28 ideas
| 17082 | Paradox: why do you analyse if you know it, and how do you analyse if you don't? [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: The alleged paradox of analysis asserts that if one knew what was involved in the concept, one would not need the analysis; if one did not know what was involved in the concept, no analysis could be forthcoming. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 1) | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of problem that seemed to bug Plato a lot. You certainly can't analyse something if you don't understand it, but it seems obvious that you can illuminatingly analyse something of which you have a reasonable understanding. |
| 6161 | Structuralism is neo-Kantian idealism, with language playing the role of categories of understanding [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Structuralism is a form of neo-Kantian idealism, in which the job of creating Kant's phenomenal world has been taken over by language instead of forms of sensibility and categories of the understanding. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: A helpful connection, which explains my aversion to any attempt at understanding the world simply by analysing language, either in its ordinary usage, or in its underlying logical form. |
| 6163 | If bivalence is rejected, then excluded middle must also be rejected [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: If you reject the principle of bivalence (that a proposition is either determinately true or false), then statements are also not subject to the Law of Excluded Middle (P or not-P). | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I think Rowlands is wrong about this. Excluded Middle could be purely syntacti, or its semantics could be 'True or Not-True'. Only bivalent excluded middle introduces 'True or False'. Compare Idea 4752. |
| 6155 | Supervenience is a one-way relation of dependence or determination between properties [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is essentially a one-way relation of dependence or determination, …which holds, in the first instance, between properties. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This definition immediately shows why supervenient properties are in danger of being epiphenomenal (i.e. causally irrelevant). Carefully thought about the notion of a 'one-way' relation will, I think, make it more obscure rather than clearer. |
| 6154 | It is argued that wholes possess modal and counterfactual properties that parts lack [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Some have argued that a mereological whole should not be identified with the sum of its parts on the grounds that the former possess certain properties - specifically modal and (perhaps) counterfactual properties - that the latter lacks. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: I am not convinced that modal and counterfactual claims should count as properties. If my pen is heated it melts (a property), but if my pen were intelligent it could do philosophy. Intelligence is a property, but the situation isn't. |
| 6157 | Tokens are dated, concrete particulars; types are their general properties or kinds [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Tokens are dated, concrete, particular occurrences or instances; types are the general properties that these occurrences exemplify or the kinds to which they belong. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: It might be said that types are sets, of which tokens are the members. The question of 'general properties' raises the question of whether universals must exist to make kinds possible. |
| 6159 | Strong idealism is the sort of mess produced by a Cartesian separation of mind and world [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Neo-Kantian idealism, and the excesses of recent versions of it, are precisely the sort of mess one can get oneself into through an uncritical acceptance of the dichotomizing of mind and world along Cartesian internalist lines. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I am unconvinced that internalism about the mind (that its contents can be defined without reference to anything external) leads to this disastrous split. We don't have to abandon the links between an internal mind and the world. |
| 17087 | The 'symmetry thesis' says explanation and prediction only differ pragmatically [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: The 'symmetry thesis' holds that there is only a pragmatic, or epistemic, but no logical, difference between explaining and predicting. …The only difference is in what the producer of the deduction knows just before the deduction is produced. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 4) | |
| A reaction: He cites Mill has holding this view. It seems elementary to me that I can explain something but not predict it, or predict it but not explain it. The latter case is just Humean habitual induction. |
| 17081 | Usually explanations just involve giving information, with no reference to the act of explanation [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: Plato, Aristotle, Mill and Hempel believed that an explanatory product can be characterized solely in terms of the kind of information it conveys, no reference to the act of explaining being required. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 1) | |
| A reaction: Achinstein says it's about acts, because the same information could be an explanation, or a critique, or some other act. Ruben disagrees, and so do I. |
| 17092 | An explanation needs the world to have an appropriate structure [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: Objects or events in the world must really stand in some appropriate 'structural' relation before explanation is possible. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 7) | |
| A reaction: An important point. These days people talk of 'dependence relations'. Some sort of structure to reality (mainly imposed by the direction of time and causation, I would have thought) is a prerequisite of finding a direction to explanation. |
| 17090 | Most explanations are just sentences, not arguments [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: Typically, full explanations are not arguments, but singular sentences, or conjunctions thereof. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 6) | |
| A reaction: This is mainly objecting to the claim that explanations are deductions from laws and facts. I agree with Ruben. Explanations are just information, I think. Of course, Aristotle's demonstrations are arguments. |
| 17094 | The causal theory of explanation neglects determinations which are not causal [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: The fault of the causal theory of explanation was to overlook the fact that there are more ways of making something what it is or being responsible for it than by causing it. …Causation is a particular type of determinative relation. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 7) | |
| A reaction: The only thing I can think of is that certain abstract facts are 'determined' by other abtract facts, without being 'caused' by them. A useful word. |
| 17088 | Reducing one science to another is often said to be the perfect explanation [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: The reduction of one science to another has often been taken as paradigmatic of explanation. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 5) | |
| A reaction: It seems fairly obvious that the total reduction of chemistry to physics would involve the elimination of all the current concepts of chemistry. Could this possibly enhance our understanding of chemistry? I would have thought not. |
| 17089 | Facts explain facts, but only if they are conceptualised or named appropriately [Ruben] |
| Full Idea: Facts explain facts only when the features and the individuals the facts are about are appropriately conceptualized or named. | |
| From: David-Hillel Ruben (Explaining Explanation [1990], Ch 5) | |
| A reaction: He has a nice example that 'Cicero's speeches stop in 43 BCE' isn't explained by 'Tully died then', if you don't know that Cicero was Tully. Ruben is not defending pragmatic explanation, but to this extent he must be right. |
| 6152 | Minds are rational, conscious, subjective, self-knowing, free, meaningful and self-aware [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: The apparent features of mind which are not obviously physical include: rationality, thought, consciousness, subjectivity, infallible first-person knowledge, freedom, meaning and self-awareness. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: A helpful list, some of which can be challenged. Ryle challenges first-person infallibility. Hume challenges self-awareness. Quine challenges meaning. Lots of people (e.g. Spinoza) challenge freedom. The Churchlands seem to challenge consciousness. |
| 6173 | Content externalism implies that we do not have privileged access to our own minds [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Content externalism threatens the idea of first-person authority in all its forms, and does so because it calls into question the idea that the access we have to our own mental states is privileged in the way required for such authority. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: I am inclined to respond by saying that since we clearly have privileged access to our own minds, that means there must be something wrong with content externalism. |
| 6174 | If someone is secretly transported to Twin Earth, others know their thoughts better than they do [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: If someone knew that a thinker had, without realising it, been transported to Twin Earth, they would almost certainly be a higher authority on the content of the thinker's thoughts than would the thinker. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: They would certainly be a higher authority on the truth of the thinker's thoughts, but only in the way that you might think I hold a diamond when I know it is a club. If the thinker believes it is H2O, the fact that it isn't is irrelevant to content. |
| 6158 | Supervenience of mental and physical properties often comes with token-identity of mental and physical particulars [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: One often finds a supervenience thesis concerning the relation between mental and physical properties combined with a token identity theory concerning the relation between mental and physical particulars. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: This brings out the important clarifying point that supervenience is said to be between properties, not substances. The point is that supervenience will always cry out for an explanation, preferably a sensible one. |
| 6168 | The content of a thought is just the meaning of a sentence [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: The content of the thought that the sky is blue is simply the meaning of the sentence "The sky is blue". | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that it is logically impossible for a non-language-speaker, such as a chimpanzee, to think that the sky is the same colour as the water. If we allow propositions, we might be able to keep meanings without the sentences. |
| 6167 | Action is bodily movement caused by intentional states [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: An action is a bodily movement that is caused by intentional states such as beliefs, desires and so on. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: A useful definition, and clearly one that has no truck with attempts at giving behaviourist definitions of action. The definition of a 'moral action' needs to be built on this one. Particular types of belief and desire, presumably. |
| 6177 | Moral intuition seems unevenly distributed between people [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: The faculty of moral intuition seems to be unevenly distributed between people. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: This would be a good argument if it was thought that the source of moral intuitions was divine, but people vary enormously in their intuitions about maths, about character, about danger. If you believe in any intuition at all, you must accept its variety. |
| 23896 | We see our character as a restricting limit, but also as an unshakable support [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Our character appears to us as a limit by which we do not want to be imprisoned, …but also as a support that we want to believe is unshakable. | |
| From: Simone Weil (On the Concept of Character [1941], p.100) | |
| A reaction: A nice perception. It is fairly easy to criticise, or even laugh at, one's own actions, but extremely hard to criticise our own character. Maybe we all wish we were more determined in our projects, but not much else. |
| 23894 | The concept of character is at the centre of morality [Weil] |
| Full Idea: We cannot pose a moral problem without putting the concept of character at its centre. | |
| From: Simone Weil (On the Concept of Character [1941], p.98) | |
| A reaction: The question for Aristotle (which I derive from Philippa Foot) is whether moral goodness simply is good character, or whether it is the actions (or even the consequences). Weil is close to modern virtue theory here. |
| 23893 | We don't see character in a single moment, but only over a period of time [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Character is constant over a period of time; the way a person is at a single moment does not at all reflect the character of this person. We do, however, concede that character changes. | |
| From: Simone Weil (On the Concept of Character [1941], p.98) | |
| A reaction: I do think, though, that there are moments in behaviour which are hugely revealing of character, even in a single remark. But I agree that most single moments do not show much. |
| 23895 | We modify our character by placing ourselves in situations, or by attending to what seems trivial [Weil] |
| Full Idea: We can modify our character, by putting ourselves in circumstances that will act on us from the outside, …or by the orientation of our attention in the moments that appear most insignificant or indifferent in our lives. | |
| From: Simone Weil (On the Concept of Character [1941], p.99) | |
| A reaction: I've never seen anyone address this question (apart from Aristotle's emphasis on training habits). Choosing your source for current affairs information strikes me as very important. What you read, what you watch, who you spend time with… |
| 6156 | The 17th century reintroduced atoms as mathematical modes of Euclidean space [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: The seventeenth century revolution reintroduced the classical concept of the atom in somewhat new attire as an essentially mathematical entity whose primary qualities could be precisely quantified as modes or aspects of Euclidean space. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: Obviously this very abstract view of atoms didn't last, once they began to identify specific physical atoms, such as oxygen. This view fits in with Newton's use of pure (abstract) points such as the 'centre of gravity'. |
| 6170 | Natural kinds are defined by their real essence, as in gold having atomic number 79 [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Part of what it means to be a natural kind is that they are defined by a real essence, a constitution that marks them out as the substance they are (as water is essentially H2O, and gold essentially has atomic number 79). | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: A 'real essence' would be the opposite of a 'conventional essence', which is just a human way of seeing things. |
| 6178 | It is common to see the value of nature in one feature, such as life, diversity, or integrity [Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: In recent environmental philosophy it is common to see the value of nature identified with one or another natural feature of the environment: life, diversity, ecosystemic integrity and so on. | |
| From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: This thought seems to be asking for the Open Question argument. What is so good about life, or diversity? Our strongest intuition must be that the survival of the ecosystem, and whatever makes that possible, is the highest value. |