3 ideas
| 18284 | Particulars can be verified or falsified, but general statements can only be falsified (conclusively) [Popper] |
| Full Idea: Whereas particular reality statements are in principle completely verifiable or falsifiable, things are different for general reality statements: they can indeed be conclusively falsified, they can acquire a negative truth value, but not a positive one. | |
| From: Karl Popper (Two Problems of Epistemology [1932], p.256), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 18 'Laws' | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a logician's approach to science, but I prefer to look at coherence, where very little is actually conclusive, and one tinkers with the theory instead. |
| 3449 | If parallelism is true, how does the mind know about the body? [Crease] |
| Full Idea: In parallelism, the idea that we have a body is like an astronaut hearing shouting on the moon, and reasoning that as this is impossible he must be simultaneously imagining shouting AND there is real shouting taking place! | |
| From: Jason Crease (works [2001]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: This seems to capture the absurdity of Leibniz's proposal. I experience what my brain is doing, but not because my brain is doing it. I would never know if God had made a slight error in setting His two 'clocks'; their accuracy is just a pious hope. |
| 9145 | We form the image of a cardinal number by a double abstraction, from the elements and from their order [Cantor] |
| Full Idea: We call 'cardinal number' the general concept which, by means of our active faculty of thought, arises when we make abstraction from an aggregate of its various elements, and of their order. From this double abstraction the number is an image in our mind. | |
| From: George Cantor (Beitrage [1915], §1), quoted by Kit Fine - Cantorian Abstraction: Recon. and Defence Intro | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This is the great Cantor, creator of set theory, endorsing the traditional abstractionism which Frege and his followers so despise. Fine offers a defence of it. The Frege view is platonist, because it refuses to connect numbers to the world. |