48 ideas
| 6123 | Empirical investigation can't discover if holes exist, or if two things share a colour [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Ontology is not empirical, but ontologists do make discoveries; empirical investigation won't discover that holes exist; we see that two things are the same colour, but a philosopher must resolve whether one universal is present in both. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is one of the best, simplest and clearest statements I have encountered of the autonomy of philosophy. One may, of course, respond by saying 'who cares?', but then who cares about quarks, or the economy of the Spanish Empire? |
| 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. |
| 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). |
| 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. |
| 6143 | Prolonged events don't seem to endure or exist at any particular time [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: That events endure is difficult to reconcile with the claim that, say, the American Civil War existed; for such an event seems never to have been 'wholly present' at any single time. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §3 n14) | |
| A reaction: A nice problem example for those who, like Kim, want their ontology to include events. Personally I am happy to allow some vagueness here. The Civil War only became an 'event' on the day it finished. An event's time need not be an instant. |
| 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? |
| 6135 | A crumbling statue can't become vague, because vagueness is incoherent [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Some would say that annihilating grains of stone from the statue of David (playing the 'Sorites Game') could never make its identity vague, because metaphysical vagueness is simply unintelligible. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: He cites Russell, Dummett and Lewis in support. But Russell is a logical atomist, and Lewis says identity is composition. It strikes me as obvious that identity can be vague; the alternative is the absurdities of the Sorites paradox. |
| 6145 | Intrinsic properties are those an object still has even if only that object exists [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Intrinsic properties are, by and large, those properties that an object can exemplify even if that object and its parts (if any) are the only objects that exist. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.I) | |
| A reaction: This leads to all sorts of properties that seemed intrinsic turning out to be relational. In what sense would a single object have mass, or impenetrability? |
| 6124 | I say that most of the objects of folk ontology do not exist [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: I argue against the existence of most of the objects alleged to exist by what we might call 'folk ontology'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1) | |
| A reaction: This is the programme for Merricks's heroic book, denying (quite plausibly) the need for large objects in our ontology. It seems that ontology must multiply its entities prodigiously, or else be austere in the extreme. Is there no middle way? |
| 6134 | Is swimming pool water an object, composed of its mass or parts? [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Some - such as those who endorse unrestricted composition or those who believe in a kind of entity called 'a mass' - say that 'the water in the swimming pool' refers to a big material object. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: A well-chosen example to support his thesis that large objects don't (strictly) exist. We certainly must not say (in Quine fashion) that we must accept the ontology of our phrases. I cut nature at the joints, and I say a pool is an obvious joint. |
| 6125 | We can eliminate objects without a commitment to simples [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Eliminativism about physical objects does not require a commitment to (or against) simples. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.I) | |
| A reaction: His strategy is to eliminate objects in favour of whatever it is (an unknown) to which objects actually reduce. His point seems to be clearly correct, just as I might eliminate 'life' from my ontology, without quite knowing what it is. |
| 14229 | Merricks agrees that there are no composite objects, but offers a different semantics [Merricks, by Liggins] |
| Full Idea: Merricks agrees with van Inwagen that there are no composite objects, but disagrees with him about the semantics of talk about material objects. | |
| From: report of Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003]) by David Liggins - Nihilism without Self-Contradiction 4 | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen has one semantics for folk talk, and another semantics 'for the philosophy room'. Merricks seems to have an error theory of folk semantics (i.e. the folk don't understand what they are saying). |
| 6142 | The 'folk' way of carving up the world is not intrinsically better than quite arbitrary ways [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: It is hard to see why the folk way of carving up the material world should - barring further argument - be elevated to a loftier status than the unrestricted compositionist way. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §3.III) | |
| A reaction: There are some right ways to carve up the world, though there is also the capacity to be quite arbitrary, if it is useful, or even amusing. Thus Cyprus is an island (fact), Britons are a nation (useful), and Arsenal fans are sad (amusing). |
| 14472 | If atoms 'arranged baseballwise' break a window, that analytically entails that a baseball did it [Merricks, by Thomasson] |
| Full Idea: Given the proper understanding of 'arranged baseballwise', the fact that atoms arranged baseballwise are causally relevant to a shattering analytically entails that a baseball is. | |
| From: report of Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], 3) by Amie L. Thomasson - Ordinary Objects 01.3 | |
| A reaction: This is the key argument of Thomasson's book. Presumably, following Idea 14471, 'I bought some atoms arranged baseballwise' is held to entail 'I bought a baseball'. That seems to beg the question against Van Inwagen and Merricks. |
| 14469 | Overdetermination: the atoms do all the causing, so the baseball causes no breakage [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The Overdetermination Argument: a baseball is irrelevant to whether its atoms shatter a window, the shattering is caused by the atoms in concert, the shattering is not overdetermined, so if the baseball exists it doesn't cause the shattering. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], 3) | |
| A reaction: An obvious thought is that no individual atom does any sort of breaking at all - it is only when they act as a team, and an appropriate name for the team is a 'baseball', and the team is real. |
| 6137 | Clay does not 'constitute' a statue, as they have different persistence conditions (flaking, squashing) [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: A statue is not identical with its constituent lump of clay because they have different persistence conditions; the statue, but not the lump, could survive the loss of a few smallish bits, and the lump, but not the statue, could survive being squashed. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.III) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why a lump can't survive losing a few bits (if the lump never had a precise identity), but it is hard to argue that squashing is a problem. However, presumably the identity (or constitution) between lump and statue is not a necessity. |
| 6127 | 'Unrestricted composition' says any two things can make up a third thing [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: If my dog and the top half of my tree compose an object, this is defended under the title of 'unrestricted (universal) composition', the thesis that any two things compose something. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.II) | |
| A reaction: David Lewis is cited amongst those defending this thesis. My intuition is against this thesis, because I think identity is partly dictated by nature, and is not entirely conventional. You can force an identity, but you feel the 'restriction'. |
| 6131 | Composition as identity is false, as identity is never between a single thing and many things [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: One of the most obvious facts about identity is that it holds one-one (John and Mr Smith) and perhaps many-many (John+Mary and Mr Smith+Miss Jones), but never one-many. It follows that composition as identity (things are their parts) is false. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.IV) | |
| A reaction: This assumes that 'having identity' and 'being identical to' are the same concept. I agree with his conclusion, but am not convinced by the argument. I'm not even quite clear why John and May can't be identical to the Smiths. |
| 6132 | Composition as identity is false, as it implies that things never change their parts [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Composition as identity implies that no persisting object ever changes its parts, which is clearly false, so composition as identity is false. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.IV) | |
| A reaction: Presumably Lewis can say that when a thing subtly changes its parts, it really does lose its strict identity, but becomes another 'time-slice' or close 'counterpart' of the original object. This is a coherent view, but I disagree. I'm a believer. |
| 6141 | There is no visible difference between statues, and atoms arranged statuewise [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: If we imagine a world like ours except that, while there are atoms arranged statuewise in that world, there are no statues, ...no amount of looking around could distinguish that imagined world from ours. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.V) | |
| A reaction: This is one of his arguments for ontological eliminativism about physical objects. If we accept the argument, it will wreak havoc with our entire ontology, and we will end up anti-realists. I say you have to see statues - you just can't miss them. |
| 6130 | 'Composition' says things are their parts; 'constitution' says a whole substance is an object [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Composition as identity claims that a single object is identical with the many parts it comprises; constitution as identity says that a single object (a statue) is identical with a single object (clay) that 'constitutes' it. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1 n11) | |
| A reaction: The constitution view has been utilised (by Lynn Rudder Baker) to give an account of personal identity as constituted by a human body. Neither sounds quite right to me; the former view misses something about reality; the latter doesn't explain much. |
| 6138 | It seems wrong that constitution entails that two objects are wholly co-located [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers deny that two numerically distinct physical objects could be 'wholly co-located'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.III) | |
| A reaction: A fish can be located in a river; the Appenines can be located in Italy. If you accept the objection you will probably have to accept identity-as-composition, or object-eliminativism. One object can have two causal roles, supporting two identities. |
| 6128 | Objects decompose (it seems) into non-overlapping parts that fill its whole region [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Intuitively, an object's parts at one level of decomposition are parts of that object that do not overlap and that, collectively, fill the whole region the object fills. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.II) | |
| A reaction: A nice case where 'intuition' must be cited as the basis for the claim, and yet it is hard to see how anyone could possibly disagree. Exhibit 73 in favour of rationalism. This ideas shows the structure of nature and the workings of our minds. |
| 6136 | Eliminativism about objects gives the best understanding of the Sorites paradox [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: I say we should endorse eliminativism about physical objects, because it offers the most plausible understanding of what occurs during the Sorites Game (eliminating grains of a thing one at a time). | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: That is one route to go in explaining the paradox (i.e. by saying there never was a 'heap' in the first place). I suspect a better route is to say that heaps really exist as natural phenomena, but they suffer from vague identity and borderline cases. |
| 6133 | If my counterpart is happy, that is irrelevant to whether I 'could' have been happy [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The existence of someone in another world who is a lot like me, but happier, is irrelevant to whether I - this very person - could have been happier, even if we call that other-worldly someone 'my counterpart'. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §1.IV) | |
| A reaction: He says this is a familiar objection. I retain a lingering deterministic doubt about whether it ever makes to sense to say that I 'could' have been happy, given that I am not. It does seem to make sense to say that I was close to happiness, but missed it. |
| 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. |
| 6150 | The 'warrant' for a belief is what turns a true belief into knowledge [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The 'warrant' for a belief is that, whatever it is, that makes the difference between mere true belief and knowledge. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §7.II) | |
| A reaction: Hence a false belief could be well justified, but it could never be warranted. This makes warrant something like the externalist view of justification, a good supporting situation for a belief, rather than an inner awareness of support for it. |
| 6144 | You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: When you hold your child, you do exactly that - hold the child himself or herself - and not some stand-in. This implies that we are not two substances, and we are not mental states nor akin to software. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4) | |
| A reaction: And it is not just a brain, either. This is a nice simple example to support the sensible view that a person is a type of animal. Like all other physical objects that is a bit vague, so we should not be distracted by borderline cases like brain bisection. |
| 6140 | Maybe the word 'I' can only refer to persons [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: One might say that the word 'I' can only have a person as its reference. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §2.IV) | |
| A reaction: To infer the existence of persons from this would be to commit what I think of as the Linguistic Fallacy, of deducing ontology directly from language. We might allow (Dennett fashion) that folk categories require the fiction of persons. |
| 6149 | Free will and determinism are incompatible, since determinism destroys human choice [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The main recent support for incompatibilism is the 'no choice' argument: we have no choice that the past and the laws of nature entail human actions, we have no choice about what the past or the laws are like, so we have no choice about our actions. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §6.III) | |
| A reaction: Since I consider free will to be an absurd chimera, I think this argument involves a total misunderstanding of what a 'choice' is. Since the human brain is a wonderfully sophisticated choosing machine, our whole life consists of choices. |
| 6148 | Human organisms can exercise downward causation [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: Human organisms have non-redundant causal powers, and so can exercise downward causation. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.VII) | |
| A reaction: The hallmark of property dualism. This notion needs a lot more expansion and exploration than Merricks gives it, and I don't think it will be enough to provide 'free will', or even, as Merricks hopes, to place humans in a distinct ontological category. |
| 6146 | Before Creation it is assumed that God still had many many mental properties [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The belief of theists that God might never have created implies that there is a possible world that contains just a single entity with many conscious mental properties. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.II) | |
| A reaction: So if we believe content is wide, we must believe that God was incapable of thought before creation, and thus couldn't plan creation, and so didn't create, and so the Creator is a logical impossibility. Cool. |
| 6147 | The hypothesis of solipsism doesn't seem to be made incoherent by the nature of mental properties [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The hypothesis of solipsism, that I - an entity with many conscious mental properties - am all that exists, while surely false, is not rendered incoherent simply by the nature of the mental properties. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.II) | |
| A reaction: This, along with the thought of a pre-Creation God, is a nice intuitive case for showing that we strongly believe in some degree of narrow content. |
| 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. |
| 5901 | Is 'productive of happiness' the definition of 'right', or the cause of it? [Ross on Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Bentham has not made up his mind whether he thinks that 'right' means 'productive of the general happiness', or that being productive of the general happiness is what makes acts right (and he would have thought the difference unimportant). | |
| From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by W. David Ross - The Right and the Good §I | |
| A reaction: The issue is whether rightness exists as a concept separate from happiness. I take it Bentham would vote for the first reading, as he has no interest in what is right, apart from increasing happiness. |
| 5934 | Of Bentham's 'dimensions' of pleasure, only intensity and duration matter [Ross on Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Most of Bentham's 'dimensions' of pleasure refer to further pleasures, or are irrelevant to the pleasure; we are left with intensity and duration as the characteristics on which depend the value of a pleasure qua pleasure, and there is nothing to add. | |
| From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by W. David Ross - The Right and the Good §VI | |
| A reaction: I agree. When Bentham produces his list he seems to be trying to add a bogus enrichment to what is really a rather crude and basic notion of the aim of life. Your simple hedonist appears to only desire high intensity and long duration. |
| 3777 | Pleasure and pain control all human desires and duties [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], I.1) | |
| A reaction: Ridiculous. Both halves are false. We pursue things for other reasons, and to deny this makes his idea a tautology. Deep ecology has nothing to do with human pleasure or pain. |
| 3554 | Bentham thinks happiness is feeling good, but why use morality to achieve that? [Annas on Bentham] |
| Full Idea: It is easy to fall into Bentham's mindless assumption that happiness must be a specific state of feeling good about something, but it is mysterious why anyone would think morality a good strategy for achieving this. | |
| From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 2.7 |
| 3781 | The value of pleasures and pains is their force [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: It behoves the legislator to understand the force of pleasures and pains, which is their value. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], IV.1) |
| 3778 | The community's interest is a sum of individual interests [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: The interest of the community is the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], I.4) |
| 20280 | Large mature animals are more rational than babies. But all that really matters is - can they suffer? [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational animal than an infant of a day, or even a month, old. But suppose they be otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], XVIII 1 n), quoted by Peter Singer - Practical Ethics 03 | |
| A reaction: This is certainly an inspiring, and even shocking question, which never seems to have been so directly asked before in the entire history of European thought. Awesome. |
| 3779 | Unnatural, when it means anything, means infrequent [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Unnatural, when it means anything, means unfrequent. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], II.14 n8.9) |
| 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? |
| 3780 | We must judge a thing morally to know if it conforms to God's will [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary to know first whether a thing is right in order to know from thence whether it be conformable to the will of God. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], II.18) |