17 ideas
| 14775 | Numbers are just names devised for counting [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Numbers are merely a system of names devised by men for the purpose of counting. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], II) | |
| A reaction: This seems a perfectly plausible view prior to the advent of Cantor, set theory and modern mathematical logic. I suppose the modern reply to this is that Peirce may be right about origin, but that men thereby stumbled on an Aladdin's Cave of riches. |
| 14776 | That two two-eyed people must have four eyes is a statement about numbers, not a fact [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: To say that 'if' there are two persons and each person has two eyes there 'will be' four eyes is not a statement of fact, but a statement about the system of numbers which is our own creation. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], II) | |
| A reaction: One eye for each arm of the people is certainly a fact. Frege uses this equivalence to build numbers. I think Peirce is wrong. If it is not a fact that these people have four eyes, I don't know what 'four' means. It's being two pairs is also a fact. |
| 8568 | A property is merely a constituent of laws of nature; temperature is just part of thermodynamics [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Being a constituent of probabilistic laws of nature is all there is to being a property. There is no more to temperature than the thermodynamics and other laws they occur in. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: How could thermodynamics be worked out without a prior concept of temperature? I think it is at least plausible to deny that there are any 'laws' of nature. But even Quine can't deny that some things are too hot to touch. |
| 8564 | There is obviously a possible predicate for every property [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: To every property there obviously corresponds a possible predicate applying to all and only those particulars with that property. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This doesn't strike me as at all obvious. If nature dictates the properties, there may be vastly more than any human language could cope with. It is daft to say that a property can only exist if humanity can come up with a predicate for it. |
| 8566 | We need universals for causation and laws of nature; the latter give them their identity [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: I take the main reason for believing in contingent universals to be the roles they play in causation and in laws of nature, and those laws are what I take to give those universals their identity. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: He agrees with Armstrong. Sounds a bit circular - laws are built on universals, and universals are identified by laws. It resembles a functionalist account of mental events. I think it is wrong. A different account of laws will be needed... |
| 8565 | If properties were just the meanings of predicates, they couldn't give predicates their meaning [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: One reason for denying that properties just are the meanings of our predicates is that, if they were, they could not give our predicates their meanings. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: Neither way round sounds quite right to me. Predicate nominalism is wrong, but what is meant by a property 'giving' a predicate its meaning? It doesn't seem to allow room for error in our attempts to name the properties. |
| 19553 | Commitment to 'I have a hand' only makes sense in a context where it has been doubted [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: If I utter 'I know I have a hand' then I can only be reckoned a cooperative conversant by my interlocutors on the assumption that there was a real question as to whether I have a hand. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to point to the contextualist approach to global scepticism, which concerns whether we are setting the bar high or low for 'knowledge'. |
| 14770 | Reasoning is based on statistical induction, so it can't achieve certainty or precision [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: All positive reasoning is judging the proportion of something in a whole collection by the proportion found in a sample. Hence we can never hope to attain absolute certainty, absolute exactitude, absolute universality. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], II) | |
| A reaction: This is the basis of Peirce's fallibilism - that all 'positive' reasoning (whatever that it?) is based on statistical induction. I'm all in favour of fallibilism, but find Peirce's claim to be a bit too narrow. He was too mesmerised by physical science. |
| 14774 | Innate truths are very uncertain and full of error, so they certainly have exceptions [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me there is the most historic proof that innate truths are particularly uncertain and mixed up with error, and therefore a fortiori not without exception. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], II) |
| 14772 | If we decide an idea is inspired, we still can't be sure we have got the idea right [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Even if we decide that an idea really is inspired, we cannot be sure, or nearly sure, that the statement is true. We know one of the commandments of the Bible was printed without a 'not' in it. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], II) |
| 14773 | A truth is hard for us to understand if it rests on nothing but inspiration [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: A truth which rests on the authority of inspiration only is of a somewhat incomprehensible nature; and we can never be sure that we rightly comprehend it. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], II) |
| 14771 | Only reason can establish whether some deliverance of revelation really is inspired [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: We never can be absolutely certain that any given deliverance [of revelation] really is inspired; for that can only be established by reasoning. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], II) |
| 19551 | How can we know the heavyweight implications of normal knowledge? Must we distort 'knowledge'? [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Those who deny skepticism but accept closure will have to explain how we know the various 'heavyweight' skeptical hypotheses to be false. Do we then twist the concept of knowledge to fit the twin desiderata of closue and anti-skepticism? | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [He is giving Dretske's view; Dretske says we do twist knowledge] Thus if I remember yesterday, that has the heavyweight implication that the past is real. Hawthorne nicely summarises why closure produces a philosophical problem. |
| 19552 | We wouldn't know the logical implications of our knowledge if small risks added up to big risks [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Maybe one cannot know the logical consequences of the proposition that one knows, on account of the fact that small risks add up to big risks. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: The idea of closure is that the new knowledge has the certainty of logic, and each step is accepted. An array of receding propositions can lose reliability, but that shouldn't apply to logic implications. Assuming monotonic logic, of course. |
| 19554 | Denying closure is denying we know P when we know P and Q, which is absurd in simple cases [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: How could we know that P and Q but not be in a position to know that P (as deniers of closure must say)? If my glass is full of wine, we know 'g is full of wine, and not full of non-wine'. How can we deny that we know it is not full of non-wine? | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: Hawthorne merely raises this doubt. Dretske is concerned with heavyweight implications, but how do you accept lightweight implications like this one, and then suddenly reject them when they become too heavy? [see p.49] |
| 14769 | Only imagination can connect phenomena together in a rational way [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: We can stare stupidly at phenomena; but in the absence of imagination they will not connect themselves together in any rational way. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism [1899], I) | |
| A reaction: The importance of this is its connection between imagination and 'rational' understanding. This is an important corrective to a crude traditional picture of the role of imagination. I would connect imagination with counterfactuals and best explanation. |
| 8567 | Singular causation requires causes to raise the physical probability of their effects [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Singular causation entails physical probabilities or chances. ...Causal laws require causes to raise their effects' chances, as when fires have a greater chance of occurring when explosions do. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: It seems fairly obvious that a probability can be increased without actually causing something. Just after a harmless explosion is a good moment for arsonists, especially if Mellor will be the investigating officer. |