6 ideas
| 9786 | Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: The notion that philosophy can be done cooperatively, in the manner of scientists or engineers engaged in a research project, seems to me absurd. And yet few philosophers can survive in isolation. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xxi) | |
| A reaction: This why Nietzsche said that philosophers were 'rare plants'. |
| 9784 | A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: You do not improve the truth value of a false proposition by calling attention to a coherent system of propositions of which it is one. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xi) | |
| A reaction: We need to disentangle the truth-value from the justification here. If it is false, then we can safely assume that is false, but we are struggling to decide whether it is false, and we want all the evidence we can get. Falsehood tends towards incoherence. |
| 19489 | For me, fictions are internally true, without a significant internal or external truth-value [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A 'myth' or fiction for me is a true internal statement (a statement endorsed by the rules) whose external truth value is as may be, the point being that that truth value is from an internal standpoint quite irrelevant. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? [1998], IX) | |
| A reaction: This contrasts with Carnap, for whom talk of 'ghosts' is false in an internal thing-framework. Yablo seems here to say a statement can be true while having no truth value. Presumably he is relaxing the internal rules. |
| 19490 | Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Make-believe games can make it easier to reason about facts, to systematize them, to visualize them, to spot connections with other facts, and to evaluate potential lines of research. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? [1998], XI) | |
| A reaction: This is the key pragmatic defence of the fictionalist view of abstract objects. Fictions are devices to help us think better. I think a lot of ontology turns out that way. |
| 19491 | 'The clouds are angry' can only mean '...if one were attributing emotions to clouds' [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: It is an open question whether the clouds that we call 'angry' are literally F, for any F other than 'such that it would be natural and proper to regard them as angry if one were going to attribute emotions to clouds'. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? [1998], XII) | |
| A reaction: His point is that it is TRUE, in those circumstances, that the clouds are angry. Thus fictions are a valid and useful part of ordinary sensible course, giving real information. I like it. |
| 7517 | I could take a healthy infant and train it up to be any type of specialist I choose [Watson,JB] |
| Full Idea: Give me a dozen healthy infants, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, artist, beggar, thief - regardless of his ancestry. | |
| From: J.B. Watson (Behaviorism [1924], Ch.2), quoted by Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate | |
| A reaction: This was a famous pronouncement rejecting the concept of human nature as in any way fixed - a total assertion of nurture over nature. Modern research seems to be suggesting that Watson is (alas?) wrong. |