be that the factive bit achieves the knowledge, and then being able to use and answer for that knowledge may just be a bonus, and not an essential ingredient. |
| 19497 | Metaphysical disjunctivism says normal perceptions and hallucinations are different experiences [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysical disjunctivists hold that veridical perceptual experiences are not essentially the same as the experiences involved in corresponding cases involving illusion and (especially) hallucination. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 1.§4) | |
| A reaction: Metaphysical disjunctivism concerns what the experiences are; epistemological justification concerns the criteria of justification. I think. I wish Pritchard would spell things out more clearly. Indeed, I wish all philosophers would. |
| 6273 | Knowledge depends on believing others, which must be innate, as inferences are not strong enough [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Our ability to picture how people are likely to respond may well be innate; indeed, our disposition to believe what other people tell us (which is fundamental to knowledge) could hardly be an inference, as that isn’t good enough for knowledge. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: An interesting claim. There could be an intermediate situation, which is a hard-wired non-conscious inference. When dismantled, the 'innate' brain circuits for assessing testimony could turn out to work on logic and evidence. |
| 6274 | Empathy may not give knowledge, but it can give plausibility or right opinion [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Empathy with others may give less than 'Knowledge', but it gives more than mere logical or physical possibility; it gives plausibility, or (to revive Platonic terminology) it provides 'right opinion'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: See Ideas 174 and 2140 for Plato. Putnam is exploring areas of knowledge outside the limits of strict science. Behind this claim seems to lie the Principle of Charity (3971), but a gang of systematic liars (e.g. evil students) would be a problem case. |
| 19495 | Epistemic externalism struggles to capture the idea of epistemic responsibility [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: A fundamental difficulty for epistemic externalist positions is that it is hard on this view to capture any adequate notion of epistemic responsibility. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], Intro) | |
| A reaction: He never explains the 'responsibility', but I presume that would be like an expert witness in court, vouching for their knowledge. |
| 19501 | We assess error against background knowledge, but that is just what radical scepticism challenges [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: When faced with an error-possibility we can appeal to background knowledge, as long as the error-possibility does not call into question this background knowledge. The same is not true when we focus on the radical sceptical hypothesis. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§5) | |
| A reaction: [reworded] Doubting everything simultaneously just looks like a mad project. If you doubt linguistic meaning, you can't even express your doubts. |
| 19507 | Radical scepticism is merely raised, and is not a response to worrying evidence [Pritchard,D] |
| Full Idea: Crucially, radical sceptical error-possibilities are never epistemically motivated, but are instead merely raised. | |
| From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§5) | |
| A reaction: In 'The Matrix' someone sees a glitch in the software (a cat crossing a passageway), and that would have to be taken seriously. Otherwise it is a nice strategy to ask why the sceptic is raising this bizzare possibility, without evidence. |
| 17084 | You can't decide which explanations are good if you don't attend to the interest-relative aspects [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Explanation is an interest-relative notion …explanation has to be partly a pragmatic concept. To regard the 'pragmatics' of explanation as no part of the concept is to abdicate the job of figuring out what makes an explanation good. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], p. 41-2), quoted by David-Hillel Ruben - Explaining Explanation Ch 1 | |
| A reaction: I suppose this is just obvious, depending on how far you want to take the 'interest-relative' bit. If a fool is fobbed off with a trivial explanation, there must be some non-relative criterion for assessing that. |
| 6282 | Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: How can you have a theory of understanding without a meaning that requires to be understood? Personally I think about the minds of small animals when pondering this, and that seems to put reference and truth at the front of the queue. |
| 6281 | Truth conditions can't explain understanding a sentence, because that in turn needs explanation [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: You can't treat understanding a sentence as knowing its truth conditions, because it then becomes unintelligible what that knowledge in turn consists in. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: The implication, I take it, is circularity; how can you specify truth conditions if you don't understand sentences? Putnam here agrees with Dummett that verification must be involved. Something has to be taken as axiomatic in all this. |
| 6278 | We should reject the view that truth is prior to meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I am suggesting that we reject the view that truth (based on the semantic theory) is prior to meaning. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: It is a nice question which of truth or meaning has logical priority. One might start by speculating about how and why animals think. A moth attracted to flame is probably working on truth without much that could be called 'meaning'. |
| 6271 | How reference is specified is not what reference is [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A theory of how reference is specified isn't a theory of what reference is. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec V) | |
| A reaction: A simple and important point. We may achieve reference by naming, describing, grunting or pointing, but the question is, what have we achieved when we get there? |
| 6268 | The claim that scientific terms are incommensurable can be blocked if scientific terms are not descriptions [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The line of reasoning of Kuhn and Feyerabend can be blocked by arguing (as I have in various places, and as Saul Kripke has) that scientific terms are not synonymous with descriptions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the motivation for creating the causal theory of reference. See Idea 6162. We could still go back and ask whether we could block scientific relativism by rethinking how descriptions work, instead of abandoning them. |
| 6279 | A private language could work with reference and beliefs, and wouldn't need meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A language made up and used by a being who belonged to no community would have no need for such a concept as the 'meaning' of a term. To state the reference of each term and what the language speaker believes is to tell the whole story. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: A subtle response to Wittgenstein's claim (e.g. Ideas 4152,4158), but I am not sure what Putnam means. I would have thought that beliefs had to be embodied in propositions. They may not need 'meaning' quite as urgently as sentences, but still… |
| 6270 | The correct translation is the one that explains the speaker's behaviour [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What it is to be a correct translation is to be the translation that best explains the behaviour of the speaker. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec III) | |
| A reaction: This seems fairly close to Quine, but rather puzzlingly uses the word 'correct'. If our criteria of translation are purely behavioural, there is no way we can be correct after one word ('gavagai'), so at what point does it become 'correct'? |
| 6283 | Language maps the world in many ways (because it maps onto other languages in many ways) [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: We could say that the language has more than one correct way of being mapped onto the world (it must, since it has more than one way of being correctly mapped onto a language which is itself correctly mapped onto the world). | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: This spells out nicely the significance of Quine's 'indeterminacy of translation'. Others have pointed out that the fact that language maps onto world in many ways need not be anti-realist; the world is endless, and language is limited. |
| 6275 | You can't say 'most speaker's beliefs are true'; in some areas this is not so, and you can't count beliefs [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The maxim that 'most of a speaker's beliefs are true' as an a priori principle governing radical translation seems to me to go too far; first, I don't know how to count beliefs; second, most people's beliefs on some topics (philosophy) are probably false. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Putnam prefers a pragmatic view, where charity is applicable if behaviour is involved. Philosophy is too purely theoretical. The extent to which Charity should apply in philosophy seminars is a nice question, which all students should test in practice. |