10 ideas
| 15148 | Powers give explanations, without being necessary for some class membership [Chakravartty] |
| Full Idea: Powers explain behaviours regardless of whether they are necessary for membership in a particular class of things. | |
| From: Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 3) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, and is important for driving a wedge between powers and essences. If there are essences, they are not simply some bunch of powers. |
| 15145 | A kind essence is the necessary and sufficient properties for membership of a class [Chakravartty] |
| Full Idea: The modern concept of a kind essence is a set of intrinsic properties that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the membership of something in a class of things, or 'kind'. | |
| From: Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: I am always struck by the problem that the kind itself is constructed from the individuals, so circularity always seems to loom. |
| 15147 | Cluster kinds are explained simply by sharing some properties, not by an 'essence' [Chakravartty] |
| Full Idea: The fact that members of some cluster kinds are subjects of causal generalizations reflects the degree to which they share causally efficacious properties, not the fact that they may be composed of essence kinds per se. | |
| From: Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: I think this is right. I am a fan of individual essences, but not of kind essences. I take kinds, and kind explanations, to be straightforward inductive generalisations from individuals. Extreme stabilities give the illusion of a kind essence. |
| 15144 | Explanation of causal phenomena concerns essential kinds - but also lack of them [Chakravartty] |
| Full Idea: Scientific practices such as prediction and explanation regarding causal phenomena are concerned not merely with kinds having essences, but also with kinds lacking them. | |
| From: Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 1) | |
| A reaction: Not quite clear what he has in mind, but explanation should certainly involve a coherent picture, and not just the citation of some underlying causal mechanism. |
| 7876 | Even if we identify pain with neural events, we can't explain why those neurons cause that feeling [Levine, by Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Materialists identify pain with the firing of nociceptive-specific neurons in the parietal cortex. Even so, Levine argues, we will still lack any explanation of why nociceptive-specific neurons yield pain. | |
| From: report of Joseph Levine (Purple Haze [2001]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 5.1 | |
| A reaction: [Proposed by Levine in 1983] I don't think we need to instantly go dualist when faced with this, but we may all eventually have to concede a bit of mysterianism. The explanation may be holistic (and hence hopelessly complex). |
| 7877 | Only phenomenal states have an explanatory gap; water is fully explained by H2O [Levine, by Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Levine says the explanatory gap is peculiar to phenomenal states. Once water has been identified with H2O, or temperature with mean kinetic energy, we do not continue to ask why H2O yields water, or why mean kinetic energy yields temperature. | |
| From: report of Joseph Levine (Purple Haze [2001]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 5.1 | |
| A reaction: Everything is mysterious if you think about if for long enough. What about a representational gap? Why do those neurons represent that tree (if the neurons aren't tree-shaped)? To understand qualia, we must understand the whole brain, I suspect. |
| 7878 | Materialism won't explain phenomenal properties, because the latter aren't seen in causal roles [Papineau on Levine] |
| Full Idea: We cannot give materialist explanations of why brain yields phenomenal properties because phenomenal concepts are not associated with descriptions of causal roles in the same way as pre-theoretical terms in other areas of science. | |
| From: comment on Joseph Levine (Purple Haze [2001]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 5.1 | |
| A reaction: I think Papineau has part of the answer, and I certainly like his notion of Conceptual Dualism, but if qualia are physical, there must be a physical account of how they acquire their properties. I think the whole brain needs to be understood first. |
| 4316 | Either all action is rational, or reason dominates, or reason is only concerned with means [Cottingham] |
| Full Idea: We can distinguish rational exclusivism (all activity is guided by reason - Plato and Spinoza), rational hegemonism (all action is dominated by reason), and rational instrumentalism (reason assesses means rather than ends - Hume). | |
| From: John Cottingham (Reason, Emotions and Good Life [2000]) | |
| A reaction: The idea that reason is the only cause of actions seems deeply implausible, but I strongly resist Hume's instrumental approach. Action without desire is not a contradiction. |
| 15146 | Some kinds, such as electrons, have essences, but 'cluster kinds' do not [Chakravartty] |
| Full Idea: Many of the kinds we theorize about and experiment on today simply do not have essences. We can distinguish 'essence kinds', such as electrons, and 'cluster kinds', such as biological species. | |
| From: Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: This is an important point for essentialists. He offers a strict criterion, in Idea 15145, for mind membership, but we might allow species to have essences by just relaxing the criteria a bit, and acknowledging some vagueness, especially over time. |
| 15151 | Many causal laws do not refer to kinds, but only to properties [Chakravartty] |
| Full Idea: Causal laws often do not make reference to kinds of objects at all, but rather summarize relations between quantitative, causally efficacious properties of objects. | |
| From: Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 3) | |
| A reaction: This would only be a serious challenge if it was not possible to translate talk of properties into talk of kinds, and vice versa. |