Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'The Case for Closure', 'Logic and Conversation' and 'From Stimulus to Science'

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9 ideas

2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 3. Non-Contradiction
To affirm 'p and not-p' is to have mislearned 'and' or 'not' [Quine]
     Full Idea: To affirm a compound of the form 'p and not-p' is just to have mislearned one or both of these particles.
     From: Willard Quine (From Stimulus to Science [1995], p.23), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.1
     A reaction: Quoted by Fogelin. This summarises the view of logic developed by the young Wittgenstein, that logical terms are 'operators', rather than referring terms. Of course the speaker may have a compartmentalised mind, or not understand 'p' properly.
10. Modality / B. Possibility / 8. Conditionals / c. Truth-function conditionals
Conditionals are truth-functional, but we must take care with misleading ones [Grice, by Edgington]
     Full Idea: Grice argued that the truth-functional account of conditionals can withstand objections, provided that we are careful to distinguish the false from the misleadingly true.
     From: report of H. Paul Grice (Logic and Conversation [1975]) by Dorothy Edgington - Do Conditionals Have Truth Conditions? 2
The odd truth table for material conditionals is explained by conversational conventions [Grice, by Fisher]
     Full Idea: According to Grice, it is the rules that govern conversation beyond the merely logical that account for the counter-intuitiveness of the truth table for the material conditional.
     From: report of H. Paul Grice (Logic and Conversation [1975]) by Jennifer Fisher - On the Philosophy of Logic 8.I
     A reaction: There is a conversational rule which says that replies should normally relevant to context. It would be nice if logical implications were also relevant to context.
Conditionals might remain truth-functional, despite inappropriate conversational remarks [Edgington on Grice]
     Full Idea: Grice defended the truth-functional account of conditionals, noting the gap between what we are justified in believing and what is appropriate to say. .But the problem arises at the level of belief, not at the level of inappropriate conversational remarks
     From: comment on H. Paul Grice (Logic and Conversation [1975]) by Dorothy Edgington - Conditionals 17.1.3
10. Modality / B. Possibility / 8. Conditionals / f. Pragmatics of conditionals
A person can be justified in believing a proposition, though it is unreasonable to actually say it [Grice, by Edgington]
     Full Idea: Grice drew attention to situations in which a person is justified in believing a proposition, which would nevertheless by an unreasonable thing for the person to say, in normal circumstances. I think he is right about disjunction and negated conjunctions.
     From: report of H. Paul Grice (Logic and Conversation [1975]) by Dorothy Edgington - Conditionals (Stanf) 2.4
     A reaction: Edgington considers Grice's ideas of implicature as of permanent value, especially as a clarification of 1950s ordinary language philosophy.
11. Knowledge Aims / B. Certain Knowledge / 2. Common Sense Certainty
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'.
13. Knowledge Criteria / A. Justification Problems / 2. Justification Challenges / c. Knowledge closure
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.
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.
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]