45 ideas
| 7623 | For ancient Greeks being wise was an ethical value [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: An ancient Greek would have said that being wise is an ethical value. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This is instantly appealing, but since the Enlightenment we are under an obligation to attempt to justify absolutely everything, including the value of wisdom. I'm thinking that it only has value if it leads to eudaimonia. |
| 4642 | No fact can be real and no proposition true unless there is a Sufficient Reason (even if we can't know it) [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The principle of sufficient reason says no fact can be real or existing and no proposition can be true unless there is a sufficient reason why it should be thus and not otherwise, even though in most cases these reasons cannot be known to us. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §32) | |
| A reaction: I think of this as my earliest philosophical perception, a childish rebellion against being told that there was 'no reason' for something. My intuition tells me that it is correct, and the foundation of ontology and truth. Don't ask me to justify it! |
| 4714 | Putnam's epistemic notion of truth replaces the realism of correspondence with ontological relativism [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: Putnam replaces a correspondence theory of truth with an epistemic notion of truth - truth is idealized rational acceptability. The correspondence theory is committed to realism, but his allows ontological relativism. | |
| From: report of Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be part of a slide by Putnam away from realism towards pragmatism. As a robust and defiant realist, this always strikes me as the road to hell. |
| 7617 | Before Kant, all philosophers had a correspondence theory of truth [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Before Kant it is impossible to find any philosopher who did not have a correspondence theory of truth. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I don't believe this is true of Descartes. See ideas 2266 and 4298. Truth is 'clear and distinct' conceptions, but if you enlarge (and maybe socialise) 'clear' you get coherent. Descartes firmly avoids correspondence, because he can't trust 'facts'. |
| 4716 | The correspondence theory is wrong, because there is no one correspondence between reality and fact [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: Putnam argues that theory does not correspond to reality, because there are myriad correspondences possible, and we cannot single out "the" relation of correspondence. | |
| From: report of Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This obviously depends on views about reference and meaning. I don't see the problem in simple cases, which is all the correspondence theory needs. Complex cases, like chemistry, may well have ambiguities, but so what? |
| 2115 | Everything in the universe is interconnected, so potentially a mind could know everything [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Every body is sensitive to everything in the universe, so that one who saw everything could read in each body what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened and will happen. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §61) |
| 7616 | Truth is an idealisation of rational acceptability [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Truth is an idealisation of rational acceptability; we speak as if there were such things as epistemically ideal conditions, and we call a statement 'true' if it would be justified under such conditions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: The second part makes human beings sound stupid (which they are not), but the first part is right, and incredibly important. Peirce is behind Putnam's thought. Truth is the target of belief. It isn't a nonsense just because we can't be infallible. |
| 2111 | Falsehood involves a contradiction, and truth is contradictory of falsehood [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We judge to be false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §31) |
| 14203 | Intension is not meaning, as 'cube' and 'square-faced polyhedron' are intensionally the same [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Intension cannot be identified with meaning. ..'Cube' and 'regular polyhedron with six square faces' are logically equivalent predicates. The intension is the same (the function giving the cubes in any possible world) but there is a difference of meaning. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) |
| 14207 | If cats equal cherries, model theory allows reinterpretation of the whole language preserving truth [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: If the number of cats happens to equal the cherries, then it follows from the theory of models that there is a reinterpretation of the entire language that leaves all sentences unchanged in truth value while permuting the extensions of 'cat' and 'cherry'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This horrifying result seems to come simply from the fact that there is an isomorphism between two models, which in turn seems to rest largely on the cardinality of the models. There seems to be something wrong with model theory here (?). |
| 7644 | The monad idea incomprehensibly spiritualises matter, instead of materialising soul [La Mettrie on Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The Leibnizians with their monads have constructed an incomprehensible hypothesis. They have spiritualized matter rather than materialising the soul. | |
| From: comment on Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716]) by Julien Offray de La Mettrie - Machine Man p.3 | |
| A reaction: I agree with La Mettrie. This disagreement shows, I think, how important the problem of interaction between mind and body was in the century after Descartes. Drastic action seemed needed to bridge the gap, one way or the other. |
| 11857 | He replaced Aristotelian continuants with monads [Leibniz, by Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: In the end Leibniz dethroned Aristotelian continuants, seen as imperfect from his point of view, in favour of monads. | |
| From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716]) by David Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed 3.1 | |
| A reaction: I take the 'continuants' to be either the 'ultimate subject of predication' (in 'Categories'), or 'essences' (in 'Metaphysics'). Since monads seem to be mental (presumably to explain the powers of things), this strikes me as a bit mad. |
| 7843 | Is a drop of urine really an infinity of thinking monads? [Voltaire on Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Can you really maintain that a drop of urine is an infinity of monads, and that each one of these has ideas, however obscure, of the entire universe? | |
| From: comment on Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716]) by Francois-Marie Voltaire - works Vol 22:434 | |
| A reaction: Monads are a bit like Christian theology - if you meet them cold they seem totally ridiculous, but if you meet them after ten years of careful preliminary study they make (apparently) complete sense. Defenders of panpsychism presumably like them. |
| 12751 | It is unclear in 'Monadology' how extended bodies relate to mind-like monads. [Garber on Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is never clear in the 'Monadologie' how exactly the world of extended bodies is related to the world of simple substances, the world of non-extended and mind-like monads. | |
| From: comment on Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716]) by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 9 | |
| A reaction: Leibniz was always going to hit the interaction problem, as soon as he started giving an increasingly spiritual account of what a substance, and hence marginalising the 'force' which had held centre-stage earlier on. Presumably they are 'parallel'. |
| 19363 | Changes in a monad come from an internal principle, and the diversity within its substance [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: A monad's natural changes come from an internal principle, ...but there must be diversity in that which changes, which produces the specification and variety of substances. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §11-12) | |
| A reaction: You don't have to like monads to like this generalisation (and Perkins says Leibniz had a genius for generalisations). Metaphysics must give an account of change. Succeeding time-slices etc explain nothing. Principle and substance must meet. |
| 19352 | A 'monad' has basic perception and appetite; a 'soul' has distinct perception and memory [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The general name 'monad' or 'entelechy' may suffice for those substances which have nothing but perception and appetition; the name 'souls' may be reserved for those having perception that is more distinct and accompanied by memory. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §19) | |
| A reaction: It is basic to the study of Leibniz that you don't think monads are full-blown consciousnesses. He isn't really a panpsychist, because the level of mental activity is so minimal. There seem to be degrees of monadhood. |
| 14214 | If we try to cure the abundance of theories with causal links, this is 'just more theory' [Putnam, by Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If we try to base determinate reference on natural causal connection, Putnam says this is just more theory, as subject as any theory to overabundant, conflicting intended interpretations. | |
| From: report of Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981]) by David Lewis - Putnam's Paradox 'Why Are' | |
| A reaction: This is the 1981 Putnam, moving away from the realism that was implicit in the original causal theory of reference developed by himself and Kripke. His 'just more theory' is the slogan of Putnam's later anti-realism. |
| 14205 | The sentence 'A cat is on a mat' remains always true when 'cat' means cherry and 'mat' means tree [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The sentence 'A cat is on a mat' can be reinterpreted so that in the actual world 'cat' refers to cherries and 'mat' refers to trees, without affecting the truth-value of the sentence in any possible world. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This simple suggestion is the basis of a notorious argument in favour of anti-realism. See D.Lewis's 'Putnam's Paradox'. It tracks back to Skolem's doubts about whether infinitary mathematics is possible. Putnam's conclusion sounds daft. |
| 7610 | A fact is simply what it is rational to accept [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I propose that the only criterion for what is a fact is what it is rational to accept. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Pref) | |
| A reaction: An epistemological-ontological confusion here. The concept of a fact is of something which is the case quite independently of our criteria for believing it. There are facts which are unknowable for humans. It is, of course, rational to accept facts. |
| 7618 | Very nominalistic philosophers deny properties, though scientists accept them [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers are so nominalistic that they would deny the existence of such entities as 'properties' altogether; but science itself does not hesitate to talk freely of properties. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Maybe scientists aren't very good at ontology? They talk about forces and energy, but don't seem to know what they are. I am inclined to think that we must include properties in the working ontology of humans, but not into strict physics. |
| 7931 | If a substance is just a thing that has properties, it seems to be a characterless non-entity [Leibniz, by Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: For Leibniz, to distinguish between a substance and its properties in order to provide a thing or entity in which properties can inhere leads necessarily to the absurd conclusion that the substance itself must be a truly characterless non-entity. | |
| From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716]) by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This is obviously one of the basic thoughts in any discussion of substances. It is why physicists ignore them, and Leibniz opted for a 'bundle' theory. But the alternative seems daft too - free-floating properties, hooked onto one another. |
| 17554 | There must be some internal difference between any two beings in nature [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There are never two beings in nature that are perfectly alike, two beings in which it is not possible to discover an internal difference, that is, one founded on an intrinsic denomination. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §09) | |
| A reaction: From this it follows that if two things really are indiscernible, then we must say that they are one thing. He says monads all differ from one another. People certainly do. Leibniz must say this of electrons. How can he know this? |
| 4718 | If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: Putnam endorses the view that necessity is relative to a description, so there is only necessity 'de dicto': relative to language, not to reality. | |
| From: report of Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: Even a realist must take this proposal seriously. The facts may contain de re necessities, but we could be very sceptical about our capacity to know them. Personally I enjoy speculating about de re necessities. They can't stop you. |
| 2112 | Truths of reason are known by analysis, and are necessary; facts are contingent, and their opposites possible [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There are two kinds of truths: of reasoning and of facts. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposites impossible. Facts are contingent and their opposites possible. A necessary truth is known by analysis. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §33) |
| 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'. |
| 9344 | Mathematical analysis ends in primitive principles, which cannot be and need not be demonstrated [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: At the end of the analytical method in mathematics there are simple ideas of which no definition can be given. Moreover there are axioms and postulates, in short, primitive principles, which cannot be demonstrated and do not need demonstration. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §35) | |
| A reaction: My view is that we do not know such principles when we apprehend them in isolation. I would call them 'intuitions'. They only ascend to the status of knowledge when the mathematics is extended and derived from them, and found to work. |
| 2110 | We all expect the sun to rise tomorrow by experience, but astronomers expect it by reason [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: When we expect it to be day tomorrow, we all behave as empiricists, because until now it has always happened thus. The astronomer alone knows this by reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §28) |
| 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] |
| 7620 | Some kind of objective 'rightness' is a presupposition of thought itself [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What the relativist fails to see is that it is a presupposition of thought itself that some kind of objective 'rightness' exists. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This may be the key objection to relativism. If you have a frame of reference, is it a good one? If you have a new perspective, is it better than your old one? Is the culture you live in confused or clear-thinking? Jokes and metaphors rely on truth. |
| 14204 | Naïve operationalism would have meanings change every time the tests change [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: On a naïve operationalist account every time a new way of testing whether a substance is really gold is discovered, the meaning and reference of 'gold' undergoes a change. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) |
| 2109 | Increase a conscious machine to the size of a mill - you still won't see perceptions in it [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If a conscious machine were increased in size, one might enter it like a mill, but we should only see the parts impinging on one another; we should not see anything which would explain a perception. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §17) | |
| A reaction: A wonderful image for capturing a widely held intuition. It seems to motivate Colin McGinn's 'Mysterianism'. The trouble is Leibniz didn't think big/small enough. Down at the level of molecules it might become obvious what a perception is. 'Might'. |
| 19362 | We know the 'I' and its contents by abstraction from awareness of necessary truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is through the knowledge of necessary truths and through their abstraction that we rise to reflective acts, which enable us to think of that which is called "I" and enable us to consider that this or that is in us. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §30) | |
| A reaction: For Leibniz, necessary truth can only be known a priori. Sense experience won't reveal the self, as Hume observed. We evidently 'abstract' the idea of 'I' from the nature of a priori thought. Animals have no self (or morals) for this reason. |
| 7611 | Rationality is one part of our conception of human flourishing [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Our notion of rationality is, at bottom, just one part of our conception of human flourishing, our idea of the good. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This looks like the beginnings of virtue epistemology, since rationality will have criteria, which would seem to be virtues. I find this idea appealing, both as a view of rationality, and as a view of the human good. |
| 14200 | 'Water' on Twin Earth doesn't refer to water, but no mental difference can account for this [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The word 'water' used on Twin Earth refers not to water but to this other liquid (XYZ). Yet there is no relevant difference in the mental state of Twin Earth speakers and speakers on Earth (in 1750) to account for this difference of reference. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: In this world, if you and I separately meet twins, and I think about this twin while you think about that one, our mental states are different even if they are indistinguishable. I know I'm thinking about my twin, not yours. Indexicals. |
| 7612 | Reference is social not individual, because we defer to experts when referring to elm trees [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: My concept of an elm tree is exactly the same as my concept of a beech tree (I blush to confess), which shows that the determination of reference is social and not individual - both you and I defer to experts who can tell elms from beeches. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: If I said 'that tree looks nice' I wouldn't be deferring to experts. Nor if I said 'that tree, which I take to be an elm, looks nice'. If I am an expert I don't defer to experts. |
| 7613 | Concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be building on the idea that meaning is use, and also arises from a background of pragmatism. Perhaps a concept is an acquaintance with a node in platonic space? Lots of abilities aren't concepts, so what distinguishes the concepts? |
| 14202 | Neither individual nor community mental states fix reference [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Mental state (in either the individualistic or the collective sense) does not fix reference. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: The idea that communities fix reference seems to me plausible. See Tyler Burge on this. |
| 14201 | Maybe the total mental state of a language community fixes the reference of a term [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: One might concede that the reference of a person's term isn't fixed by his individual mental state, but insist that the total mental state of all the members of the language community fixes the reference of the term. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: I like this reading of the problem, though Putnam himself prefers to say that things fix the reference. I take reference to be a human action, not a natural causal relation. Animals connecting thought to object may not count as reference at all. |
| 14206 | There are infinitely many interpretations of a sentence which can all seem to be 'correct' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: There are always infinitely many different interpretations of the predicates of a language which assign 'correct' truth-values to the sentences in all possible worlds, no matter how those 'correct' truth-values are singled out. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: Putnam says that he is using this argument from model theory to endorse the scepticism about 'gavagai' that Quine expressed in 1960. It is based on the ideas of Skolem, who was a renegade philosopher of mathematics. See Tim Button. |
| 7624 | The word 'inconsiderate' nicely shows the blurring of facts and values [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The use of the word 'inconsiderate' seems to me a very fine example of the way in which the fact/value distinction is hopelessly fuzzy in the real world and in the real language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981]) | |
| A reaction: Interesting, but not much of an argument. What would Nietzsche say? Was Agamemnon morally deficient because we might think him 'inconsiderate'? |
| 12707 | The true elements are atomic monads [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Monads are the true atoms of nature and, in brief, the elements of things. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], (opening)), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 2 | |
| A reaction: Thus in one sentence Leibniz gives us a theory of natural elements, and an account of atoms. This kind of speculation got metaphysics a bad name when science unravelled a more accurate picture. The bones must be picked out of Leibniz. |
| 2114 | This is the most perfect possible universe, in its combination of variety with order [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: From all the possible universes God chooses this one to obtain as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible; that is, it is the means of obtaining the greatest perfection possible. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §58) |
| 2113 | God alone (the Necessary Being) has the privilege that He must exist if He is possible [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: God alone (or the Necessary Being) has the privilege that He must exist if He is possible. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Monadology [1716], §45) |