52 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'. |
| 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. |
| 7785 | The use of plurals doesn't commit us to sets; there do not exist individuals and collections [Boolos] |
| Full Idea: We should abandon the idea that the use of plural forms commits us to the existence of sets/classes… Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. There are not two sorts of things in the world, individuals and collections. | |
| From: George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984]), quoted by Henry Laycock - Object | |
| A reaction: The problem of quantifying over sets is notoriously difficult. Try http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/object/index.html. |
| 10405 | In the iterative conception of sets, they form a natural hierarchy [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: In the iterative conception of sets, they form a natural hierarchy. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.1) |
| 10699 | Does a bowl of Cheerios contain all its sets and subsets? [Boolos] |
| Full Idea: Is there, in addition to the 200 Cheerios in a bowl, also a set of them all? And what about the vast number of subsets of Cheerios? It is haywire to think that when you have some Cheerios you are eating a set. What you are doing is: eating the Cheerios. | |
| From: George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984], p.72) | |
| A reaction: In my case Boolos is preaching to the converted. I am particularly bewildered by someone (i.e. Quine) who believes that innumerable sets exist while 'having a taste for desert landscapes' in their ontology. |
| 10225 | Monadic second-order logic might be understood in terms of plural quantifiers [Boolos, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Boolos has proposed an alternative understanding of monadic, second-order logic, in terms of plural quantifiers, which many philosophers have found attractive. | |
| From: report of George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984]) by Stewart Shapiro - Philosophy of Mathematics 3.5 |
| 10736 | Boolos showed how plural quantifiers can interpret monadic second-order logic [Boolos, by Linnebo] |
| Full Idea: In an indisputable technical result, Boolos showed how plural quantifiers can be used to interpret monadic second-order logic. | |
| From: report of George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984], Intro) by Øystein Linnebo - Plural Quantification Exposed Intro |
| 10780 | Any sentence of monadic second-order logic can be translated into plural first-order logic [Boolos, by Linnebo] |
| Full Idea: Boolos discovered that any sentence of monadic second-order logic can be translated into plural first-order logic. | |
| From: report of George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984], §1) by Øystein Linnebo - Plural Quantification Exposed p.74 |
| 10697 | Identity is clearly a logical concept, and greatly enhances predicate calculus [Boolos] |
| Full Idea: Indispensable to cross-reference, lacking distinctive content, and pervading thought and discourse, 'identity' is without question a logical concept. Adding it to predicate calculus significantly increases the number and variety of inferences possible. | |
| From: George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984], p.54) | |
| A reaction: It is not at all clear to me that identity is a logical concept. Is 'existence' a logical concept? It seems to fit all of Boolos's criteria? I say that all he really means is that it is basic to thought, but I'm not sure it drives the reasoning process. |
| 10407 | Logical Form explains differing logical behaviour of similar sentences [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: 'Logical Form' is a technical notion motivated by the observation that sentences with a similar surface structure may exhibit quite different logical behaviour. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: [Swoyer goes on to give some nice examples] The tricky question is whether each sentence has ONE logical form. Pragmatics warns us of the dangers. One needs to check numerous inferences from a given sentences, not just one. |
| 13671 | Second-order quantifiers are just like plural quantifiers in ordinary language, with no extra ontology [Boolos, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Boolos proposes that second-order quantifiers be regarded as 'plural quantifiers' are in ordinary language, and has developed a semantics along those lines. In this way they introduce no new ontology. | |
| From: report of George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984]) by Stewart Shapiro - Foundations without Foundationalism 7 n32 | |
| A reaction: This presumably has to treat simple predicates and relations as simply groups of objects, rather than having platonic existence, or something. |
| 10267 | We should understand second-order existential quantifiers as plural quantifiers [Boolos, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Standard second-order existential quantifiers pick out a class or a property, but Boolos suggests that they be understood as a plural quantifier, like 'there are objects' or 'there are people'. | |
| From: report of George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984]) by Stewart Shapiro - Philosophy of Mathematics 7.4 | |
| A reaction: This idea has potential application to mathematics, and Lewis (1991, 1993) 'invokes it to develop an eliminative structuralism' (Shapiro). |
| 10698 | Plural forms have no more ontological commitment than to first-order objects [Boolos] |
| Full Idea: Abandon the idea that use of plural forms must always be understood to commit one to the existence of sets of those things to which the corresponding singular forms apply. | |
| From: George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984], p.66) | |
| A reaction: It seems to be an open question whether plural quantification is first- or second-order, but it looks as if it is a rewriting of the first-order. |
| 7806 | Boolos invented plural quantification [Boolos, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Boolos virtually patented the new device of plural quantification. | |
| From: report of George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984]) by José A. Benardete - Logic and Ontology | |
| A reaction: This would be 'there are some things such that...' |
| 10421 | Supervenience is nowadays seen as between properties, rather than linguistic [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is sometimes taken to be a relationship between two fragments of language, but it is increasingly taken to be a relationship between pairs of families of properties. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.17) | |
| A reaction: If supervenience is a feature of the world, rather than of our descriptions, then it cries out for explanation, just as any other regularities do. Personally I would have thought the best explanation of the supervenience of mind and body was obvious. |
| 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. |
| 10410 | Anti-realists can't explain different methods to measure distance [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Anti-realists theories of measurement (like operationalism) cannot explain how we can use different methods to measure the same thing (e.g. lengths and distances in cosmology, geology, histology and atomic physics). | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Swoyer says that the explanation is that measurement aims at objective properties, the same in each of these areas. Quite good. |
| 10700 | First- and second-order quantifiers are two ways of referring to the same things [Boolos] |
| Full Idea: Ontological commitment is carried by first-order quantifiers; a second-order quantifier needn't be taken to be a first-order quantifier in disguise, having special items, collections, as its range. They are two ways of referring to the same things. | |
| From: George Boolos (To be is to be the value of a variable.. [1984], p.72) | |
| A reaction: If second-order quantifiers are just a way of referring, then we can see first-order quantifiers that way too, so we could deny 'objects'. |
| 10416 | Can properties have parts? [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Can properties have parts? | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: If powers are more fundamental than properties, with the latter often being complexes of the underlying powers, then yes they do. But powers don't. Presumably whatever is fundamental shouldn't have parts. Why? |
| 10399 | If a property such as self-identity can only be in one thing, it can't be a universal [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Some properties may not be universals, if they can only be exemplified by one thing, such as 'being identical with Socrates'. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000]) | |
| A reaction: I think it is absurd to think that self-identity is an intrinsic 'property', possessed by everything. That a=a is a convenience for logicians, meaning nothing in the world. And it is relational. The sharing of properties is indeed what needs explanation. |
| 10417 | There are only first-order properties ('red'), and none of higher-order ('coloured') [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: 'Elementarism' is the view that there are first-order properties, but that there are no properties of any higher-order. There are first-order properties like various shades of red, but there is no higher-order property, like 'being a colour'. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Bergmann 1968] Interesting. Presumably the programme is naturalistic (and hence congenial to me), and generalisations about properties are conceptual, while the properties themselves are natural. |
| 10413 | The best-known candidate for an identity condition for properties is necessary coextensiveness [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: The best-known candidate for an identity condition for properties is necessary coextensiveness. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 6) | |
| A reaction: The necessity (in all possible worlds) covers renates and cordates. It is hard to see how one could assert the necessity without some deeper explanation. What makes us deny that actually coextensive renates and cordates have different properties? |
| 10402 | Various attempts are made to evade universals being wholly present in different places [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: The worry that a single thing could be wholly present in widely separated locations has led to trope theory, to the claim that properties are not located in their instances, or to the view that this treats universals as if they were individuals. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: I find it dispiriting to come to philosophy in the late twentieth century and have to inherit such a ridiculous view as that there are things that are 'wholly present' in many places. |
| 10400 | Conceptualism says words like 'honesty' refer to concepts, not to properties [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Conceptualists urge that words like 'honesty', which might seem to refer to properties, really refer to concepts. A few contemporary philosophers have defended conceptualism, and recent empirical work bears on it, but the view is no longer common. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: ..and that's all Swoyer says about this very interesting view! He only cites Cocchiarella 1986 Ch.3. The view leaves a lot of work to be done in explaining how nature is, and how our concepts connect to it, and arise in response to it. |
| 10403 | If properties are abstract objects, then their being abstract exemplifies being abstract [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: If properties are abstract objects, then the property of being abstract should itself exemplify the property of being abstract. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: Swoyer links this observation with Plato's views on self-predication, and his Third Man Argument (which I bet originated with Aristotle in the Academy!). Do we have a regress of objects, as well as a regress of properties? |
| 10406 | One might hope to reduce possible worlds to properties [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: One might hope to reduce possible worlds to properties. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Zalta 1983 4.2, and Forrest 1986] I think we are dealing with nothing more than imagined possibilities, which are inferred from our understanding of the underlying 'powers' of the actual world (expressed as 'properties'). |
| 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. |
| 10404 | Extreme empiricists can hardly explain anything [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Extreme empiricists wind up unable to explain much of anything. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the major problem for empiricism, but I am not sure why inference to the best explanation should not be part of a sensible empirical approach. Thinking laws are just 'descriptions of regularities' illustrates the difficulty. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 10408 | Intensions are functions which map possible worlds to sets of things denoted by an expression [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Intensions are functions that assign a set to the expression at each possible world, ..so the semantic value of 'red' is the function that maps each possible world to the set of things in that world that are red. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: I am suddenly deeply alienated from this mathematical logicians' way of talking about what 'red' means! We need more psychology, not less. We call things red if we imagine them as looking red. Is imagination a taboo in analytical philosophy? |
| 10409 | Research suggests that concepts rely on typical examples [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Recent empirical work on concepts says that many concepts have graded membership, and stress the importance of phenomena like typicality, prototypes, and exemplars. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Rorsch 1978 as the start of this] I say the mind is a database, exactly corresponding to tables, fields etc. Prototypes sound good as the way we identify a given category. Universals are the 'typical' examples labelling areas (e.g. goat). |
| 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. |
| 10401 | The F and G of logic cover a huge range of natural language combinations [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: All sorts of combinations of copulas ('is') with verbs, adverbs, adjectives, determiners, common nouns, noun phrases and prepositional phrases go over into the familiar Fs and Gs of standard logical notation. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice warning of how misleading logic can be when trying to understand how we think about reality. Montague semantics is an attempt to tackle the problem. Numbers as adjectives are a clear symptom of the difficulties. |
| 10420 | Maybe a proposition is just a property with all its places filled [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Some say we can think of a proposition as a limiting case of a property, as when the two-place property '___ loves ___' can become the zero-placed property, or proposition 'that Sam loves Darla'. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.6) | |
| A reaction: If you had a prior commitment to the idea that reality largely consists of bundles of properties, I suppose you might find this tempting. |
| 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. |
| 10412 | If laws are mere regularities, they give no grounds for future prediction [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: If laws were mere regularities, then the fact that observed Fs have been Gs would give us no reason to conclude that those Fs we haven't encountered will also be Gs. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: I take this simple point to be very powerful. No amount of regularity gives grounds for asserting future patterns - one only has Humean habits. Causal mechanisms are what we are after. |
| 10411 | Two properties can have one power, and one property can have two powers [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: If properties are identical when they confer the same capacities on their instances, different properties seem able to bestow the same powers (e.g. force), and one property can bestow different powers (attraction or repulsion). | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Interesting, but possibly a misunderstanding. Powers are basic, and properties are combinations of powers. A 'force' isn't a basic power, it is a consequence of various properties. Relational behaviours are also not basic powers, which are the source. |