39 ideas
| 3358 | Metaphysics focuses on Platonism, essentialism, materialism and anti-realism [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: In contemporary metaphysics the major areas of discussion are Platonism, essentialism, materialism and anti-realism. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], After) |
| 3312 | There are the 'is' of predication (a function), the 'is' of identity (equals), and the 'is' of existence (quantifier) [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: At least since Russell, one has routinely distinguished between the 'is' of predication ('Socrates is wise', Fx), the 'is' of identity ('Morning Star is Evening Star', =), and the 'is' of existence ('the cat is under the bed', Ex). | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: This seems horribly nitpicking to many people, but I love it - because it is just true, and it is a truth right at the basis of the confusions in our talk. Analytic philosophy forever! [P.S. 'Tiddles is a cat' - the 'is' membership] |
| 3352 | Analytical philosophy analyses separate concepts successfully, but lacks a synoptic vision of the results [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Analytical philosophy excels in the piecemeal analysis of causation, perception, knowledge and so on, but there is a striking poverty of any synoptic vision of these independent studies. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.22) |
| 3329 | Presumably the statements of science are true, but should they be taken literally or not? [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: As our bible, the Book of Science is presumed to contain only true sentences, but it is less clear how they are to be construed, which literally and which non-literally. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.13) |
| 6334 | The function of the truth predicate? Understanding 'true'? Meaning of 'true'? The concept of truth? A theory of truth? [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: We must distinguish the function of the truth predicate, what it is to understand 'true', the meaning of 'true', grasping the concept of truth, and a theory of truth itself. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.8) | |
| A reaction: It makes you feel tired to think about it. Presumably every other philosophical analysis has to do this many jobs. Clearly Horwich wants to propose one account which will do all five jobs. Personally I don't believe these five are really distinct. |
| 6342 | Some correspondence theories concern facts; others are built up through reference and satisfaction [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: One correspondence theory (e.g. early Wittgenstein) concerns representations and facts; alternatively (Tarski, Davidson) the category of fact is eschewed, and the truth of sentences or propositions is built out of relations of reference and satisfaction. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.7.35) | |
| A reaction: A helpful distinction. Clearly the notion of a 'fact' is an elusive one ("how many facts are there in this room?"), so it seems quite promising to say that the parts of the sentence correspond, rather than the whole thing. |
| 6332 | The common-sense theory of correspondence has never been worked out satisfactorily [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The common-sense notion that truth is a kind of 'correspondence with the facts' has never been worked out to anyone's satisfaction. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I've put this in to criticise it. Philosophy can't work by rejecting theories which can't be 'worked out', and accepting theories (like Tarski's) because they can be 'worked out'. All our theories will end up minimal, and defiant of common sense. |
| 6335 | The redundancy theory cannot explain inferences from 'what x said is true' and 'x said p', to p [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The redundancy theory is unable to account for the inference from "Oscar's claim is true" and "Oscar's claim is that snow is white" to "the proposition 'that snow is white' is true", and hence to "snow is white". | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.9) | |
| A reaction: Earlier objections appealed to the fact that the word 'true' seemed to have a use in ordinary speech, but this seems a much stronger one. In general, showing the role of a term in making inferences pins it down better than ordinary speech does. |
| 6344 | Truth is a useful concept for unarticulated propositions and generalisations about them [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: All uses of the truth predicate are explained by the hypothesis that its entire raison d'être is to help us say things about unarticulated propositions, and in particular to express generalisations about them. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Concl) | |
| A reaction: This certain is a very deflationary notion of truth. Articulated propositions are considered to stand on their own two feet, without need of 'is true'. He makes truth sound like a language game, though. Personally I prefer to mention reality. |
| 6336 | No deflationary conception of truth does justice to the fact that we aim for truth [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: It has been suggested that no deflationary conception of truth could do justice to the fact that we aim for the truth. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.11) | |
| A reaction: (He mentions Dummett and Wright). People don't only aim for it - they become very idealistic about it, and sometimes die for it. Personally I think that any study of truth should use as its example police investigations, not philosophical analysis. |
| 23299 | Horwich's deflationary view is novel, because it relies on propositions rather than sentences [Horwich, by Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Horwich's brave and striking move is to make the primary bearers of truth propositions - not exactly a new idea in itself, but new in the context of a serious attempt to defend deflationism. | |
| From: report of Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990]) by Donald Davidson - The Folly of Trying to Define Truth p.30 | |
| A reaction: Davidson rejects propositions because they can't be individuated, but I totally accept propositions. I'm puzzled why this would produce a deflationist theory, since I think it points to a much more robust view. |
| 6337 | The deflationary picture says believing a theory true is a trivial step after believing the theory [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: According to the deflationary picture, believing that a theory is true is a trivial step beyond believing the theory. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.17) | |
| A reaction: What has gone wrong with this picture is that you cannot (it seems to me) give a decent account of belief without mentioning truth. To believe a proposition is to hold it true. Hume's emotional account (Idea 2208) makes belief bewildering. |
| 3326 | Set theory attempts to reduce the 'is' of predication to mathematics [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Set theory offers the promise of a complete mathematization of the 'is' of predication. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.13) |
| 3327 | The set of Greeks is included in the set of men, but isn't a member of it [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Set inclusion is sharply distinguished from set membership (as the set of Greeks is found to be included in, but not a member of, the set of men). | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.13) |
| 3335 | The standard Z-F Intuition version of set theory has about ten agreed axioms [Benardete,JA, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Zermelo proposed seven axioms for set theory, with Fraenkel adding others, to produce the standard Z-F Intuition. | |
| From: report of José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.17) by PG - Db (ideas) |
| 6339 | Logical form is the aspects of meaning that determine logical entailments [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The logical forms of the sentences in a language are those aspects of their meanings that determine the relations of deductive entailment holding amongst them. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.6.30) | |
| A reaction: A helpful definition. Not all sentences, therefore, need to have a 'logical form'. Is the logical form the same as the underlying proposition. The two must converge, given that propositions lack the ambiguity that is often found in sentences. |
| 3332 | Greeks saw the science of proportion as the link between geometry and arithmetic [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: The Greeks saw the independent science of proportion as the link between geometry and arithmetic. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.15) |
| 3330 | Negatives, rationals, irrationals and imaginaries are all postulated to solve baffling equations [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: The Negative numbers are postulated (magic word) to solve x=5-8, Rationals postulated to solve 2x=3, Irrationals for x-squared=2, and Imaginaries for x-squared=-1. (…and Zero for x=5-5) …and x/0 remains eternally open. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.14) |
| 3337 | Natural numbers are seen in terms of either their ordinality (Peano), or cardinality (set theory) [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: One approaches the natural numbers in terms of either their ordinality (Peano), or cardinality (set theory). | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.17) |
| 3310 | If slowness is a property of walking rather than the walker, we must allow that events exist [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Once we conceded that Tom can walk slowly or quickly, and that the slowness and quickness is a property of the walking and not of Tom, we can hardly refrain from quantifying over events (such as 'a walking') in our ontology. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 6) |
| 12793 | Early pre-Socratics had a mass-noun ontology, which was replaced by count-nouns [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: With their 'mass-noun' ontologies, the early pre-Socratics were blind to plurality ...but the count-noun ontologists came to dominate the field forever after. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: The mass-nouns are such things as earth, air, fire and water. This is a very interesting historical observation (cited by Laycock). Our obsession with identity seems tied to formal logic. There is a whole other worldview waiting out there. |
| 3353 | If there is no causal interaction with transcendent Platonic objects, how can you learn about them? [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: How can you learn of the existence of transcendent Platonic objects if there is no causal interaction with them? | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.22) |
| 3304 | Why should packed-together particles be a thing (Mt Everest), but not scattered ones? [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Why suppose these particles packed together constitute a macro-entity (namely, Mt Everest), whereas those, of equal number, scattered around, fail to add up to anything beyond themselves? | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 2) |
| 3350 | Could a horse lose the essential property of being a horse, and yet continue to exist? [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Is being a horse an essential property of a horse? Can we so much as conceive the abstract possibility of a horse's ceasing to be a horse even while continuing to exist? | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.20) |
| 3309 | If a soldier continues to exist after serving as a soldier, does the wind cease to exist after it ceases to blow? [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: If a soldier need not cease to exist merely because he ceases to be a soldier, there is room to doubt that the wind ceases to exist when it ceases to be a wind. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 6) |
| 3351 | One can step into the same river twice, but not into the same water [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: One can step into the same river twice, but one must not expect to step into the same water. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.21) |
| 3314 | Absolutists might accept that to exist is relative, but relative to what? How about relative to itself? [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: With the thesis that to be as such is to be relative, the absolutist may be found to concur, but the issue turns on what it might be that a thing is supposed to be relative to. Why not itself? | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 8) |
| 3323 | Maybe self-identity isn't existence, if Pegasus can be self-identical but non-existent [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: 'Existence' can't be glossed as self-identical (critics say) because Pegasus, even while being self-identical, fails to exist. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.11) |
| 3306 | The clearest a priori knowledge is proving non-existence through contradiction [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: One proves non-existence (e.g. of round squares) by using logic to derive a contradiction from the concept; it is precisely here, in such proofs, that we find the clearest example of a priori knowledge. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 4) |
| 3349 | If we know truths about prime numbers, we seem to have synthetic a priori knowledge of Platonic objects [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Assume that we know to be true propositions of the form 'There are exactly x prime numbers between y and z', and synthetic a priori truths about Platonic objects are delivered to us on a silver platter. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.18) |
| 3341 | Logical positivism amounts to no more than 'there is no synthetic a priori' [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Logical positivism has been concisely summarised as 'there is no synthetic a priori'. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.18) |
| 3344 | Assertions about existence beyond experience can only be a priori synthetic [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: No one thinks that the proposition that something exists that transcends all possible experience harbours a logical inconsistency. Its denial cannot therefore be an analytic proposition, so it must be synthetic, though only knowable on a priori grounds. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.18) |
| 3345 | Appeals to intuition seem to imply synthetic a priori knowledge [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Appeals to intuition - no matter how informal - can hardly fail to smack of the synthetic a priori. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.18) |
| 2975 | That honey is sweet I do not affirm, but I agree that it appears so [Timon] |
| Full Idea: That honey is sweet I do not affirm, but I agree that it appears so. | |
| From: Timon (On Sensations (frags) [c.285 BCE]), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.104-5 |
| 6338 | We could know the truth-conditions of a foreign sentence without knowing its meaning [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: Someone who does not understand German and is told 'Schnee ist weiss' is true if frozen H2O is white, does not understand the German sentence, even though he knows the truth-conditions. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.5.22 n1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a powerful objection to Davidson's well-known claim that meaning is truth-conditions. Horwich likes the idea that meaning is use, but I think a similar objection arises - you can use a sentence well without knowing its meaning. |
| 6340 | There are Fregean de dicto propositions, and Russellian de re propositions, or a mixture [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: There are pure, Fregean, abstract, de dicto propositions, in which a compositional structure is filled only with senses; there are pure, Russellian, concrete, de re propositions, which are filled with referents; and there are mixed propositions. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.6.31) | |
| A reaction: Once Frege has distinguished sense from reference, this distinction of propositions is likely to follow. The current debate over the internalist and externalist accounts of concepts seems to continue the debate. A mixed strategy sounds good. |
| 6341 | Right translation is a mapping of languages which preserves basic patterns of usage [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The right translation between words of two languages is the mapping that preserves basic patterns of usage - where usage is characterised non-semantically, in terms of circumstances of application, assertibility conditions and inferential role. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.6.32) | |
| A reaction: It still strikes me that if you ask why a piece of language is used in a certain way, you find yourself facing something deeper about meaning than mere usage. Horwich cites Wittgenstein and Quine in his support. Could a machine pass his test? |
| 3334 | Rationalists see points as fundamental, but empiricists prefer regions [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: Rationalists have been happier with an ontology of points, and empiricists with an ontology of regions. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch.16) |
| 3308 | In the ontological argument a full understanding of the concept of God implies a contradiction in 'There is no God' [Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: In the ontological argument a deep enough understanding of the very concept of God allows one to derive by logic a contradiction from the statement 'There is no God'. | |
| From: José A. Benardete (Metaphysics: the logical approach [1989], Ch. 4) |