29 ideas
| 22427 | To explain object qualities, primary qualities must be more than mere sources of experience [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: In order that we have available an explanation of the qualities of objects we need to be able to conceive primary qualities as consisting in something other than powers to produce experiences. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6 n 52) | |
| A reaction: I suppose if the qualities are nothing more than the source of the experiences, that is Kant's noumenon. Nothing more could be said. The seems to be a requirement for tacit inference here. We infer the interior of the tomato. |
| 490 | Everything happens by reason and necessity [Leucippus] |
| Full Idea: Nothing happens at random; everything happens out of reason and by necessity. | |
| From: Leucippus (fragments/reports [c.435 BCE], B002), quoted by (who?) - where? |
| 22413 | Being red simply consists in looking red [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: What we should claim is that being red consists in looking red. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: A very nice simple account. There is more to being square than looking square (which may not even guarantee that it is square). That's the primary/secondary distinction in a nut shell. But red things don't look red in the dark. Sufficient, not necessary. |
| 22415 | Relativity means differing secondary perceptions are not real disagreements [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Relativity permits differences in the perceived secondary qualities not to imply genuine disagreement, whereas perceived differences of primary qualities imply that at least one perceiver is in error. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: An example of 'relativity' is colour blindness. Sounds good, but what of one perceiver seeing a square as square, and another seeing it obliquely as a parallelogram? The squareness then seems more like a theory than a perception. |
| 22416 | Phenomenalism is correct for secondary qualities, so scepticism is there impossible [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: We might say that scepticism is ruled out for secondary qualities because (roughly) phenomenalism is correct for them; but phenomenalism is not similarly correct for primary qualities, and scepticism cannot get a foothold. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: An odd idea, if phenomenalism says that reality consists entirely of phenomena. I should think phenomenalism is a commitment to the absence of primary qualities. |
| 22422 | Maybe all possible sense experience must involve both secondary and primary qualities [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The inseparability thesis about perception says that for any actual and possible sense the content of experiences delivered by that sense must be both of secondary qualities and of primary qualities. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: That would mean that all possible experience must have a mode of presentation, and also must be 'of' something independent of experience. So a yellow after-image would not count as an 'experience'? |
| 22428 | You understood being red if you know the experience involved; not so with thngs being square [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: To grasp what it is to be red is to know the kind of sensory experience red things produce; ...but it is not true that to grasp what it is to be square one needs to know what kinds of sensory experience square things produce. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 8) | |
| A reaction: Are any experiences involved in the understanding of squareness? We don't know squareness by a priori intuition (do we?). To grasp squareness if may be necessary to have a variety of experiences of it. Or to grasp that it is primary. |
| 22414 | You don't need to know how a square thing looks or feels to understand squareness [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: To grasp what it is for something to be square it is not constitutively necessary to know how square things look or feel, since what it is to be square does not involve any such relation to experience. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: You could even describe squareness verbally, unlike redness. It seems crucial that almost any sense (such as bat echoes) can communicate primary qualities, but secondary qualities are tied to a sense, and wouldn't exist without it. |
| 22423 | Touch doesn't provide direct experience of primary qualities, because touch feels temperature [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Bennett's claim that touch provides experience of primary qualities without experience of any secondary qualities strikes me as false, because tactile experience includes felt temperature, which is a dispositional secondary quality. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: [J.Bennett 1971 pp. 90-4] Fair point. What about shape and texture? We experience forces, but the shape is assembled in imagination rather than in experience. So do we meet primary qualities directly in forces, such as acceleration? No secondary quality? |
| 22426 | We can perceive objectively, because primary qualities are not mind-created [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I hold that experience succeeds in representing the world objectively, since primary quality perceptual content is not contributed by the mind. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: My new example of a direct perception of a primary quality is acceleration in a lift. What would we say to one passenger who denied feeling the acceleration? It took an effort to see that mind contributes to secondary qualities (so make more effort?). |
| 22412 | Lockean secondary qualities (unlike primaries) produce particular sensory experiences [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: In the Lockean tradition, secondary qualities are defined as those whose instantiation in an object consists in a power or disposition of the object to produce sensory experiences in perceivers of a certain phenomenological character. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: Primary qualities are said to lack such dispositions. Not sure about these definitions. Primaries offer no experiences? With these definitions, comparing them would be a category mistake. I take it primaries reflect reality and secondaries do not. |
| 22421 | Could there be a mind which lacked secondary quality perception? [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Can we form a conception of a type of mind whose representations are free of secondary quality perceptions? | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: Nice question. Minds must have experiences, and there has to be a 'way' or 'mode' for those experiences. A mind which directly grasped the primary quality of sphericity would seem to be visionary rather than sensual or experiential. |
| 22424 | Secondary qualities contain information; their variety would be superfluous otherwise [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Surely we learn something about an object when we discover its secondary qualities? ...If secondary quality experience were informationally inert, its variety would be something of a puzzle. Why not employ the same medium for all primary informaton? | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: This is important. We can't just focus on the primary qualities, and ignore the secondary. But diverse colours draw attention to information, which can then be translated into neutral data, as in spectroscopic analysis. Locke agrees with this. |
| 22425 | The utility theory says secondary qualities give information useful to human beings [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Secondary quality perception, according to the utility theory, gives information about the relation between the perceptual object and the perceiver's needs and interests. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: Almost the only example I can think of is whether fruit is ripe or rotten. ...Also 'bad' smells. We recognise aggressive animal noises, but that is not the same as dangerous (e.g. rustling snake). Divine design is behind this theory, I think. |
| 7629 | We see objects 'directly' by representing them [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: My view is that we see objects 'directly' by representing them in visual experience. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], Ch.8 n1) | |
| A reaction: [Quoted by Maund] This rejects both inference in perception and sense-data, while retaining the notion of representation. It is a view which has gained a lot of support. But how can it be direct if it represents? Photographs can't do that. |
| 22420 | The indexical perspective is subjective, incorrigible and constant [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I attribute three properties to the indexical perspective: it is subjective, incorrigible, and constant. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 5) | |
| A reaction: That is as good an idea as any for summarising the view (associated with John Perry) that the indexical perspective is an indispensable feature of reality. For a good attack on this, which I favour, see Cappelen and Dever. |
| 18410 | Indexical thought is in relation to my self-consciousness [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Very roughly, we can say that to think of something indexically is to think of it in relation to me, as I am presented to myself in self-consciousness. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: So it is characterised relationally, which doesn't mean it has a distinctive intrinsic character. If I'm lost, and I overhear someone say 'Peter is in Hazlemere', I get the same relational information (in a different mode) without the indexicality. |
| 22417 | Indexicals do not figure in theories of physics, because they are not explanatory causes [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Indexicals are like secondary qualities in not figuring in causal explanations of the interactions of objects: physics omits them not because they are relative and egocentric, but because they do not constitute explanatory predicates of a causal theory. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: They are outside explanatory physics, but not outside explanation. The object moved because a force acted on it; or the object moved because I wanted it moved. |
| 18402 | Indexical concepts are indispensable, as we need them for the power to act [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The present suggestion is that indexical concepts are ineliminable because without them agency would be impossible: when I imagine myself divested of indexical thoughts employing only centreless mental representations, I am deprived of the power to act. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the view developed by Perry and Lewis. I agree with Cappelen and Dever that it is entirely wrong, and that indexical thought is entirely eliminable, and nothing special. |
| 22418 | I can know indexical truths a priori, unlike their non-indexical paraphrases [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I know the truth of the sentence 'I am here now' a priori, but I do not know a priori 'McGinn is in London on 15th Nov 1981'. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 3) | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that I can grasp the concepts of 'here' and 'now' (i.e. space and time) by purely a priori means. But he certainly shows that you can't glibly dismiss indexicals by paraphrasing them in that way. |
| 23418 | Liberal state legitimacy is based on a belief in justice, not in some conception of the good life [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: For liberals the basis of state legitimacy is a shared sense of justice, not a shared conception of the good. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'legitimacy') | |
| A reaction: For a liberal state to work, the citizens have to roughly believe in the core values of liberalism, which are primarily freedom and equality (and hence justice). |
| 23414 | Liberals say state intervention in culture restricts people's autonomy [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: According to liberal theory, a state which intervenes in the cultural market place to encourage any particular way of life restricts people's autonomy. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'social') | |
| A reaction: The communitarian idea is that the state should intervene, in order to foster the best aspects of communal culture. The dangers are obvious, and can be seen in any totalitarian state. A gentle hand on the tiller, perhaps? Increase the options? |
| 23410 | Modern liberals see a community as simply a society which respects freedom and equality [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Most contemporary liberal philosophers have little to say about the ideal of community. …It is often seen as derivative of liberty and equality - a society lives up to the ideal of community if its members are treated as free and equal persons. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: He cites Rawls as an example. This is the central idea which was attacked by modern communitarians. A collection of scattered self-seeking isolated individuals doesn't seem to amount to a healthy communal life. Maybe community needs further rights? |
| 23409 | Community can focus on class or citizenship or ethnicity or culture [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: In recent centuries the ideal of community has taken many forms, from class solidarity or shared citizenship to a common ethnic descent or cultural identity. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Language and religion are not explicitly mentioned, but must be implied. Supporting a major sports team is also worth mentioning. |
| 23419 | Communitarianism struggles with excluded marginalised groups [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The problem of the exclusion of historically marginalised groups is endemic to the communitarian project. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'legitimacy') | |
| A reaction: Put simply, old-fashioned styles of community are probably impossible in large modern states, some with rather arbitrary borders. |
| 23413 | Feminism has shown that social roles are far from fixed (as communitarians tend to see them) [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians say that some of our social roles must be regarded as fixed when planning our lives, …but the women's movement has shown how deeply entrenched social roles can be questioned and rejected. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Embedded') | |
| A reaction: True, but parents walking out on young children also shows that. The ideal must be some sort of balance. |
| 23415 | Participation aids the quest for the good life, but why should that be a state activity? [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians rarely distinguish between collective activities and political activities. Shared participation aids intelligent decisions about the good life, but why should that be organised through the state, rather than by free individuals? | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'need') | |
| A reaction: Kylicka points out later that local groups can be very unintelligent or prejudiced. Modern media have changed that picture, because participation can be with geographically remote people. |
| 23411 | Communitarians see justice as primarily a community matter, rather than a principle [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians believe either that community replaces the need for principles of justice, or that the community is either the source of such principles or should play a greater role in deciding their content. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The idea that a racist or chauvinist or puritanical or insular community should decide justice for all its members sounds horrible. It drives you to liberal individualism, just thinking about it. |
| 23412 | Justice resolves conflicts, but may also provoke them [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Justice can help mediate conflicts, but it also tends to creat conflicts, and to decrease the natural expression of sociability. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Community [1993], 'limits') | |
| A reaction: [He is discussing Michael Sandel on liberalism] Family life might not go well if all of its members continually demanded justice for themselves as individuals. Maybe our concept of justice is too individualistic? Do we need a sense of 'group' justice? |