64 ideas
| 11159 | My account shows how the concept works, rather than giving an analysis [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: My assimilation of essence to definition ...may not provide us with an analysis of the concept, but it does provide us with a good model of how the concept works. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 3) | |
| A reaction: An example of the modern shift in analytic philosophy, away from the dream of given a complete analysis of a concept, towards giving an account of the concepts relationships. Compare Shoemaker in Idea 8559. |
| 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) |
| 11157 | Modern philosophy has largely abandoned real definitions, apart from sortals [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: In modern analytic philosophy we find that, as a result of sustained empiricist critique, the idea of real definition has been more or less given up (unless it be taken to be vestigially present in the notion of a sortal). | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 3) | |
| A reaction: The account of essences as falling under sortals (roughly, categorising terms) is associated with David Wiggins. Kit Fine is in the business of reviving Aristotelian real definitions, as are fans of scientific essentialism (see under 'Nature'). |
| 11171 | Defining a term and giving the essence of an object don't just resemble - they are the same [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: There is an analogy between defining a term and giving the essence of an object. ..However, I am inclined to think that the two cases are not merely parallel but are, at bottom, the same. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p.13) | |
| A reaction: The proposal is something like the meaning of a concept being the essence of the concept. And essence is definition. The parallel is that they both lead to necessities, either derived from objects or from concepts. Sounds good to me. |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 10794 | The nominalist is tied by standard semantics to first-order, denying higher-order abstracta [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: The nominalist finds that standard semantics shackles him to first-order languages if, as nominalists are wont, he is to make do without abstract higher order objects. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.166) | |
| A reaction: Aha! Since I am pursuing a generally nominalist strategy in metaphysics, I suddenly see that I must adopt a hostile attitude to higher-order logic! Maybe plural quantification is the way to go, with just first-order objects. |
| 10786 | Anything which refers tends to be called a 'name', even if it isn't a noun [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: The tendency has been to call any expression a 'name', however distant from the grammatical category of nouns, provided it is seen as referring. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.162) |
| 10788 | Nominalists see proper names as a main vehicle of reference [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: For a nominalist with an ontology of empirically distinguishable objects, proper names are seen as a primary vehicle of reference. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.162) |
| 10799 | Nominalists should quantify existentially at first-order, and substitutionally when higher [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: For the nominalist, at level zero, where substituends are referring names, the quantifiers may be read existentially. Beyond level zero, the variables and quantifiers are read sustitutionally (though it is unclear whether this program is feasible). | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.167) |
| 10790 | Quantifiers are needed to refer to infinitely many objects [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: An adequate language for referring to infinitely many objects would seem to require variables and quantifiers in addition to names. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.164) |
| 10791 | Substitutional semantics has no domain of objects, but place-markers for substitutions [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: On a substitutional semantics of a first-order language, a domain of objects is not specified. Variables do not range over objects. They are place markers for substituends (..and sentences are true-for-all-names, or true-for-at-least-one-name). | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.165) |
| 10785 | Maybe a substitutional semantics for quantification lends itself to nominalism [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: It has been suggested that a substitutional semantics for quantification theory lends itself to nominalistic aims. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.161) |
| 10795 | Substitutional language has no ontology, and is just a way of speaking [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Translation into a substitutional language does not force the ontology. It remains, literally, and until the case for reference can be made, a façon de parler. That is the way the nominalist would like to keep it. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.166) |
| 10798 | A true universal sentence might be substitutionally refuted, by an unnamed denumerable object [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Critics say if there are nondenumerably many objects, then on the substitutional view there might be true universal sentences falsified by an unnamed object, and there must always be some such, for names are denumerable. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.167) | |
| A reaction: [See Quine 'Reply to Prof. Marcus' p.183] The problem seems to be that there would be names which are theoretically denumerable, but not nameable, and hence not available for substitution. Marcus rejects this, citing compactness. |
| 10787 | Is being just referent of the verb 'to be'? [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Being itself has been viewed as referent of the verb 'to be'. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.162) |
| 11151 | An object is dependent if its essence prevents it from existing without some other object [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: One object depends upon another (in one sense of the term) if its essence prevents it from existing without the other object. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 2) | |
| A reaction: I take the interest of this to be that essences are usually thought to be intrinsic, but this seems to involve the object in necessary external relations. |
| 10789 | Nominalists say predication is relations between individuals, or deny that it refers [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Nominalists have the major task of explaining how predicates work. They usually construct it as a relation between individuals, or deny the referential function of predicates. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.163) |
| 10796 | If objects are thoughts, aren't we back to psychologism? [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: If objects are thoughts, aren't we back to psychologism? | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.166) | |
| A reaction: Personally I don't think that would be the end of the world, but Fregeans go into paroxyms at the mention of 'psychology', because they fear that it destroys objectivity. That may be because they haven't understood thought properly. |
| 11152 | Essences are either taken as real definitions, or as necessary properties [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Essence has been conceived either on the model of definition, involving the 'real' as opposed to 'nominal' definitions, or it is elucidated in modal terms, located in de re cases of modal attributions (an object being necessarily a certain way). | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 2) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Fine sets out to defend the definitional view, which derives from Aristotle, his line being that necessity depends on essence, and so cannot be used to define it. I think I agree. |
| 11161 | Essentially having a property is naturally expressed as 'the property it must have to be what it is' [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: We have an informal way of saying an object essentially has a property, as 'the object must have the property if it is to be the object that it is', and this form of words manages to convey what we wish to convey. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 4) | |
| A reaction: The importance of this claim is that it makes no mention of 'necessity'. Fine's view is plausible, but hard to evaluate once he has said. We seem to then divide an object's properties into identity properties, causal properties and peripheral properties. |
| 11160 | Simple modal essentialism refers to necessary properties of an object [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: The simplest form of the modal account takes an object to have a property essentially just in case it is necessary that the object has the property. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 3) | |
| A reaction: Fine wants to reverse the account, explaining necessities in terms of prior essences. |
| 11158 | Essentialist claims can be formulated more clearly with quantified modal logic [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: With the advent of quantified modal logic, philosophers have been in a better position to formulate essentialist claims. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 3) | |
| A reaction: A nice illustration of the role which logic plays in modern analytic philosophy. It is not an unreasonable assumption that we will understand a theoretical problem more clearly if we can articulate it more accurately. |
| 11167 | Metaphysical necessity is a special case of essence, not vice versa [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Far from viewing essence as a special case of metaphysical necessity, we should view metaphysical necessity as a special case of essence. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 9) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as one of the most powerful proposals in modern philosophy (even if it is a reiteration of Aristotle!). |
| 16537 | Essence as necessary properties produces a profusion of essential properties [Fine,K, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: If an essence is a sum of essential properties (had in all possible worlds where it exists), Fine points out that it seems grossly to overgenerate essential properties ('S is either a man or a mouse', or 'S is such that 2+2=4'). | |
| From: report of Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994]) by E.J. Lowe - What is the Source of Knowledge of Modal Truths? 6 | |
| A reaction: To me this is the sort of mess you get into when you accept that 'being such that p' is a property. Defenders of the modal approach always have to eliminate 'trivial' properties from essences, but non-trivial is a defining feature of an essence. |
| 11163 | The nature of singleton Socrates has him as a member, but not vice versa [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Can we not recognise a sense of 'what an object is', according to which it lies in the nature of a singleton to have Socrates as a member, even though it does not lie in the nature of Socrates to belong to the singleton? | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 5) | |
| A reaction: Important and persuasive. It echoes the example in Idea 11162, that the necessary relation is not part of the essence. Socrates is necessarily in {Socrates}, but that is because of the set, not because of Socrates. Essences causes necessities. |
| 11164 | It is not part of the essence of Socrates that a huge array of necessary truths should hold [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Necessarily any necessary truth will hold if Socrates exists. But it is no part of Socrates' essence that there be infinitely many prime numbers, ..or that objects like the Eiffel Tower have their own necessary essence. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 5-6) | |
| A reaction: This and the 'singleton Socrates' example (Idea 11165) are the twin prongs of Fine's attack on the modal account of essentialism. I think they constitute one of the best single pages in the whole of recent philosophy. Bravo. |
| 10935 | An essential property of something must be bound up with what it is to be that thing [Fine,K, by Rami] |
| Full Idea: Fine's view is that the notion of an essential property of a thing should be bound up with the notion of what it is to be that thing (unlike, for example, Socrates being such that there are infinitely many primes). | |
| From: report of Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994]) by Adolph Rami - Essential vs Accidental Properties §2 | |
| A reaction: I would think that Fine is so obviously right that it was hardly worth saying, but philosophers are a funny lot, and are quite likely to claim that features of prime numbers are part of the essence of a long-dead philosopher. |
| 10936 | Essential properties are part of an object's 'definition' [Fine,K, by Rami] |
| Full Idea: According to Fine's definitional characterization of essential properties, they are those of an object's properties that are part of the object's 'definition'. | |
| From: report of Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994]) by Adolph Rami - Essential vs Accidental Properties §2 | |
| A reaction: This demands not just an account of what a definition is, but also the notion that there is only one fixed and correct definition (since the object presumably only has one essence) - but there seems to be something relative about a good definition. |
| 11165 | If Socrates lacks necessary existence, then his nature cannot require his parents' existence [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: If there is nothing in the nature of Socrates which demands that he exists, then presumably there is nothing in the nature of Socrates which demands that his parents exist. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 6) | |
| A reaction: This sounds conclusive to me, against any claim that Socrates necessarily had those parents, if the claim is based on the identity or esssence of Socrates. |
| 10797 | Substitutivity won't fix identity, because expressions may be substitutable, but not refer at all [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Substitutivity 'salve veritate' cannot define identity since two expressions may be everywhere intersubstitutable and not refer at all. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers [1978], p.167) |
| 11166 | The subject of a proposition need not be the source of its necessity [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: We naturally suppose, if a subject-predicate proposition is necessary, that the subject of the proposition is the source of the necessity. But that singleton 2 contains 2 is necessary, whether the number or the set is the subject of the proposition. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 9) | |
| A reaction: A very nice addition to his general attack on the idea that essence should be accounted for in terms of his necessity. He asks a beautifully simple question: for each necessity that we accept, what is the source of that necessity? |
| 11169 | Conceptual necessities rest on the nature of all concepts [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual (and logical) necessities can be taken to be the propositions which are true in virtue of the nature of all concepts (or just the logical concepts). | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 9-10) | |
| A reaction: The idea that something might be true simply because of the nature of a concept sounds good, and a slightly better formulation than traditional accounts of analytic truth. |
| 11162 | Socrates is necessarily distinct from the Eiffel Tower, but that is not part of his essence [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary that Socrates and the Eiffel Tower be distinct. But it is not essential to Socrates that he be distinct from the Tower, for there is nothing in his nature which connects him in any special way to it. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 5) | |
| A reaction: I find this simple argument very persuasive in separating out necessary facts about an object from the essence of that object. |
| 11168 | Metaphysical necessities are true in virtue of the nature of all objects [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: The metaphysically necessary truths can be identified with the propositions which are true in virtue of the nature of all objects whatever. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p. 9) | |
| A reaction: This is part of Fine's proposal that necessities are derived from the essences or natures of things, which view I find very congenial. |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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? |
| 11170 | Analytic truth may only be true in virtue of the meanings of certain terms [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Just as a necessary truth may be true in virtue of the identity of certain objects as opposed to others, so an analytic truth may be true in virtue of the meanings of certain terms as opposed to others (such as 'bachelor' rather than 'unmarried'). | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p.10) | |
| A reaction: This is a beautifully simple observation, that the necessity of 'bachelors are unmarried men' derives from part of the proposition, not from the whole of it. So what is it about the part that generates the apparent necessity? The nature of the concept! |
| 11172 | The meaning of 'bachelor' is irrelevant to the meaning of 'unmarried man' [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Strictly speaking it is irrelevant to the meaning of 'bachelor' that the phrase 'unmarried man' means what it does. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Essence and Modality [1994], p.13) | |
| A reaction: His point is that the necessary truth here derives from the meaning of 'bachelor', and not from the meaning of 'unmarried man'. But is also true that 'unmarried man' means 'bachelor' (for those familiar with the latter, but not the former). |