50 ideas
| 6979 | Serious metaphysics cares about entailment between sentences [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Serious metaphysics is committed to views about which sentences entail which other sentences. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This does not say that metaphysics is only about entailment, or (even worse) only about sentences. Put another way: if we wish to be wise, we must study the implications of our beliefs. Yes. |
| 6980 | Conceptual analysis studies whether one story is made true by another story [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual analysis is the very business of addressing when and whether a story told in one vocabulary is made true by one told in some allegedly more fundamental vocabulary. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This is a view of linguistic analysis as focusing on entailments rather than on usage or truth conditions. If philosophy is the attempt to acquire a totally consistent set of beliefs (a plausible view), then Jackson is right. |
| 6983 | Intuitions about possibilities are basic to conceptual analysis [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Intuitions about possibilities are the bread and butter of conceptual analysis. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Hence the centrality of the debate over conceivability and possibility. Which seems to reduce to the relationship between 'intuition' and 'imagination'. Imagination is a very weak guide to what is possible, and intuition is very uncertain.... |
| 14707 | Conceptual analysis is needed to establish that metaphysical reductions respect original meanings [Jackson, by Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: On the empiricist view of meaning, the relevance of conceptual analysis to metaphysics is that it establishes that a putative reduction respects the original meaning of the target expression. | |
| From: report of Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], p.28) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics 2.2.4 |
| 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. |
| 7005 | Something can only have a place in a preferred account of things if it is entailed by the account [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: The one and only way of having a place in an account told in some set of preferred terms is by being entailed by that account - a view I will refer to as the entry by entailment thesis. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: How do we distinguish between the original account, which seems to be just accepted, and the additions which accrue because they are entailed by it? Why does this club distinguish members from guests? |
| 6994 | Truth supervenes on being [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Truth supervenes on being. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: A nice slogan for those of us who find the word 'truth' to be meaningful. |
| 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. |
| 6984 | Smooth reductions preserve high-level laws in the lower level [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: In a 'smooth' reduction the laws of the reduced theory (thermodynamics of gases) are pretty much preserved in (and isomorphic with) the corresponding laws in the reducing theory (molecular or kinetic theory of gases). | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Are the 'laws' of weather (e.g. linking humidity, temperature and pressure to rainfall) preserved at the level of physics? One might say that they are not preserved, but they are not lost either (they just fade away). Contradictions would be worrying. |
| 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. |
| 6978 | Baldness is just hair distribution, but the former is indeterminate, unlike the latter [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Baldness is a much more indeterminate matter than is hair distribution, nevetheless baldness is nothing over and above hair distribution. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], p.22) | |
| A reaction: This seems to support Williamson's view that there is no vagueness in nature, and that 'vague' is an entirely epistemological concept. |
| 6993 | Redness is a property, but only as a presentation to normal humans [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: We typically count things as red just if they have a property that interacts with normal human beings to make the object look red in such a way that their so looking counts as a presentation of the property to normal humans. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: This is Jackson's careful statement of the 'Australian' primary property view of colours. He is trying to make red a real property of objects, but personally I take the mention of 'normal' humans as a huge danger sign. Nice try, but no. See Idea 5456. |
| 6987 | We should not multiply senses of necessity beyond necessity [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: We should not multiply senses of necessity beyond necessity. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: It would be nice if there was just one sense of necessity, with the multiplication arising from the different ways in which necessities arise. In chess, checkmate is a necessity which rests on contingencies. Absolute necessities seem different. |
| 6988 | Mathematical sentences are a problem in a possible-worlds framework [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: There is notoriously a problem about what to say concerning mathematical sentences within the possible-worlds framework. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3 n25) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this concerns possible axioms and their combinations. |
| 6975 | Possible worlds could be concrete, abstract, universals, sentences, or properties [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Possible worlds might be concrete (Lewis), or abstract (Stalnaker), or structured universals (Forrest), or collections of sentences (Jeffrey), or mere combinations of properties and relations (Armstrong). | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: A helpful summary. I don't like concrete, or collections of sentences. Whatever they are, they had better be 'possible', so not any old collection or idea will do. |
| 6982 | Long arithmetic calculations show the a priori can be fallible [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: We know that being fallible and being a priori can co-exist - the results of long numerical additions are well-known examples. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: I see this realisation as a good example of progress in philosophy. Russell, who says self-evidence comes in degrees, deserves major credit. It is the key idea that once again makes rationalism respectable. |
| 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. |
| 6991 | We examine objects to determine colour; we do not introspect [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: We examine objects to determine their colour; we do not introspect. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Interesting, but the theory of secondary qualities did not arise from experience, but from a theory about what is actually going on. Compare pain appearing to be in your foot. |
| 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. |
| 6976 | In physicalism, the psychological depends on the physical, not the other way around [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism is associated with various asymmetry doctrines, most famously with the idea that the psychological depends in some sense on the physical, and not the other way around. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Sounds okay to me. Shadows depend on objects, and not the other way round. It might suggest properties depending on substances (or bare particulars), but I prefer the dependence of processes on mechanisms (waterfalls on liquid water). |
| 6986 | Is the dependence of the psychological on the physical a priori or a posteriori? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Should the necessary passage from the physical account of the world to the psychological one that physicalists are committed to, be placed in the a posteriori or the a priori basket? | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: That is, is 'the physical entails the mental' empirical or a priori? See Idea 3989. If we can at least dream of substance dualism, it is hard to see how it could be fully a priori. I think I prefer to see it as an inductive explanation. |
| 6992 | If different states can fulfil the same role, the converse must also be possible [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: It would be strange if having learnt the lesson of multiple realisability that the same role may be filled by different states, we turned around and insisted that the converse - different roles filled by the same state - is impossible. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.4 n3) | |
| A reaction: Good. The world is full of creatures who seem to enjoy the smell of decay etc. Some people (not me) like horror films. The separation of qualia and role leaves type-type physicalism as a possibility. Survival needs similar roles, not similar qualia. |
| 6996 | Folk psychology covers input, internal role, and output [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Folk psychology has a tripartite nature, with input clauses, internal role clauses, and output clauses. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Interesting, particularly that folk psychology refers to internal roles, or attempts to explain what is going on inside the 'black box'. The folk have collectively worked out a standard flow diagram for human thought. |
| 6977 | Egocentric or de se content seems to be irreducibly so [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: I have been convinced by arguments (e.g. of Perry, Castañeda and Lewis) that egocentric or de se content is irreducibly so. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This is associated with the use of indexicals (like 'I' and 'now') in language. Quine disagrees, and should not be written off. Any theory of content, concepts, meaning etc. must clearly taken account of such subjective language. |
| 6990 | Keep distinct the essential properties of water, and application conditions for the word 'water' [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: My guess is that objectors to the deflationary account of the Twin Earth parable are confusing the essential properties of water with the question of what is essential for being water. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: That is, we must distinguish between the actual ontology of water's properties and the conditions under which we (in our society) apply the word 'water'. Interesting. The latter issue, though, might push us back towards internalism... |
| 6985 | Analysis is finding necessary and sufficient conditions by studying possible cases [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual analysis is sometimes understood as the business of finding necessary and sufficient conditions by the method of possible cases. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Some (e.g. Stich) reject this, but it seems to me undeniable that the procedure can be very illuminating, even if it is never totally successful. Jackson prefers to see analysis as the study of entailments between stories about the world. |
| 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. |
| 6995 | Successful predication supervenes on nature [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Successful predication supervenes on nature. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: A nice slogan, but it is in danger of being a tautology. If I say x and y 'are my favourites/are interesting', is that 'successful' predication? Is 'Juliet is the sun' unsuccessful? |
| 6989 | I can understand "He has a beard", without identifying 'he', and hence the truth conditions [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: If I hear someone say "He has a beard", and I don't know whether it is Jackson, Jones, or someone else, I don't know which proposition is being expressed in the sense of not knowing the conditions under which what is said is true. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: This is the neatest and simplest problem I have encountered for Davidson's truth-conditions account of meaning. However, we probably just say that we understand the sense but not the reference. The strict-and-literal but not contextual meaning. |
| 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. |
| 6998 | Folk morality does not clearly distinguish between doing and allowing [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: We have, it seems to me, currently no clear sense of the place and rationale of the distinction between doing and allowing in folk morality. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Does this mean that philosophers should endeavour to appear on television in order to improve folk morality, so that Jackson, back at the ranch, can then infer the meanings of moral terms from the new improved version? |
| 6997 | Moral functionalism says moral terms get their meaning from their role in folk morality [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: Moral functionalism is the view that the meanings of moral terms are given by their place in the network of input, internal clauses, and output that makes up folk psychology. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Jackson considers this enough to support a cognitivist view of morality. In assuming that there is something stable called 'folk morality' he seems to be ignoring questions about cultural relativism. |
| 7000 | Which are prior - thin concepts like right, good, ought; or thick concepts like kindness, equity etc.? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: 'Centralists' (e.g. Bernard Williams) say thin ethical concepts (right, good, ought) are conceptually fundamental; 'non-centralists' (e.g. Susan Hurley) say that such concepts are not conceptually prior to kindness, equity and the like. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: My immediate intuition is to side with Susan Hurley, since morality grows out of immediate relationships, not out of intellectual principles and theoretical generalisations. This would go with particularist views of virtue theory. |
| 6999 | It is hard to justify the huge difference in our judgements of abortion and infanticide [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: We allow that abortion is permissible in many circumstances, but infanticide is hardly ever permissible, and yet it is hard to justify this disparity in moral judgement in the sense of finding the relevant difference. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics [1998], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: The implications of this are tough to face. A foetus is (maybe) just not as important as a new-born babe - and so a new-born babe is of less importance than a five-year old. Birth is (or was) a hugely dangerous hurdle to be cleared. |
| 3535 | All observable causes are merely epiphenomena [Kim] |
| Full Idea: All causal relations involving observable phenomena - all causal relations from daily experience - are cases of epiphenomenal causation. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Epiphenomenal and supervenient causation [1984], §2) |