33 ideas
| 18005 | Philosophy aims to become more disciplined about categories [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], Intro p.8), quoted by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.2 | |
| A reaction: I rather like this. It fits the view the idea that metaphysics aims to give the structure of reality. If there are not reasonably uniform categories for things, then reality is indescribable. Improving our categories seems a thoroughly laudable aim. |
| 13939 | No possible evidence could decide the reality of numbers, so it is a pseudo-question [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: I cannot think of any possible evidence that would be regarded as relevant by both nominalists and realists about numbers, and would decide the controversy, or make one side more probable. Hence I regard the external questions as pseudo-questions. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 4) |
| 8195 | Undecidable statements result from quantifying over infinites, subjunctive conditionals, and the past tense [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: I once wrote that there are three linguistic devices that make it possible for us to frame undecidable statements: quantification over infinity totalities, as expressed by word such as 'never'; the subjunctive conditional form; and the past tense. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 4) | |
| A reaction: Dummett now repudiates the third one. Statements containing vague concepts also appear to be undecidable. Personally I have no problems with deciding (to a fair extent) about 'never x', and 'if x were true', and 'it was x'. |
| 8194 | Surely there is no exact single grain that brings a heap into existence [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: There is surely no number n such that "n grains of sand do not make a heap, although n+1 grains of sand do" is true. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 4) | |
| A reaction: It might be argued that there is such a number, but no human being is capable of determing it. Might God know the value of n? On the whole Dummett's view seems the most plausible. |
| 13936 | Questions about numbers are answered by analysis, and are analytic, and hence logically true [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: For the internal question like 'is there a prime number greater than a hundred?' the answers are found by logical analysis based on the rules for the new expressions. The answers here are analytic, i.e., logically true. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) |
| 8748 | Logical positivists incorporated geometry into logicism, saying axioms are just definitions [Carnap, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: The logical positivists brought geometry into the fold of logicism. The axioms of, say, Euclidean geometry are simply definitions of primitive terms like 'point' and 'line'. | |
| From: report of Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950]) by Stewart Shapiro - Thinking About Mathematics 5.3 | |
| A reaction: If the concept of 'line' is actually created by its definition, then we need to know exactly what (say) 'shortest' means. If we are merely describing a line, then our definition can be 'impredicative', using other accepted concepts. |
| 8190 | Intuitionists rely on the proof of mathematical statements, not their truth [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The intuitionist account of the meaning of mathematical statements does not employ the notion of a statement's being true, but only that of something's being a proof of the statement. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 2) | |
| A reaction: I remain unconvinced that anyone could give an account of proof that didn't discreetly employ the notion of truth. What are we to make of "we suspect this is true, but no one knows how to prove it?" (e.g. Goldbach's Conjecture). |
| 8960 | Internal questions about abstractions are trivial, and external ones deeply problematic [Carnap, by Szabó] |
| Full Idea: Carnap's verdict is that questions regarding the existence of abstracta tend to be trivial when taken as internal and deeply problematic when taken as external. | |
| From: report of Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950]) by Zoltán Gendler Szabó - Nominalism 6 | |
| A reaction: If the internal aspect of the problem is 'trivial', this would put Carnap in league with fictionalists, who are only committed to entities while playing the current game. What is the status of the theory? Carnap wanted flowers to bloom. |
| 8198 | A 'Cambridge Change' is like saying 'the landscape changes as you travel east' [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The idea of 'Cambridge Change' is like saying 'the landscape changes as you travel east'. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: The phrase was coined in Oxford. It is a useful label with which realists can insult solipsists, idealists and other riff-raff. Four Dimensionalists seem to see time in this way. Events sit there, and we travel past them. But there are indexical events. |
| 13933 | Existence questions are 'internal' (within a framework) or 'external' (concerning the whole framework) [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: We distinguish two kinds of existence questions: first, entities of a new kind within the framework; we call them 'internal questions'. Second, 'external questions', concerning the existence or reality of the system of entities as a whole. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) | |
| A reaction: This nicely disposes of many ontological difficulties, but at the price of labelling most external questions as meaningless, so that the internal answers have very little commitment, and the external (big) questions are now banned. Not for me. |
| 13934 | To be 'real' is to be an element of a system, so we cannot ask reality questions about the system itself [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) |
| 8192 | I no longer think what a statement about the past says is just what can justify it [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: In distinguishing between what can establish a statement about the past as true and what it is that that statement says, we are repudiating antirealism about the past. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is a late shift of ground from the champion of antirealism. If Dummett's whole position is based on a 'justificationist' theory of meaning, he must surely have a different theory of meaning now for statements about the past? |
| 13938 | A linguistic framework involves commitment to entities, so only commitment to the framework is in question [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: If someone accepts a framework for a kind of entities, then he must admit the entities as possible designata. Thus the question of the admissibility of entities is reduced to the question of the acceptability of the linguistic framework for the entities. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 4) | |
| A reaction: Despite the many differences of opinion between Quine and Carnap, this appears to be a straight endorsement by Carnap of the Quinean conception of ontological commitment. |
| 14297 | A dispositional property is not a state, but a liability to be in some state, given a condition [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: To possess a dispositional property is not to be in a particular state;..it is to be bound or liable to be in a particular state, or undergo a particular change, when a particular condition is realized. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], II (7)) | |
| A reaction: Whether this view is correct is the central question about dispositions. Ryle's view is tied in with Humean regularities and behaviourism about mind. The powers view, which I favour, says a disposition is a drawn bow, an actual state of power. |
| 14300 | No physical scientist now believes in an occult force-exerting agency [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: The old error treating the term 'Force' as denoting an occult force-exerting agency has been given up in the physical sciences. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], V (1)) | |
| A reaction: Since 1949 they seem to have made a revival, once they are divested of their religious connotations. The word 'agency' is the misleading bit. Even Leibniz's monads weren't actual agents - he always said that was 'an analogy'. |
| 13935 | We only accept 'things' within a language with formation, testing and acceptance rules [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: To accept the thing world means nothing more than to accept a certain form of language, in other words, to accept rules for forming statements and for testing, accepting, or rejecting them. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) | |
| A reaction: If you derive your metaphysics from your language, then objects are linguistic conventions. But why do we accept conventions about objects? |
| 8199 | The existence of a universe without sentience or intelligence is an unintelligible fantasy [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The existence of a universe from which sentience was permanently absent is an unintelligible fantasy. What exists is what can be known to exist. What is true is what can be known to be true. Reality is what can be experienced and known. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as nonsense. The fact that we cannot think about a universe without introducing a viewpoint does not mean that we cannot 'intellectually imagine' its existence devoid of viewpoints. Nothing could ever experience a star's interior. |
| 13932 | Empiricists tend to reject abstract entities, and to feel sympathy with nominalism [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: Empiricists are in general rather suspicious with respect to any kind of abstract entities like properties, classes, relations, numbers, propositions etc. They usually feel more sympathy with nominalists than with realists (in the medieval sense). | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 1) | |
| A reaction: The obvious reason is that you can't have sense experiences of abstract entities. I like the question 'what are they made of?' rather than the question 'how can I experience them?'. |
| 13937 | New linguistic claims about entities are not true or false, but just expedient, fruitful or successful [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: The acceptance of new linguistic forms about entities cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 3) | |
| A reaction: The obvious problem seems to be that a complete pack of lies might be successful for a very long time, if it plugged a critical hole in a major theory. Is success judged financially? How do we judge success without mentioning truth? |
| 13940 | All linguistic forms in science are merely judged by their efficiency as instruments [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: The acceptance or rejection of abstract (or any other) linguistic forms in any branch of science will finally be decided by their efficiency as instruments. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 5) |
| 2622 | Can one movement have a mental and physical cause? [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine maintains that there exist both minds and bodies; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements, and mental causes of corporeal movements. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], I (3)) | |
| A reaction: This nicely identifies the problem of double causation, which can be found in Spinoza (Idea 4862). The dualists have certainly got a problem here, but they can deny a conflict. The initiation of a hand movement is not mechanical at all. |
| 1353 | Reporting on myself has the same problems as reporting on you [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: My reports on myself are subject to the same kinds of defects as are my reports on you. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: This may be true of memories or of motives, but it hardly seems to apply to being in pain, where you might be totally lying, where the worst I could do to myself is exaggerate. "You're fine; how am I?" |
| 1354 | We cannot introspect states of anger or panic [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: No one could introspectively scrutinize the state of panic or fury. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: It depends what you mean by 'scrutinize'. No human being ever loses their temper or panics without a background thought of "Oh dear, I'm losing it - it would probably be better if I didn't" (or, as Aristotle might say, "I'm angry, and so I should be"). |
| 2624 | I cannot prepare myself for the next thought I am going to think [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: One thing that I cannot prepare myself for is the next thought that I am going to think. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], VI (7)) |
| 2620 | Dualism is a category mistake [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: The official theory of mind (as private, non-spatial, outside physical laws) I call 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'. I hope to prove it entirely false, and show that it is one big mistake, namely a 'category mistake'. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949], I (2)) | |
| A reaction: This is the essence of Ryle's eliminitavist behaviourism. Personally I agree that the idea of a separate 'ghost' running the machine is utterly implausible, but it isn't a 'category mistake'. The mind clearly exists, but the confusion is about what it is. |
| 2388 | Behaviour depends on desires as well as beliefs [Chalmers on Ryle] |
| Full Idea: Another problem for Ryle (from Chisholm and Geach) is that no mental state could be defined by a single range of behavioural dispositions, independent of any other mental states. (Behaviour depends upon desires as well as beliefs). | |
| From: comment on Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949]) by David J.Chalmers - The Conscious Mind 1.1.2 | |
| A reaction: The defence of behaviourism is to concede this point, but suggest that behavioural dispositions come in large groups of interdependent sets, some relating to beliefs, others relating to desires, and each group leads to a behaviour. |
| 3354 | You can't explain mind as dispositions, if they aren't real [Benardete,JA on Ryle] |
| Full Idea: Ryle is tough-minded to the point of incoherence when he combines a dispositional account of the mind with an anti-realist account of dispositions. | |
| From: comment on Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.22 | |
| A reaction: A nice point, but it strikes me that Ryle was, by temperament at least, an eliminativist about the mind, so the objection would not bother him. Maybe a disposition and a property are the same thing? |
| 2387 | How can behaviour be the cause of behaviour? [Chalmers on Ryle] |
| Full Idea: A problem for Ryle is that mental states may cause behaviour, but if mental states are themselves behavioural or behavioural dispositions, as opposed to internal states, then it is hard to see how they could do the job. | |
| From: comment on Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind [1949]) by David J.Chalmers - The Conscious Mind 1.1.2 | |
| A reaction: I strongly approve of this, as an objection to any form of behaviourism or functionalism. If you identify something by its related behaviour, or its apparent function, this leaves the question 'WHY does it behave or function in this way?' |
| 8193 | Verification is not an individual but a collective activity [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Verification is not an individual but a collective activity. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 3) | |
| A reaction: This generates problems. Are deceased members of the community included? (Yes, says Dummett). If someone speaks to angels (Blake!), do they get included? Is a majority necessary? What of weird loners? Etc. |
| 8189 | Truth-condition theorists must argue use can only be described by appeal to conditions of truth [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: To demonstrate the necessity of a truth-conditional theory of meaning, a proponent of such a theory must argue that use cannot be described without appeal to the conditions for the truth of statements. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: Unlike Dummett, I find that argument rather appealing. How do you decide the possible or appropriate use for a piece of language, if you don't already know what it means. Basing it all on social conventions means it could be meaningless ritual. |
| 8191 | The truth-conditions theory must get agreement on a conception of truth [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: It is not enough for the truth-condition theorist to argue that we need the concept of truth: he must show that we should have the same conception of truth that he has. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 2) | |
| A reaction: Davidson invites us to accept Tarski's account of truth. It invites the question of what the theory would be like with a very robust correspondence account of truth, or a flabby rather subjective coherence view, or the worst sort of pragmatic view. |
| 8197 | Maybe past (which affects us) and future (which we can affect) are both real [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Maybe both the past and the future are real, determined by our current temporal perspective. Past is then events capable of having a causal influence upon events near us, and future is events we can affect, but from which we receive no information. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is the Four-Dimensional view, which is opposed to Presentism. Might immediate unease is that it gives encouragement to fortune-tellers, whom I have always dismissed with 'You can't see the future, because it doesn't exist'. |
| 8196 | The present cannot exist alone as a mere boundary; past and future truths are rendered meaningless [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The idea that only the present is real cannot be sustained. St Augustine pointed out that the present has no duration; it is a mere boundary between past and future, and dependent on them. It also denies truth-value to statements about past or future. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: To defend Presentism, I suspect that one must focus entirely on the activities of consciousness and short-term memory. All truths, of past or future, must refer totally to such mental events. But what could an event be if there is no enduring time? |