8 ideas
| 19696 | There are reasons 'for which' a belief is held, reasons 'why' it is believed, and reasons 'to' believe it [Neta] |
| Full Idea: We must distinguish between something's being a 'reason for which' a creature believes something, and its being a 'reason why' a creature believes something. ...We must also distinguish a 'reason for which' from a 'reason to' believe something. | |
| From: Ram Neta (The Basing Relation [2011], Intro) | |
| A reaction: He doesn't spell the distinctions out clearly. I take it that 'for which' is my personal justification, 'why' is the dodgy prejudices that cause my belief. and 'to' is some actual good reasons, of which I may be unaware. |
| 19697 | The basing relation of a reason to a belief should both support and explain the belief [Neta] |
| Full Idea: A reason has a 'basing relation' with a belief if it (i) rationally supports holding the belief, and (ii) explains why the belief is held. | |
| From: Ram Neta (The Basing Relation [2011], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Presumably a false reason would fit this account. Why not talk of 'grounding', or is that word now reserved for metaphysics? If I hypnotise you into a belief, would my hypnotic power be the basing reason? Fits (ii), but not (i). |
| 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] |
| 21995 | Must production determine superstructure, or could it be the other way round? [Singer on Marx] |
| Full Idea: Once the 'interaction' between the superstructure and the productive forces is admitted, is it still possible to maintain that production determines the superstructure, rather than the other way round? | |
| From: comment on Karl Marx (Capital Vol. 1 [1867]) by Peter Singer - Marx 7 | |
| A reaction: It is much harder to defend historical determinism if Singer is right about this. Modern capitalism won't admit of the sort of simple distinctions that mark was looking for. |
| 20577 | Even decently paid workers still have their produce bought with money stolen from them [Marx] |
| Full Idea: Even if the workers are paid a fair wage, the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money has has stolen from them, | |
| From: Karl Marx (Capital Vol. 1 [1867], p.728), quoted by Johanna Oksala - Political Philosophy: all that matters Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: [Penguin edition cited] The word 'stolen' is obviously dubious here. 'Exploitation' is a much more accurate word. One might talk of 'blackmail' or 'extortion' rather than theft. |