58 ideas
| 2463 | A standard naturalist view is realist, externalist, and computationalist, and believes in rationality [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be an emerging naturalist consensus that is Realist in ontology and epistemology, externalist in semantics, and computationalist in cognitive psychology, which nicely allows us to retain our understanding of ourselves as rational creatures. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2435 | Psychology has to include the idea that mental processes are typically truth-preserving [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A psychology that can't make sense of such facts as that mental processes are typically truth-preserving is ipso facto dead in the water. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) |
| 22317 | Truth does not admit of more and less [Frege] |
| Full Idea: What is only half true is untrue. Truth does not admit of more and less. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (works [1890], CP 353), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 48 'Truth' | |
| A reaction: What about a measurement which is accurate to three decimal places? Maybe being 'close to' the truth is not the same as being 'more' true. The truth about a distance between two points is unknowable? |
| 13455 | Frege did not think of himself as working with sets [Frege, by Hart,WD] |
| Full Idea: Frege did not think of himself as working with sets. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 1 | |
| A reaction: One can hardly blame him, given that set theory was only just being invented. |
| 16895 | The null set is indefensible, because it collects nothing [Frege, by Burge] |
| Full Idea: Frege regarded the null set as an indefensible entity from the point of view of iterative set theory. It collects nothing. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Tyler Burge - Frege on Apriority (with ps) 2 | |
| A reaction: The null set defines the possibility that something could be collected. At the very least, it introduces curly brackets into the language. |
| 3328 | Frege proposed a realist concept of a set, as the extension of a predicate or concept or function [Frege, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Contrary to Dedekind's anti-realism, Frege proposed a realist definition of a set as the extension of a predicate (or concept, or function). | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.13 |
| 9179 | Frege frequently expressed a contempt for language [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Frege frequently expressed a contempt for language. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890], p.228) by Michael Dummett - Frege's Distinction of Sense and Reference p.228 | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as exactly the right attitude for a logician to have. Russell seems to have agreed. Attitudes to vagueness are the test case. Over-ambitious modern logicians dream of dealing with vagueness. Forget it. Stick to your last. |
| 2442 | Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §3) |
| 13473 | Frege thinks there is an independent logical order of the truths, which we must try to discover [Frege, by Hart,WD] |
| Full Idea: Frege thinks there is a single right deductive order of the truths. This is not an epistemic order, but a logical order, and it is our job to arrange our beliefs in this order if we can make it out. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 2 | |
| A reaction: Frege's dream rests on the belief that there exists a huge set of logical truths. Pluralism, conventionalism, constructivism etc. about logic would challenge this dream. I think the defence of Frege must rest on Russellian rooting of logic in nature. |
| 6076 | For Frege, predicates are names of functions that map objects onto the True and False [Frege, by McGinn] |
| Full Idea: For Frege, a predicate does not refer to the objects of which it is true, but to the function that maps these objects onto the True and False; ..a predicate is a name for this function. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Colin McGinn - Logical Properties Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: McGinn says this is close to the intuitive sense of a property. Perhaps 'predicates are what make objects the things they are?' |
| 3319 | Frege gives a functional account of predication so that we can dispense with predicates [Frege, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: The whole point of Frege's functional account of predication lies in its allowing us to dispense with all properties across the board. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.9 |
| 9871 | Frege always, and fatally, neglected the domain of quantification [Dummett on Frege] |
| Full Idea: Frege persistently neglected the question of the domain of quantification, which proved in the end to be fatal. | |
| From: comment on Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.16 | |
| A reaction: The 'fatality' refers to Russell's paradox, and the fact that not all concepts have extensions. Common sense now says that this is catastrophic. A domain of quantification is a topic of conversation, which is basic to all language. Cf. Idea 9874. |
| 16884 | Basic truths of logic are not proved, but seen as true when they are understood [Frege, by Burge] |
| Full Idea: In Frege's view axioms are basic truth, and basic truths do not need proof. Basic truths can be (justifiably) recognised as true by understanding their content. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Tyler Burge - Frege on Knowing the Foundations 1 | |
| A reaction: This is the underpinning of the rationalism in Frege's philosophy. |
| 3331 | If '5' is the set of all sets with five members, that may be circular, and you can know a priori if the set has content [Benardete,JA on Frege] |
| Full Idea: There is a suspicion that Frege's definition of 5 (as the set of all sets with 5 members) may be infected with circularity, …and how can we be sure on a priori grounds that 4 and 5 are not both empty sets, and hence identical? | |
| From: comment on Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.14 |
| 16880 | Frege aimed to discover the logical foundations which justify arithmetical judgements [Frege, by Burge] |
| Full Idea: Frege saw arithmetical judgements as resting on a foundation of logical principles, and the discovery of this foundation as a discovery of the nature and structure of the justification of arithmetical truths and judgments. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Tyler Burge - Frege on Knowing the Foundations Intro | |
| A reaction: Burge's point is that the logic justifies the arithmetic, as well as underpinning it. |
| 8689 | Eventually Frege tried to found arithmetic in geometry instead of in logic [Frege, by Friend] |
| Full Idea: After the problem with Russell's paradox, Frege did not publish for fourteen years, and he then tried to re-found arithmetic in Euclidean geometry, rather than in logic. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890], 3.4) by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics 3.4 | |
| A reaction: I take it that his new road would have led him to modern Structuralism, so I think he was probably on the right lines. Unfortunately Frege had already done enough for one good lifetime. |
| 5657 | Frege's logic showed that there is no concept of being [Frege, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Frege's quantificational logic vindicates Kant's insight that existence is not a predicate and leads to fallacies when treated as one; and we might also say, despite Hegel, that there is no concept of being. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.17 | |
| A reaction: I notice that Colin McGinn has questioned the value of quantificational logic. It is difficult to assert that 'there is no concept of x', if several people have written large books about it. |
| 3318 | Frege made identity a logical notion, enshrined above all in the formula 'for all x, x=x' [Frege, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: It was Frege who first made identity a logical notion, enshrining it above all in the formula (x) x=x. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.9 |
| 16885 | To understand a thought, understand its inferential connections to other thoughts [Frege, by Burge] |
| Full Idea: Frege famously realised that understanding a thought requires understanding its inferential connections to other thoughts. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Tyler Burge - Frege on Knowing the Foundations 1 | |
| A reaction: If true, this is probably our greatest advance in grasping the concept of 'understanding' since Aristotle - but is it true? It is a striking and interesting idea, and central to the importance of Frege in modern analytic philosophy. |
| 16887 | Frege's concept of 'self-evident' makes no reference to minds [Frege, by Burge] |
| Full Idea: Frege's terms that translate 'self-evident' usually make no explicit reference to actual minds. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Tyler Burge - Frege on Knowing the Foundations 4 | |
| A reaction: This follows the distinction in Aquinas, between things that are intrinsically self-evident, and things that are self-evident to particular people. God, presumably, knows all of the former. |
| 16894 | An apriori truth is grounded in generality, which is universal quantification [Frege, by Burge] |
| Full Idea: Generality for Frege is simply universal quantification; what makes a truth apriori is that its ultimate grounds are universally quantified. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Tyler Burge - Frege on Apriority (with ps) 2 |
| 2462 | Control of belief is possible if you know truth conditions and what causes beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Premeditated cognitive management is possible if knowing the contents of one's thoughts would tell you what would make them true and what would cause you to have them. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I love the idea of 'cognitive management'. Since belief is fairly involuntary, I subject myself to the newspapers, books, TV and conversation which will create the style of beliefs to which I aspire. Why? |
| 2461 | An experiment is a deliberate version of what informal thinking does all the time [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Experimentation is an occasional and more or less self-conscious exercise in what informal thinking does all the time without thinking about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2454 | We can deliberately cause ourselves to have true thoughts - hence the value of experiments [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A creature that knows what makes its thoughts true and what would cause it to have them, could therefore cause itself to have true thoughts. …This would explain why experimentation is so close to the heart of our cognitive style. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2455 | Interrogation and experiment submit us to having beliefs caused [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can put yourself into a situation where you may be caused to believe that P. Putting a question to someone who is in the know is one species of this behaviour, and putting a question to Nature (an experiment) is another. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2460 | Participation in an experiment requires agreement about what the outcome will mean [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: To be in the audience for an experiment you have to believe what the experimenter believes about what the outcome would mean, but not necessarily what the outcome will be. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 16882 | The building blocks contain the whole contents of a discipline [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The ultimate building blocks of a discipline contain, as it were in a nutshell, its whole contents. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (works [1890]), quoted by Tyler Burge - Frege on Knowing the Foundations 1 | |
| A reaction: [Burge gives a reference] I would describe this nutshell as the 'essence' of the subject, and it fits Aristotle's concept of an essence perfectly. Does it fit biology or sociology, in the way it might fit maths or logic? Think of DNA or cells in biology. |
| 2458 | Theories are links in the causal chain between the environment and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Theories function as links in the causal chains that run from environmental outcomes to the beliefs that they cause the inquirer to have. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 5987 | Alcmaeon was the first to say the brain is central to thinking [Alcmaeon, by Staden, von] |
| Full Idea: Alcmaeon apparently was the first Greek to assign central cognitive and biological functions to the brain. | |
| From: report of Alcmaeon (fragments/reports [c.490 BCE]) by Heinrich von Staden - Alcmaeon | |
| A reaction: The name of Alcmaeon should be remembered with honour. This was 200 years before Aristotle, who still hadn't worked it out. I presume Alcmaeon inferred the truth from head injuries, which is overwhelming evidence, if you notice it. |
| 2443 | I say psychology is intentional, semantics is informational, and thinking is computation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I hold that psychological laws are intentional, that semantics is purely informational, and that thinking is computation (and that it is possible to hold all of these assumptions at once). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: When he puts it baldly like that, it doesn't sound terribly persuasive. Thinking is 'computation'? Raw experience is irrelevant? What is it 'like' to spot an interesting connection between two propositions or concepts? It's not like adding 7 and 5. |
| 2453 | We are probably the only creatures that can think about our own thoughts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I think it is likely that we are the only creatures that can think about the contents of our thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a major idea. If you ask me the traditional question - what is the essential difference between us and other animals? - this is my answer (not language, or reason). We are the metathinkers. |
| 2446 | Cartesians consider interaction to be a miracle [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The Cartesian view is that the interaction problem does arise, but is unsolvable because interaction is miraculous. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: A rather unsympathetic statement of the position. Cartesians might think that God could explain to us how interaction works. Cartesians are not mysterians, I think, but they see no sign of any theory of interaction. |
| 2445 | Semantics v syntax is the interaction problem all over again [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The question how mental representations could be both semantic, like propositions, and causal, like rocks, trees, and neural firings, is arguably just the interaction problem all over again. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Interesting way of presenting the problem. If you seem to be confronting the interaction problem, you have probably drifted into a bogus dualist way of thinking. Retreat, and reformulate you questions and conceptual apparatus, till the question vanishes. |
| 2464 | Type physicalism equates mental kinds with physical kinds [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Type physicalism is, roughly, the doctrine that psychological kinds are identical to neurological kinds. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App A n.1) | |
| A reaction: This gets my general support, leaving open the nature of 'kinds'. Presumably the identity is strict, as in 'Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus'. It seems unlikely that if you and I think the 'same' thought, that we have strictly identical brain states. |
| 2447 | Hume has no theory of the co-ordination of the mind [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: What Hume didn't see was that the causal and representational properties of mental symbols have somehow to be coordinated if the coherence of mental life is to be accounted for. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly the idea that it all somehow becomes magic at the point where the brain represents the world is incoherent - but it is a bit magical. How can the whole of my garden be in my brain? Weird. |
| 2440 | Propositional attitudes are propositions presented in a certain way [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Propositional attitudes are really three-place relations, between a creature, a proposition, and a mode of presentation (which are sentences of Mentalese). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'really'! Why do we need a creature? Isn't 'hoping it will rain' a propositional attitude which some creature may or may not have? Fodor wants it to be physical, but it's abstract? |
| 2450 | Rationality has mental properties - autonomy, productivity, experiment [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mentalism isn't gratuitous; you need it to explain rationality. Mental causation buys you behaviours that are unlike reflexes in at least three ways: they're autonomous, they're productive, and they're experimental. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: He makes his three ways sound all-or-nothing, which is (I believe) the single biggest danger when thinking about the mind. "Either you are conscious, or you are not..." |
| 2437 | XYZ (Twin Earth 'water') is an impossibility [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There isn't any XYZ, and there couldn't be any, and so we don't have to worry about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: Jadeite and Nephrite are real enough, which are virtually indistinguishable variants of jade. You just need Twin Jewellers instead of Twin Earths. We could build them, and employ twins to work there. |
| 2441 | Truth conditions require a broad concept of content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We need the idea of broad content to make sense of the fact that thoughts have the truth-conditions that they do. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be (as Dummett points out) a potential circularity here, as you can hardly know the truth-conditions of something if you don't already know its content. |
| 3114 | Concepts aren't linked to stuff; they are what is caused by stuff [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the words of 'Swamp Man' (spontaneously created, with concepts) are about XYZ on Twin Earth, it is not because he's causally connected to the stuff, but because XYZ would cause his 'water' tokens (in the absence of H2O). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App B) | |
| A reaction: The sight of the Eiffel tower causes my 'France' tokens, so is my word "France" about the Eiffel Tower? What would cause my 'nothing' tokens? |
| 2452 | Knowing the cause of a thought is almost knowing its content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you know quite a lot about what would cause you to have it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where this fits into the great jigsaw of the mind, but it strikes me as an acute and important observation. The truth of a thought is not essential to make you have it. Ask Othello. |
| 2432 | Is content basically information, fixed externally? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I assume intentional content reduces (in some way) to information. …The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not the way that it is related to other thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2) | |
| A reaction: Does this make Fodor a 'weak' functionalist? The 'strong' version would say a thought is merely a location in a flow diagram, but Fodor's 'mentalism' includes a further 'content' in each diagram box. |
| 2438 | In the information view, concepts are potentials for making distinctions [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Semantics, according to the informational view, is mostly about counterfactuals; what counts for the identity of my concepts is not what I do distinguish but what I could distinguish if I cared to (even using instruments and experts). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: We all differ in our discriminations (and awareness of expertise), so our concepts would differ, which is bad news for communication (see Idea 223). The view has some plausibility, though. |
| 5816 | Frege said concepts were abstract entities, not mental entities [Frege, by Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Frege, rebelling against 'psychologism', identified concepts (and hence 'intensions' or meanings) with abstract entities rather than mental entities. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Hilary Putnam - Meaning and Reference p.119 | |
| A reaction: This, of course, assumes that 'abstract' entities and 'mental' entities are quite distinct things. A concept is presumably a mental item which has content, and the word 'concept' is simply ambiguous, between the container and the contents. |
| 2439 | Semantic externalism says the concept 'elm' needs no further beliefs or inferences [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the essence of semantic externalism that there is nothing that you have to believe, there are no inferences that you have to accept, to have the concept 'elm'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: [REMINDER: broad content is filed in 18.C.7, under 'Thought' rather than under language. That is because I am a philospher of thought, rather than of language. |
| 2457 | If meaning is information, that establishes the causal link between the state of the world and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the causal connection between the state of the world and the contents of beliefs that the reduction of meaning to information is designed to insure. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear why characterising the contents of a belief in terms of its information has to amount to a 'reduction'. A cup of tea isn't reduced to tea. Connections imply duality. |
| 7307 | A thought is not psychological, but a condition of the world that makes a sentence true [Frege, by Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: For Frege, a thought is not something psychological or subjective; rather, it is objective in the sense that it specifies some condition in the world the obtaining of which is necessary and sufficient for the truth of the sentence that expresses it. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.2 | |
| A reaction: It is worth emphasising Russell's anti-Berkeley point about 'ideas', that the idea is in the mind, but its contents are in the world. Since the contents are what matter, this endorses Frege, and also points towards modern externalism. |
| 2451 | To know the content of a thought is to know what would make it true [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you thereby know what would make the thought true. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: The truthmaker might by physically impossible, and careful thought might show it to be contradictory - but that wouldn't destroy the meaning. |
| 2433 | For holists no two thoughts are ever quite the same, which destroys faith in meaning [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If what you are thinking depends on all of what you believe, then nobody ever thinks the same thing twice. …That is why so many semantic holists (Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Churchland, probably Wittgenstein) end up being semantic eliminativists. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: If linguistic holism is nonsense, this is easily settled. What I say about breakfast is not changed by reading some Gibbon yesterday. |
| 2436 | It is claimed that reference doesn't fix sense (Jocasta), and sense doesn't fix reference (Twin Earth) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that Frege cases [knowing Jocasta but not mother] show that reference doesn't determine sense, and Twin cases [knowing water but not H2O] show that sense doesn't determine reference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: How about 'references don't contain much information', and 'descriptions may not fix what they are referring to'? Simple really. |
| 2434 | Broad semantics holds that the basic semantic properties are truth and denotation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Broad semantic theories generally hold that the basic semantic properties of thoughts are truth and denotation. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: I think truth and denotation are the basic semantic properties, but I am dubious about whole-hearted broad semantic theories, so I seem to have gone horribly wrong somewhere. |
| 7309 | Frege's 'sense' is the strict and literal meaning, stripped of tone [Frege, by Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Frege held that "and" and "but" have the same 'sense' but different 'tones' (note: they have the same truth tables); the sense of an expression is what a sentence strictly and literally means, stripped of its tone. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.6 | |
| A reaction: It seems important when studying Frege to remember what has been stripped out. In "he is a genius and he plays football", if you substitute 'but' for 'and', the new version says (literally?) something very distinctive about football. |
| 7312 | 'Sense' solves the problems of bearerless names, substitution in beliefs, and informativeness [Frege, by Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Frege's introduction of 'sense' was motivated by the desire to solve three problems: the problem of bearerless names, the problem of substitution in belief contexts, and the problem of informativeness. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.9 | |
| A reaction: A proposal which solves three problems sounds pretty good! These three problems can be used to test the counter-proposals of Russell and Kripke. |
| 2459 | Externalist semantics are necessary to connect the contents of beliefs with how the world is [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You need an externalist semantics to explain why the contents of beliefs should have anything to do with how the world is. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Since externalist semantics only emerged in the 1970s, that implies that no previous theory had any notion that language had some connection to how the world is. Eh? |
| 7725 | 'P or not-p' seems to be analytic, but does not fit Kant's account, lacking clear subject or predicate [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: 'It is raining or it is not raining' appears to true because of the general principle 'p or not-p', so it is analytic; but this does not fit Kant's idea of an analytic truth, because it is not obvious that it has a subject concept or a predicate concept. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: The general progress of logic seems to be a widening out to embrace problem sentences. However, see Idea 7315 for the next problem that arises with analyticity. All this culminates in Quine's attack (e.g. Idea 1624). |
| 7316 | Analytic truths are those that can be demonstrated using only logic and definitions [Frege, by Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Frege (according to Quine) characterises analytic truths as those that can be demonstrated or proved using only logical laws and definitions as premises. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 4.2 | |
| A reaction: This is the big shift away from the Kantian version (predicate contained in the subject) towards a modern version, perhaps fixed by a truth table giving true for all values. |
| 3307 | Frege put forward an ontological argument for the existence of numbers [Frege, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Frege put forward an ontological argument for the existence of numbers. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.4 |
| 24043 | Soul must be immortal, since it continually moves, like the heavens [Alcmaeon, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Alcmaeon says that the soul is immortal because it resembles immortal things and that this affection belongs to it because it is always in movement, like divine things, such the moon, the sun, the stars and the whole heaven. | |
| From: report of Alcmaeon (fragments/reports [c.490 BCE], DK 24) by Aristotle - De Anima 405a30 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Fish and rivers seem to be continually moving too. Presumably we are like gods, but then Greek gods seem awfully like humans. I don't know the history of belief in immortality; an interesting topic. |