Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Through the Looking Glass', 'Personal Identity and Individuation' and 'The Varieties of Reference'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

---

7 ideas

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / e. Being and nothing

21982	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.

12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 6. Inference in Perception

12580	Experiences have no conceptual content [Evans, by Greco]
	Full Idea: In Evans's work experiences are conceived of as not having a conceptual content at all.
	From: report of Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980]) by John Greco - Justification is not Internal
	A reaction: I presume it is this view which provoked McDowell's contrary view in 'Mind and World'. I say this is a job for neuroscience, and I struggle to see what philosophical questions hang on the outcome. I think I side with Evans.

7643	We have far fewer colour concepts than we have discriminations of colour [Evans]
	Full Idea: Do we really understand the proposal that we have as many colour concepts as there are shades colour that we can sensibly discriminate?
	From: Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980], 7.5)
	A reaction: This is the argument (rejected by McDowell) that experience cannot be conceptual because experience is too rich. We should not confuse lack of concepts with lack of words. I may have a concept of a colour between two shades, but no word for it.

16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 2. Mental Continuity / b. Self as mental continuity

7946	The memory criterion has a problem when one thing branches into two things [Williams,B, by Macdonald,C]
	Full Idea: The memory criterion for personal identity permits 'branching' (where two things can later meet the criteria of persistence of a single earlier thing), which presents it with serious problems.
	From: report of Bernard Williams (Personal Identity and Individuation [1956]) by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things Ch.4
	A reaction: Of course, any notion of personal identity would have serious problem if people could branch into two, like fissioning amoeba. If that happened, we probably wouldn't have had a strong notion of personal identity in the first place. See Parfit.

18. Thought / C. Content / 1. Content

23794	Some representational states, like perception, may be nonconceptual [Evans, by Schulte]
	Full Idea: Evans introduced the idea that there are some representational states, for example perceptual experiences, which have content that is nonconceptual.
	From: report of Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980]) by Peter Schulte - Mental Content 3.4
	A reaction: McDowell famously disagree, and whether all experience is inherently conceptualised is a main debate from that period. Hard to see how it could be settled, but I incline to McDowell, because minimal perception hardly counts as 'experience'.

18. Thought / D. Concepts / 1. Concepts / a. Nature of concepts

16366	The Generality Constraint says if you can think a predicate you can apply it to anything [Evans]
	Full Idea: If a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, then he must have the conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is G, for every property of being G of which he has conception. This condition I call the 'Generality Constraint'.
	From: Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980], p.104), quoted by François Recanati - Mental Files 5.3
	A reaction: Recanati endorses the Constraint in his account of mental files. Apparently if I can entertain the thought of a circle being round, I can also entertain the thought of it being square, so I am not too sure about this one.

18. Thought / D. Concepts / 3. Ontology of Concepts / b. Concepts as abilities

12575	Concepts have a 'Generality Constraint', that we must know how predicates apply to them [Evans, by Peacocke]
	Full Idea: Evans's 'Generality Constraint' says that if a thinker is capable of attitudes to the content Fa and possesses the singular concept b, then he is capable of having attitudes to the content Fb.
	From: report of Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980], 4.3) by Christopher Peacocke - A Study of Concepts 1.1
	A reaction: So having an attitude becomes the test of whether one possesses a concept. I suppose if one says 'You know you've got a concept when you are capable of thinking about it', that is much the same thing. Sounds fine.