Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Through the Looking Glass', 'Buddhacarita' and 'Coherence: The Price is Right'

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11 ideas

2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 6. Coherence
Coherence problems have positive and negative restraints; solutions maximise constraint satisfaction [Thagard]
     Full Idea: A coherence problem is a set of elements connected by positive and negative restraints, and a solution consists of partitioning the elements into two sets (accepted and rejected) in a way that maximises satisfaction of the constraints.
     From: Paul Thagard (Coherence: The Price is Right [2012], p.42)
     A reaction: I'm enthusiastic about this, as it begins to clarify the central activity of epistemology, which is the quest for best explanations.
Coherence is explanatory, deductive, conceptual, analogical, perceptual, and deliberative [Thagard]
     Full Idea: I propose that there are six main kinds of coherence: explanatory, deductive, conceptual, analogical, perceptual, and deliberative. ...Epistemic coherence is a combination of the first five kinds, and ethics adds the sixth.
     From: Paul Thagard (Coherence: The Price is Right [2012], p.43)
     A reaction: Wonderful. Someone is getting to grips with the concept of coherence, instead of just whingeing about how vague it is.
Explanatory coherence needs symmetry,explanation,analogy,data priority, contradiction,competition,acceptance [Thagard]
     Full Idea: Informally, a theory of explanatory coherence has the principles of symmetry, explanation, analogy, data priority, contradiction, competition and acceptance.
     From: Paul Thagard (Coherence: The Price is Right [2012], p.44)
     A reaction: [Thagard give a concise summary of his theory here] Again Thagard makes a wonderful contribution in an area where most thinkers are pessimistic about making any progress. His principles are very plausible.
3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 6. Verisimilitude
Verisimilitude comes from including more phenomena, and revealing what underlies [Thagard]
     Full Idea: A scientific theory is progressively approximating the truth if it increases its explanatory coherence by broadening to more phenomena and deepening by investigating layers of mechanisms.
     From: Paul Thagard (Coherence: The Price is Right [2012], p.46)
7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / e. Being and nothing
I only wish I had such eyes as to see Nobody! It's as much as I can do to see real people. [Carroll,L]
     Full Idea: "I see nobody on the road," said Alice. - "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked. ..."To be able to see Nobody! ...Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people."
     From: Lewis Carroll (C.Dodgson) (Through the Looking Glass [1886], p.189), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7
     A reaction: [Moore quotes this, inevitably, in a chapter on Hegel] This may be a better candidate for the birth of philosophy of language than Frege's Groundwork.
14. Science / B. Scientific Theories / 1. Scientific Theory
Neither a priori rationalism nor sense data empiricism account for scientific knowledge [Thagard]
     Full Idea: Both rationalists (who start with a priori truths and make deductions) and empiricists (starting with indubitable sense data and what follows) would guarantee truth, but neither even begins to account for scientific knowledge.
     From: Paul Thagard (Coherence: The Price is Right [2012], p.46)
     A reaction: Thagard's answer, and mine, is inference to the best explanation, but goes beyond both the a priori truths and the perceptions.
14. Science / C. Induction / 6. Bayes's Theorem
Bayesian inference is forced to rely on approximations [Thagard]
     Full Idea: It is well known that the general problem with Bayesian inference is that it is computationally intractable, so the algorithms used for computing posterior probabilities have to be approximations.
     From: Paul Thagard (Coherence: The Price is Right [2012], p.45)
     A reaction: Thagard makes this sound devastating, but then concedes that all theories have to rely on approximations, so I haven't quite grasped this idea. He gives references.
14. Science / D. Explanation / 3. Best Explanation / a. Best explanation
The best theory has the highest subjective (Bayesian) probability? [Thagard]
     Full Idea: On the Bayesian view, the best theory is the one with the highest subjective probability, given the evidence as calculated by Bayes's theorem.
     From: Paul Thagard (Coherence: The Price is Right [2012], p.45)
16. Persons / E. Rejecting the Self / 4. Denial of the Self
When the Buddha reached the highest level of insight, he could detect no self in the world [Ashvaghosha]
     Full Idea: The great Buddha passed through the eight stages of Transic insight, and quickly reached their highest point. From the summit of the world downwards he could detect no self anywhere.
     From: Ashvaghosha (Buddhacarita [c.50], XIV)
     A reaction: In the manner of Nietzsche, I am inclined to say that they find what they want to find, because that is their value. They want to get rid of the self, and dream of a mode in which existence continues without it. Is Buddhism opposed to human life?
29. Religion / C. Spiritual Disciplines / 3. Buddhism
The first stage of trance is calm amidst applied and discursive thinking [Ashvaghosha]
     Full Idea: The first stage of trance is calm amidst applied and discursive thinking.
     From: Ashvaghosha (Buddhacarita [c.50], V.11)
     A reaction: Personally I am not sure that I would want to go any further that the first stage, since the elimination of discursive thinking seems to me to be approaching death. To pursue intense thinking very calmly I take to be the ideal of all western philosophers.
The Buddha sought ultimate reality and the final goal of existence in his meditations [Ashvaghosha]
     Full Idea: Next the Boddhisatva, possessed of great skill in Transic meditation, put himself into a trance, intent on discerning both the ultimate reality of things and the final goal of existence.
     From: Ashvaghosha (Buddhacarita [c.50], XIV.2)
     A reaction: The ontological and teleological goals of the Buddha were identical to the goals of the ancient Greek philosophers, and even we have teleological aims in our study of evolution. I would expect better results from the western approach.