37 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'. |
| 13070 | If definitions must be general, and general terms can't individuate, then Socrates can't be defined [Aquinas, by Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Socrates has no definition if definitions by their nature must be in purely general terms, and if no purely general terms can succeed in uniquely singling out this signated matter. | |
| From: report of Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], 23) by Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J - Substance and Individuation in Leibniz 1.1.2 | |
| A reaction: There seem to be two models. That general terms actually individuate the matter of Socrates, or that they cross-reference to (so to speak) define Socrates 'by elimination', as the only individual that fits. But the latter is a poor definition. |
| 11197 | The definitions expressing identity are used to sort things [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: What sorts things into their proper genus and species are the definitions that express what they are. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: This is straight from Aristotle, though Aristotle's view is a little more complex, I think. If the definitions 'express what they are', then definitions seem to specify the essence. |
| 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. |
| 11195 | If affirmative propositions express being, we affirm about what is absent [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: If being is what makes propositions true, then anything we can express in an affirmative proposition, however unreal, is said to be; so lacks and absences are, since we say that absences are opposed to presences, and blindness exists in an eye. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 11194 for the alternative Aristotelian approach to being, according to categories. Do absences and lacks have real essences, or causal properties? The absence of the sentry may cause the loss of the city. |
| 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. |
| 11201 | Properties have an incomplete essence, with definitions referring to their subject [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Incidental properties have an incomplete essence, and need to refer in their definitions to their subject, lying outside their own genus. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.93) | |
| A reaction: These are 'incidental' properties, but it is a nice question whether properties have essences. Presumably they must have if they are universals, or platonic Forms. The notion of being 'strong' can be defined without specific examples. |
| 11205 | If the form of 'human' contains 'many', Socrates isn't human; if it contains 'one', Socrates is Plato [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: If (in the Platonic view) manyness was contained in humanness it could never be one as it is in Socrates, and if oneness was part of its definition then Socrates would be Plato and the nature couldn't be realised more than once. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.100) | |
| A reaction: I suppose the reply is that since we are trying to explain one-over-many, then this unusual combination of both manyness and oneness is precisely what distinguishes forms from other ideas. |
| 13090 | The principle of diversity for corporeal substances is their matter [Aquinas, by Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: In the view of Aquinas, while substantial form is the ultimate ground of identity and difference of angels, it is matter that provides a principle of diversity in the case of corporeal substances. | |
| From: report of Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267]) by Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J - Substance and Individuation in Leibniz 5.2.3 | |
| A reaction: This is at least as good a proposal as their apatial location. There is more chance of reidentifying matter than of precisely reidentifying a spatial location. Two indistinguishable spheres remain the classic problem case (of Max Black, Idea 10195) |
| 11202 | It is by having essence that things exist [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: It is by having essence that things exist. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.94) | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 11199, which gives a fuller picture. This idea seems to suggest essence as the cause of existence, which sounds wrong. Perhaps essence is a necessary condition of existence, but it is necessary that nothing indeterminate can exist? |
| 11203 | Specific individual essence is defined by material, and generic essence is defined by form [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Specific essence differs from generic essence by being demarcated: individuals are demarcated within species by dimensionally defined material, but species within genus by a defining differentiation taken from the form. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.95) | |
| A reaction: It clearly won't be enough to define an individual just to define its material and its shape. The material might also be essential to the genus, as when defining fire. Probably not very helpful. |
| 11200 | The definition of a physical object must include the material as well as the form [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Form alone cannot be a composite substance's essence. For a thing's essence is expressed by its definition, and unless the definition of a physical substance included both form and material, the definition wouldn't differ from mathematical objects. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.93) | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of thoroughly sensible remark that you only get from the greatest philosophers. Minor philosophers fall in love with things like forms, and then try to use them to explain everything. |
| 11196 | Essence is something in common between the natures which sort things into categories [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Since being as belonging to a category expresses the 'isness' of things, and belongs to all ten Aristotelian categories, essence must be something all the natures that sort different beings into genera and species have in common. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: I like this because it is the essence which does the sorting, not the sorting which defines the essence (which seems to me to be a deep and widespread confusion). |
| 11208 | A simple substance is its own essence [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: A simple substance is its own essence. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.103) | |
| A reaction: Aquinas takes complex substances to have their essences in various ways, but this thought is the basis of all essence. Presumably the Greek word 'ousia' names the key ingredient. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 11198 | Definition of essence makes things understandable [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: It is definition of essence that makes things understandable. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: The aim of philosophy is understanding, which is achieved by successful explanation. I totally agree with this Aristotelian view, so neatly summarised by Aquinas. |
| 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. |
| 11206 | The mind constructs complete attributions, based on the unified elements of the real world [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Attribution is something mind brings to completion by constructing propositional connections and disconnections, basing itself on real-world unity possessed by the things being attributed to one another. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.102) | |
| A reaction: This compromise story seems to me to be exactly right. I take it that we respond to the real joints of nature, but using thought and language which is riddled with convention. |
| 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. |
| 11207 | A cause can exist without its effect, but the effect cannot exist without its cause [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: When things are so related that one causes the other to exist, the cause can exist without what it causes but not vice versa. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.103) | |
| A reaction: This is open to question, if causes are supposed to be sufficient for effects. Presumably Aquinas would support the view that if the cause had not been, the effect would not have happened. But the current idea indicates the priority relation. |
| 4800 | Natural laws result from eliminative induction, where enumerative induction gives generalisations [Cohen,LJ, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Cohen contends that statements that express laws of nature are the products of eliminative induction, where accidentally true generalisations are the products of enumerative induction. | |
| From: report of L. Jonathan Cohen (The Problem of Natural Laws [1980], p.222) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §7.1 | |
| A reaction: The idea is that enumerative induction only offers the support of positive instances, where eliminative induction involves attempts to falsify a range of hypotheses. This still bases laws on observed regularities, rather than essences or mechanisms. |