Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Aspects of the Theory of Syntax' and 'Intentionality and the Physical: reply to Mumford'

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4 ideas

13. Knowledge Criteria / E. Relativism / 2. Knowledge as Convention

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

15. Nature of Minds / B. Features of Minds / 4. Intentionality / b. Intentionality theories

18088	Intentionality is the mark of dispositions, not of the mental [Place]
	Full Idea: My thesis is that intentionality is the mark, not of the mental, but of the dispositional.
	From: Ullin T. Place (Intentionality and the Physical: reply to Mumford [1999], 1)
	A reaction: An idea with few friends, but I really like it, because it offers the prospect of a unified account of physical nature and the mind/brain. It seems reasonable to say my mind is essentially a bunch of dispositions. Mind is representations + dispositions.

19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 1. Syntax

18006	Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor]
	Full Idea: Chomsky and his followers (whose position was labelled 'interpretative semantics') claimed that a sentence is first assigned a syntactic structure by an autonomous syntactic module, and this structure is then provided as input for semantic interpretation.
	From: report of Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [1965]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3
	A reaction: This certainly doesn't fit the experience of introspecting speech, but then I suppose good pianists focus entirely on the music, and overlook the finger movements which have obvious priority. But I don't know the syntax of the sentence when I begin it.

26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 8. Scientific Essentialism / c. Essence and laws

18089	Dispositions are not general laws, but laws of the natures of individual entities [Place]
	Full Idea: Dispositions are the substantive laws, not, as for Armstrong, of nature in general, but of the nature of individual entities whose dispositional properties they are.
	From: Ullin T. Place (Intentionality and the Physical: reply to Mumford [1999], 6)
	A reaction: [He notes that Nancy Cartwright 1989 agrees with him] I like this a lot. I tend to denegrate 'laws', because of their dubious ontological status, but this restores laws to the picture, in the place where they belong, in the stuff of the world.