30 ideas
| 14193 | 'Substance theorists' take modal properties as primitive, without structure, just falling under a sortal [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: Some deep essentialists resist the need to explain the structure under de re modal properties, taking them as primitive. One version (which we can call 'substance theory') takes them to fall under a sortal concept, with no further explanation. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], §1) | |
| A reaction: A very helpful identification of what Wiggins stands for, and why I disagree with him. The whole point of essences is to provide a notion that fits in with sciences, which means they must have an explanatory role, which needs structures. |
| 14195 | If an object's sort determines its properties, we need to ask what determines its sort [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: If the substance essentialist holds that the sort an object belongs to determines its de re modal properties (rather than the other way round), then he needs to give an (ontological, not conceptual) explanation of what determines an object's sort. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], §1) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 14193 for 'substance essentialism'. I find it quite incredible that anyone could think that a thing's sort could determine its properties, rather than the other way round. Even if sortals are conventional, they are not arbitrary. |
| 14196 | Substance essentialism says an object is multiple, as falling under various different sortals [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: The explanation of material constitution given by substance essentialism is that there are multiple objects. A person is essentially human-shaped (falling under the human sort), while their hunk of tissue is accidentally human-shaped (as tissue). | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], §1) | |
| A reaction: At this point sortal essentialism begins to look crazy. Persons are dubious examples (with sneaky dualism involved). A bronze statue is essentially harder to dent than a clay one, because of its bronze. If you remake it of clay, it isn't the same statue. |
| 14198 | Absolutely unrestricted qualitative composition would allow things with incompatible properties [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: Absolutely unrestricted qualitative composition would imply that objects with incompatible properties and objects such as winged pigs or golden mountains were actual. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], §5) | |
| A reaction: Note that this is 'qualitative' composition, and not composition of parts. The objection seems to rule out unrestricted qualitative composition, since you could hardly combine squareness with roundness. |
| 14190 | Deep essentialist objects have intrinsic properties that fix their nature; the shallow version makes it contextual [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism says that objects have their properties essentially. 'Deep' essentialists take the (nontrivial) essential properties of an object to determine its nature. 'Shallow' essentialists substitute context-dependent truths for the independent ones. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: If the deep essence determines a things nature, we should not need to say 'nontrivial'. This is my bete noire, the confusion of essential properties with necessary ones, where necessary properties (or predicates, at least) can indeed be trivial. |
| 14191 | Deep essentialists say essences constrain how things could change; modal profiles fix natures [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: The deep essentialist holds that most objects have essential properties such that there are many ways they could not be, or many changes through which they could not persist. Objects' modal profiles characterize their natures. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is the view I like, especially the last bit. If your modal profile doesn't determine your nature, then what does? Think of how you sum up a person at a funeral. Your modal profile is determined by dispositions and powers. |
| 14192 | Essentialism must deal with charges of arbitrariness, and failure to reduce de re modality [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: Two objections to deep essentialism are that it falters when faced with a skeptical objection concerning arbitrariness, and the need for a reductive account of de re modality. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: An immediate response to the second objection might be to say that modal facts about things are not reducible. The charge of arbitrariness (i.e. total arbitrariness, not just a bit of uncertainty) is the main thing a theory of essences must deal with. |
| 14197 | An object's modal properties don't determine its possibilities [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: I reject the view that an object's de re modal properties determine its relations to possibilia. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], §3) | |
| A reaction: You'll have to read Paul to see why, but I flat disagree with her on this. The whole point of accepting such properties is to determine the modal profile of the thing, and hence see how it can fit into and behave in the world. |
| 14189 | 'Modal realists' believe in many concrete worlds, 'actualists' in just this world, 'ersatzists' in abstract other worlds [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: A 'modal realist' believes that there are many concrete worlds, while the 'actualist' believes in only one concrete world, the actual world. The 'ersatzist' is an actualist who takes nonactual possible worlds and their contents to be abstracta. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: My view is something like that modal realism is wrong, and actualism is right, and possible worlds (if they really are that useful) are convenient abstract fictions, constructed (if we have any sense) out of the real possibilities in the actual world. |
| 23551 | It is necessary for a belief that it be held for a length of time [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: A mental state cannot count as a belief unless it has a reasonable life expectancy. It must be the sort of thing that one is disposed to assert not only now but in the future too. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: There are obvious counterexamples, where a firm belief is strongly formed, only to be dashed by a counterexample (such as a new witness in court) soon afterwards. That said, this idea is obviously correct. |
| 23558 | Offering knowledge needs accuracy and sincerity; receiving it needs testimonial justice [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: Accuracy and Sincerity sustain trust as regards contributing knowledge to the pool; Testimonial Justice helps sustain trust as regards acquiring knowledge from the pool. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: Fricker's contribution is to show that acquiring knowledge has its own virtues, alongside discovering and communicating it. I take the underlying virtue to be absolute respect for all possible contributors. |
| 23550 | Burge says we are normally a priori entitled to believe testimony [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: In Tyler Burge's view we have an a priori entitlement for believing what others tell us, other things being equal. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 1.3 n11) | |
| A reaction: [Burge 'Content Preservation' 1992] Close to Davidson's Charity (that without a default assumption of truth-speaking language won't work at all). Davidson is right about casual conversation, but for important testimony Burge should be more cautious. |
| 23552 | We assess testimonial probabilities by the speaker, the listener, the facts, and the circumstances [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: A person should receive the word of his interlocutor in the light of the probability that someone like that would (be able and willing to) to tell someone like him the truth about something like this in circumstances like these. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: That's a pretty good summary of the rational response to testimony. I can't think of any other factors. |
| 23553 | Testimonial judgement is not logical, but produces reasons and motivations [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: Moral/testimonial judgement is non-inferential, uncodifiable, intrinsically motivating, intrinsically reason-giving, and typically has an emotional aspect. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Fricker's compressed summary of her findings about testimony. The first words indicate her belief that assessment of testimony is a moral affair. |
| 23555 | Assessing credibility involves the impact of both the speaker's and the listener's social identity [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: For a hearer to identify the impact of identity power in their credibility judgements they must be alert to the impact not only of the speaker's social identity, but also the impact of the own social identity on their credibility judgements. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [why are all sentences in academic writing twice as long as they need to be? - that question is deeper than it looks!] This is a salutary warning. Not just 'what are my prejudices?', but also 'what is this person willing to tell a person like me?'. |
| 2584 | Lobotomised patients can cease to care about a pain [Block] |
| Full Idea: After frontal lobotomies, patients typically report that they still have pains, though the pains no longer bother them. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 83) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be an endorsement of reductive physicalism, because what matters about pains is that they bother us, not how they feel, so frog pain could do the job, if it felt different from ours, but was disliked by the frog. |
| 2582 | A brain looks no more likely than anything else to cause qualia [Block] |
| Full Idea: NO physical mechanism seems very intuitively plausible as a seat of qualia, least of all a brain. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 78) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about "least of all", given the mind-boggling complexity of the brain's connections. Certainly, though, nothing in either folk physics or academic physics suggests that any physical object is likely to be aware of anything. |
| 2574 | Behaviour requires knowledge as well as dispositions [Block] |
| Full Idea: A desire cannot be identified with a disposition to act, since the agent might not know that a particular act leads to the thing desired, and thus might not be disposed to do it. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: One might have a disposition to act, but not in a particular way. "Something must be done". To get to the particular act, it seems that indeed a belief must be added to the desire. |
| 2576 | In functionalism, desires are internal states with causal relations [Block] |
| Full Idea: According to functionalism, a system might have the behaviouristic input-output relations, yet not desire something, as this requires internal states with certain causal relations. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: Such a system might be Putnam's 'superactor', who only behaves as if he desires something. Of course, the internal states might need more than just 'causal relations'. |
| 2575 | Functionalism is behaviourism, but with mental states as intermediaries [Block] |
| Full Idea: Functionalism is a new incarnation of behaviourism, replacing sensory inputs with sensory inputs plus mental states, and replacing dispositions to act with dispositions plus certain mental states. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: I think of functionalism as behaviourism which extends inside the 'black box' between stimulus and response. It proposes internal stimuli and responses. Consequently functionalism inherits some behaviourist problems. |
| 2583 | You might invert colours, but you can't invert beliefs [Block] |
| Full Idea: It is hard to see how to make sense of the analog of color spectrum inversion with respect to non-qualitative states such a beliefs (where they are functionally equivalent but have different beliefs). | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 81) | |
| A reaction: I would suggest that beliefs can be 'inverted', because there are all sorts of ways to implement a belief, but colour can't be inverted, because that depends on a particular brain state. It makes good sense to me... |
| 2578 | Could a creature without a brain be in the right functional state for pain? [Block] |
| Full Idea: If pain is a functional state, it cannot be a brain state, because creatures without brains could realise the same Turing machine as creatures with brains. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a poorly grounded claim. There may be some hypothetical world where brainless creatures implement all our functions, but from here brains look the only plausible option. |
| 2585 | Not just any old functional network will have mental states [Block] |
| Full Idea: If there are any fixed points in the mind-body problem, one of them is that the economy of Bolivia could not have mental states, no matter how it is distorted. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 86) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to disagree with this, but then it can hardly be a serious suggestion that anyone could see how to reconfigure an economy so that it mapped the functional state of the human brain. This is not a crucial problem. |
| 2586 | In functionalism, what are the special inputs and outputs of conscious creatures? [Block] |
| Full Idea: In functionalism, it is very hard to see how there could be a single physical characterization of the inputs and outputs of all and only creatures with mentality. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 87) | |
| A reaction: It would be theoretically possible if the only way to achieve mentality was to have a particular pattern of inputs and outputs. I don't think, though, that 'mentality' is an all-or-nothing concept. |
| 2579 | Physicalism is prejudiced in favour of our neurology, when other systems might have minds [Block] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism is a chauvinist theory: it withholds mental properties from systems that in fact have them. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 71) | |
| A reaction: This criticism interprets physicalism too rigidly. There may be several ways to implement a state. My own view is that other systems might implement our functions, but they won't experience them in a human way. |
| 23554 | Judgements can be unreflective and non-inferential, yet rational, by being sensitive to experience [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: Our idea of testimonial sensibility is a spontaneous critical sensitivity permanently in training and adapting to experience. …This gives us a picture of how judgements can be rational yet unreflective, critical yet non-inferential. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: Love this. I want to connect human reasoning to good judgement by animals, and I offer the word 'sensible' to bridge the gap. Dogs and scientists can be sensible. Fricker spells out more fully what I have in mind, with reference to testimony. |
| 2577 | Simple machine-functionalism says mind just is a Turing machine [Block] |
| Full Idea: In the simplest Turing-machine version of functionalism (Putnam 1967), mental states are identified with the total Turing-machine state, involving a machine table and its inputs and outputs. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: This obviously invites the question of why mental states would be conscious and phenomenal, given that modern computers are devoid of same, despite being classy Turing machines. |
| 2580 | A Turing machine, given a state and input, specifies an output and the next state [Block] |
| Full Idea: In a Turing machine, given any state and input, the machine table specifies an output and the next state. …To have full power the tape must be infinite in at least one direction, and be movable in both directions. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 71) | |
| A reaction: In retrospect, the proposal that this feeble item should be taken as a model for the glorious complexity and richness of human consciousness doesn't look too plausible. |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| Full Idea: Linguistics rejects (on theoretical grounds) the intuition that the sentence "the boy the girl the cat bit scratched died" is ungrammatical. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 78) | |
| A reaction: Once we have disentangled it, we practical speakers have no right to say it is ungrammatical. It isn't only theory. The sentence is just stylistically infelicitous. |
| 23557 | To judge agents in remote times and cultures we need a moral resentment weaker than blame [Fricker,M] |
| Full Idea: I think that identifying forms of moral resentment that fall short of blame but which are agent-directed is the key to achieving appropriate moral response across historical and cultural distance. | |
| From: Miranda Fricker (Epistemic Injustice [2007], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Very good. Simple blame for horrible actions performed in remote rather horrible societies is pointless. But switching off moral sensibilities when reading history and anthropology looks like a slippery slope, so 'moral resentment' is nice. |