14 ideas
| 6396 | A sentence is held true because of a combination of meaning and belief [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: A sentence is held true because of two factors: what the holder takes the sentence to mean, and what he believes. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.20) | |
| A reaction: A key question is whether a belief (e.g. an imagistic one, or one held by an animal) could be true, even though no sentence is involved. Linguistic philosophers tend to avoid this question, or assume the answer is 'no'. |
| 13745 | Supervenience is not a dependence relation, on the lines of causal, mereological or semantic dependence [Kim] |
| Full Idea: It is a mistake, or at least misleading, to think of supervenience itself as a special and distinctive type of dependence relation, alongside causal dependence, mereological dependence, semantic dependence, and others. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Postscripts on supervenience [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: The point, I take it, is that supervenience is something which requires explanation, rather than being a conclusion to the debate. Why are statues beautiful? Why do brains generate minds? |
| 13746 | Supervenience is just a 'surface' relation of pattern covariation, which still needs deeper explanation [Kim] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience itself is not an explanatory relation, not a 'deep' metaphysical relation; rather it is a 'surface' relation that reports a pattern of property covariation, suggesting the presence of an interesting dependency relation that might explain it. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Postscripts on supervenience [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I think the underlying idea here is that supervenience appeals to the Humean view of physical laws as mere regularities, but it is no good for those who seek underlying mechanisms to explain the patterns and regularities. Humeans are wrong. |
| 11145 | Having a belief involves the possibility of being mistaken [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Someone cannot have a belief unless he understands the possibility of being mistaken. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.170) | |
| A reaction: If you pretend to throw a ball for a dog, but don't release it, the dog experiences being mistaken very dramatically. |
| 6397 | The concept of belief can only derive from relationship to a speech community [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: We have the idea of belief from its role in the interpretation of language; as a private attitude it is not intelligible except in relation to public language. So a creature must be a member of a speech community to have the concept of belief. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.22) | |
| A reaction: This shows how Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument (e.g. Idea 4152) hovers behind Davidson's philosophy. The idea is quite persuasive. A solitary creature just follows its mental states. The question of whether it believes them is a meta-thought. |
| 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'. |
| 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] |
| 6392 | Thought depends on speech [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: The thesis I want to refine and then argue for is that thought depends on speech. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.8) | |
| A reaction: This has the instant and rather implausible implication that animals don't think. He is not, of course, saying that all thought is speech, which would leave out thinking in images. You can't do much proper thought without concepts and propositions. |
| 6393 | A creature doesn't think unless it interprets another's speech [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: A creature cannot have a thought unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.9) | |
| A reaction: His use of the word 'creature' shows that he is perfectly aware of the issue of whether animals think, and he is, presumably, denying it. At first glance this sounds silly, but maybe animals don't really 'think', in our sense of the word. |
| 11144 | Concepts are only possible in a language community [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: A private attitude is not intelligible except as an adjustment to the public norms provided by language. It follows that a creature must be a member of speech community if it is to have the concept of belief. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.170) | |
| A reaction: This obviously draws on Wittgenstein's private language argument, and strikes me as blatantly wrong, because I take higher animals to have concepts without language. Pure vision gives rise to concepts. I don't even think they are necessarily conscious. |
| 6395 | An understood sentence can be used for almost anything; it isn't language if it has only one use [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Once a sentence is understood, an utterance of it may be used to serve almost any extra-linguistic purpose; an instrument that could be put to only one use would lack autonomy of meaning, which means it should not be counted as language. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.17) | |
| A reaction: I find this point very appealing, in opposition to the Wittgenstein view of meaning as use. Passwords seem to me a striking case of the separation of meaning and use. I like the phrase 'autonomy of meaning'. Random sticks can form a word. |
| 6394 | The pattern of sentences held true gives sentences their meaning [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Although most utterances are not concerned with truth, it is the pattern of sentences held true that gives sentences their meaning. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.14) | |
| A reaction: Davidson's distinctive version of meaning holism, as opposed to Quine's rather behaviouristic version. I agree that we relate to people through the pattern of sentences they hold true, but I am unconvinced that this 'gives sentences their meaning'. |