9 ideas
| 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'. |
| 7401 | Heat and colour don't exist, so cannot mislead about the external world [Galileo, by Tuck] |
| Full Idea: Galileo argued that there is no such thing as heat (and hence also as colour) in the external world, so there is no reason to conclude from colour-blindness that we cannot know the truth about the world. | |
| From: report of Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]) by Richard Tuck - Hobbes Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: This key idea, taken up by Gassendi, Descartes and Locke, seems to me to be one of the most important (and, in retrospect, rather obvious) facts ever worked out by the human mind. Why does anyone still doubt it? |
| 5454 | Tastes, odours and colours only reside in consciousness, and would disappear with creatures [Galileo] |
| Full Idea: I think tastes, odours, colours, and so on are mere names as far as the objects are concerned, and only reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. | |
| From: Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]), quoted by Brian Ellis - The Philosophy of Nature: new essentialism Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: A nice bold assertion of the primary/secondary distinction from the first great scientist. I agree, and to disagree (and hence side with Berkeley and Hume) is to head for metaphsical and epistemological confusion. |
| 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] |
| 16560 | Galileo introduced geometrico-mechanical explanation, based on Archimedes [Galileo, by Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: The modern idea of explaining with mechanisms became current in the 17th century when Galileo articulated a geometrico-mechanical form of explanation based on Archimedes' simple machines. This became the 'mechanical philosophy'. | |
| From: report of Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]) by Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C - Thinking About Mechanisms 5.2 | |
| A reaction: So is Archimedes the source? I would say that mechanical explanation is just commonsense, and is predominant in all human thinking, even in tiny infants. |
| 3645 | To understand the universe mathematics is essential [Galileo] |
| Full Idea: The great book of the universe cannot be understood unless one can understand the language in which it is written - the language of mathematics. | |
| From: Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623], VI.232) | |
| A reaction: Nice, though one might say that humans created the language of maths to help them discuss the patterns they perceived in nature. Maybe what is special is order, and all order can be described mathematically. |
| 17009 | I won't object if someone shows that gravity consistently arises from the action of matter [Newton] |
| Full Idea: If someone explains gravity along with all its laws by the action of some subtle matter, and shows that the motion of the planets and comets will not be disturbed by this matter, I shall be far from objecting. | |
| From: Isaac Newton (Letters to Leibniz 1 [1693], 1693.10.16) | |
| A reaction: Important if you think that Newton is the hero of the descriptive regularity theory of laws. Newton probably thought laws came from God, but he wouldn't object to Leibniz's view, that God planted the laws within the matter. |