14 ideas
| 15091 | Restrict 'logical truth' to formal logic, rather than including analytic and metaphysical truths [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: I favour restricting the term 'logical truth' to what logicians would count as such, excluding both analytic truths like 'Bachelors are unmarried' and Kripkean necessities like 'Gold is an element'. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], I) | |
| A reaction: I agree. There is a tendency to splash the phrases 'logical truth' and 'logical necessity around in vague ways. I take them to strictly arise out of the requirements of formal systems of logic. |
| 15095 | A property's causal features are essential, and only they fix its identity [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: The view I now favour says that the causal features of a property, both forward-looking and backward-looking, are essential to it. And it says that properties having the same causal features are identical. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: In this formulation we have essentialism about properties, as well as essentialism about the things which have the properties. |
| 15097 | I claim that a property has its causal features in all possible worlds [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: The controversial claim of my theory is that the causal features of properties are essential to them - are features that they have in all possible worlds. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: One problem is that a property can come in degrees, so what degree of the property is necessary to it? It is better to assign this claim to the fundamental properties (which are best called 'powers'). |
| 15094 | I now deny that properties are cluster of powers, and take causal properties as basic [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: I now reject the formulation of the causal theory which says that a property is a cluster of conditional powers. That has a reductionist flavour, which is a cheat. We need properties to explain conditional powers, so properties won't reduce. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: [compressed wording] I agree with Mumford and Anjum in preferring his earlier formulation. I think properties are broad messy things, whereas powers can be defined more precisely, and seem to have more stability in nature. |
| 15099 | If something is possible, but not nomologically possible, we need metaphysical possibility [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: If it is possible that there could be possible states of affairs that are not nomologically possible, don't we therefore need a notion of metaphysical possibility that outruns nomological possibility? | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: Shoemaker rejects this possibility (p.425). I sympathise. So there is 'natural' possibility (my preferred term), which is anything which stuff, if it exists, could do, and 'logical' possibility, which is anything that doesn't lead to contradiction. |
| 15101 | Once you give up necessity as a priori, causal necessity becomes the main type of necessity [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Once the obstacle of the deeply rooted conviction that necessary truths should be knowable a priori is removed, ...causal necessity is (pretheoretically) the very paradigm of necessity, in ordinary usage and in dictionaries. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VII) | |
| A reaction: The a priori route seems to lead to logical necessity, just by doing a priori logic, and also to metaphysical necessity, by some sort of intuitive vision. This is a powerful idea of Shoemaker's (implied, of course, in Kripke). |
| 15098 | Empirical evidence shows that imagining a phenomenon can show it is possible [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: We have abundant empirical evidence that when we can imagine some phenomenal situation, e.g., imagine things appearing certain ways, such a situation could actually exist. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: There seem to be good reasons for holding the opposite view too. We can imagine gold appearing to be all sorts of colours, but that doesn't make it possible. What does empirical evidence really tell us here? |
| 15100 | Imagination reveals conceptual possibility, where descriptions avoid contradiction or incoherence [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Imaginability can give us access to conceptual possibility, when we come to believe situations to be conceptually possible by reflecting on their descriptions and seeing no contradiction or incoherence. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: If take the absence of contradiction to indicate 'logical' possibility, but the absence of incoherence is more interesting, even if it is a bit vague. He is talking of 'situations', which I take to be features of reality. A priori synthetic? |
| 1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
| Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
| From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
| 15096 | 'Grue' only has causal features because of its relation to green [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps 'grue' has causal features, but only derivatively, in virtue of its relation to green. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: I take grue to be a behaviour, and not a property at all. The problem only arises because the notion of a 'property' became too lax. Presumably Shoemaker should also mention blue in his account. |
| 2599 | Either intentionality causes things, or epiphenomenalism is true [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The avoidance of epiphenomenalism requires making it plausible that intentional properties can meet sufficient conditions for causal responsibility. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Making Mind Matter More [1989], p.154) | |
| A reaction: A wordy way of saying we either have epiphenomenalism, or the mind had better do something - and a good theory will show how. The biggest problem of the mind may not be Chalmer's Hard Question (qualia), but how thought-contents cause things. |
| 2597 | Contrary to the 'anomalous monist' view, there may well be intentional causal laws [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I argue that (contrary to the doctrine called "anomalous monism") there is no good reason to doubt that there are intentional causal laws. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Making Mind Matter More [1989], p.151) | |
| A reaction: I certainly can't see a good argument, in Davidson or anywhere else, to demonstrate their impossibility. Give the complexity of the brain, they would be like the 'laws' for weather or geology. |
| 2598 | Lots of physical properties are multiply realisable, so why shouldn't beliefs be? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If one of your reasons for doubting that believing-that-P is a physical property is that believing is multiply realizable, then you have the same reason for doubting that being an airfoil (or a mountain) counts as a physical property. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Making Mind Matter More [1989], p.153) | |
| A reaction: This merely points out that functionalism is not incompatible with physicalism, which must be right. |
| 15093 | We might say laws are necessary by combining causal properties with Armstrong-Dretske-Tooley laws [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: One way to get the conclusion that laws are necessary is to combine my view of properties with the view of Armstrong, Dretske and Tooley, that laws are, or assert, relations between properties. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], I) | |
| A reaction: This is interesting, because Armstrong in particular wants the necessity to arise from relations between properties as universals, but if we define properties causally, and make them necessary, we might get the same result without universals. |