19 ideas
| 1922 | Spiritual qualities only become advantageous with the growth of wisdom [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If virtue is a beneficial attribute of spirit, it must be wisdom; for spiritual qualities are not in themselves advantageous, but become so with wisdom…..Hence men cannot be good by nature. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 88c) | |
| A reaction: Personally I haven't got any 'spiritual qualities', so I don't really understand this. |
| 11259 | How can you seek knowledge of something if you don't know it? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 80d05) | |
| A reaction: Vasilis Politis cites this as a nice example of the 'aporiai' (puzzles) which Aristotle said were the foundation of enquiry. Nowadays the problem is called the 'paradox of enquiry'. |
| 10993 | Ramsey's Test: believe the consequent if you believe the antecedent [Ramsey, by Read] |
| Full Idea: Ramsey's Test for conditionals is that a conditional should be believed if a belief in its antecedent would commit one to believing its consequent. | |
| From: report of Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928]) by Stephen Read - Thinking About Logic Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: A rather pragmatic approach to conditionals |
| 14279 | Asking 'If p, will q?' when p is uncertain, then first add p hypothetically to your knowledge [Ramsey] |
| Full Idea: If two people are arguing 'If p, will q?' and are both in doubt as to p, they are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge, and arguing on that basis about q; ...they are fixing their degrees of belief in q given p. | |
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928], B 155 n) | |
| A reaction: This has become famous as the 'Ramsey Test'. Bennett emphasises that he is not saying that you should actually believe p - you are just trying it for size. The presupposition approach to conditionals seems attractive. Edgington likes 'degrees'. |
| 20219 | True opinions only become really valuable when they are tied down by reasons [Plato] |
| Full Idea: True opinions are a fine thing and all they do is good, …but they escape from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 98a3) | |
| A reaction: This gives justification the role of guarantee, stabilising and securing true beliefs (rather than triggering some new thing called 'knowledge'). |
| 5985 | Seeking and learning are just recollection [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 81d) | |
| A reaction: This is a prelude to the famous conversation with the slave boy about geometry. You don't have to follow Plato into the doctrine of reincarnation; this remark is a key slogan for all rationalists. As pupils in maths lessons, we pull knowledge from within. |
| 5986 | The slave boy learns geometry from questioning, not teaching, so it is recollection [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The slave boy's knowledge of geometry will not come from teaching but from questioning; he will recover it for himself, and the spontaneous recovery of knowledge that is in him is recollection. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 85d) | |
| A reaction: Of course, if maths and geometry are huge tautological axiom systems, we would expect to be able to derive them (with hints from a teacher) entirely from their axioms. It is not clear why we might be able to derive the truths of all nature a priori. |
| 1923 | As a guide to action, true opinion is as good as knowledge [Plato] |
| Full Idea: True opinion is as good a guide as knowledge for the purpose of acting rightly. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 97b) | |
| A reaction: This is the germ of Peirce's epistemology - that knowledge is an interesting theoretical concept, but opinion/belief is what matters, and most needs explanation. |
| 8840 | There are five possible responses to the problem of infinite regress in justification [Cleve] |
| Full Idea: Sceptics respond to the regress problem by denying knowledge; Foundationalists accept justifications without reasons; Positists say reasons terminate is mere posits; Coherentists say mutual support is justification; Infinitists accept the regress. | |
| From: James Van Cleve (Why coherence is not enough [2005], I) | |
| A reaction: A nice map of the territory. The doubts of Scepticism are not strong enough for anyone to embrace the view; Foundationalist destroy knowledge (?), as do Positists; Infinitism is a version of Coherentism - which is the winner. |
| 8841 | Modern foundationalists say basic beliefs are fallible, and coherence is relevant [Cleve] |
| Full Idea: Contemporary foundationalists are seldom of the strong Cartesian variety: they do not insist that basic beliefs be absolutely certain. They also tend to allow that coherence can enhance justification. | |
| From: James Van Cleve (Why coherence is not enough [2005], III) | |
| A reaction: It strikes me that they have got onto a slippery slope. How certain are the basic beliefs? How do you evaluate their certainty? Could incoherence in their implications undermine them? Skyscrapers need perfect foundations. |
| 1919 | You don't need to learn what you know, and how do you seek for what you don't know? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: You could argue that a man cannot discover what he does know or what he doesn't. The first needs no discovery, and how do you begin looking for the second? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 80e) |
| 6894 | Mental terms can be replaced in a sentence by a variable and an existential quantifier [Ramsey] |
| Full Idea: Ramsey Sentences are his technique for eliminating theoretical terms in science (and can be applied to mental terms, or to social rights); a term in a sentence is replaced by a variable and an existential quantifier. | |
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928]), quoted by Thomas Mautner - Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy p.469 | |
| A reaction: The technique is used by functionalists and results in a sort of eliminativism. The intrinsic nature of mental states is eliminated, because everything worth saying can be expressed in terms of functional/causal role. Sounds wrong to me. |
| 1913 | Is virtue taught, or achieved by practice, or a natural aptitude, or what? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Is virtue something that can be taught, or does it come by practice, or is it a natural aptitude, or something else? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 70a) |
| 1921 | If virtue is a type of knowledge then it ought to be taught [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If virtue is some sort of knowledge, then clearly it could be taught. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 87c) |
| 1927 | It seems that virtue is neither natural nor taught, but is a divine gift [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If our discussion is right, virtue is acquired neither by nature nor by teaching. Whoever has it gets it by divine dispensation, without taking thought. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 99e) |
| 1916 | Even if virtues are many and various, they must have something in common to make them virtues [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Even if virtues are many and various, at least they all have some common character which makes them all virtues. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 72c) |
| 1918 | How can you know part of virtue without knowing the whole? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Does anyone know what a part of virtue is without knowing the whole? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 79c) |
| 9418 | All knowledge needs systematizing, and the axioms would be the laws of nature [Ramsey] |
| Full Idea: Even if we knew everything, we should still want to systematize our knowledge as a deductive system, and the general axioms in that system would be the fundamental laws of nature. | |
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928], §A) | |
| A reaction: This is the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis view. Cf. Idea 9420. |
| 9420 | Causal laws result from the simplest axioms of a complete deductive system [Ramsey] |
| Full Idea: Causal laws are consequences of those propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system. | |
| From: Frank P. Ramsey (Law and Causality [1928], §B) | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 9418. |