12 ideas
| 12772 | Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise; philosophy is in false consciousness when it sees itself otherwise. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: It is one thing to be permeated with values, and another to be value-driven. Truth, reason and logic are (I take it) granted a high value in philosophy, just as the offside rule is in football. I am trying to place reality in charge, not humanity. |
| 12771 | Is it likely that a successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: How likely is it that a truly successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Van Fraassen announces "I reject metaphysic" (p.3), so we know where he stands. Anything becomes less certain as it moves to a higher level of generality. Should we abandon generalisation? There is much illumination in metaphysics. |
| 12773 | Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: Analytical philosophy can rightly pride itself on having produced the greatest critical arsenal the world has ever known. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.6) | |
| A reaction: This is, of course, in the context of a scathing attack on the desire to use analytical methods to do speculative metaphysics. I say that if these are the best tools, then we should push forward with them to see how far we can get. |
| 12770 | We may end up with a huge theory of carefully constructed falsehoods [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The specter that faces us is that we may end up having explained all that is dreamt of in our philosophies by intricately crafted postulates that are false. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: This is more persuasive that Idea 12769. People who cannot bear to live with a total absence of explanation (with Keats's 'negative capability') are most in danger from this threat. |
| 9390 | Logic guides thinking, but it isn't a substitute for it [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: Logic is part of a normative theory of thinking, not a substitute for thinking. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt (The Logic of Boundaryless Concepts [2007], p.13) | |
| A reaction: There is some sort of logicians' dream, going back to Leibniz, of a reasoning engine, which accepts propositions and outputs inferences. I agree with this idea. People who excel at logic are often, it seems to me, modest at philosophy. |
| 15464 | The distinction between dispositional and 'categorical' properties leads to confusion [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: To avoid the danger of claiming that dispositions are their own categorical bases, we do better to eschew the alleged distinction between dispositional and 'categorical' properties altogether. | |
| From: David Lewis (Finkish dispositions [1997], II) | |
| A reaction: Since I have been unable to form any intuitive notion of what a 'categorical' property is, I like this, though not necessarily for his reason. |
| 15463 | All dispositions must have causal bases [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Prior, Pargetter and Jackson have argued convincingly for the thesis that all dispositions must have causal bases. | |
| From: David Lewis (Finkish dispositions [1997], II) | |
| A reaction: [Their paper is 1982] This key thesis is tackled by modern defenders of powers. The question is not who has the best arguments, but who offers the most coherent picture. What is a 'causal basis'? What sort of thing could be primitive or fundamental? |
| 15461 | A 'finkish' disposition is real, but disappears when the stimulus occurs [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: A disposition which would straight away vanish if put to the test is called 'finkish'. A finkishly fragile thing is fragile so long as it is not struck. But if it were struck, it would straight away cease to be fragile, and it would not break. | |
| From: David Lewis (Finkish dispositions [1997], I) | |
| A reaction: There are also 'antidotes'. Finks kill the disposition, antidotes kill the effect. These cases are problems for the simple conditional analysis of a disposition - because we never achieved the consequent. |
| 9389 | Vague membership of sets is possible if the set is defined by its concept, not its members [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: Vagueness in respect of membership is consistency with determinacy of the set's identity, so long as a set's identity is taken to consist, not in its having such-and-such members, but in its being the extension of a concept. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt (The Logic of Boundaryless Concepts [2007], p.5) | |
| A reaction: I find this view of sets much more appealing than the one that identifies a set with its members. The empty set is less of a problem, as well as non-existents. Logicians prefer the extensional view because it is tidy. |
| 15462 | Backtracking counterfactuals go from supposed events to their required causal antecedents [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: 'Backtracking' counterfactual reasoning runs from a counterfactually supposed event to the causal antecedents it would have to have had. | |
| From: David Lewis (Finkish dispositions [1997], I) | |
| A reaction: Why not call it a 'transcendental' counterfactual? Presumably you go thisworld>> counterfactualevent>> worldneededtocauseit. It conjures up two possible worlds instead of one. |
| 12769 | Inference to best explanation contains all sorts of hidden values [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The very phrase 'inference to the best explanation' should wave a red flag for us. What is good, better, best? What values are slipped in here, under a common name, and where do they come from? | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: A point worth making, but overstated. If we are going to refuse to make judgements for fear that some wicked 'value' might creep in, our lives will be reduced to absurdity. |
| 12768 | We accept many scientific theories without endorsing them as true [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The choice among theories in science may be a choice to accept in some sense falling far short of endorsement as true. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: When put like this, it is hard to deny the force of Van Fraassen's reservations about science. Lots of people, including me, use scientific theories as working assumptions for life, with nothing like full confidence in their truth. |