29 ideas
| 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. |
| 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? |
| 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. |
| 19508 | Contextualism needs a semantics for knowledge sentences that are partly indexical [Schiffer,S] |
| Full Idea: Contextualist semantics must capture the 'indexical' nature of knowledge claims, the fact that different utterances of a knowledge sentence with no apparent indexical terms can express different propositions. | |
| From: Stephen Schiffer (Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism [1996], p.325), quoted by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.5 | |
| A reaction: Schiffer tries to show that this is too difficult, and DeRose defends contextualism against the charge. |
| 19509 | The indexical aspect of contextual knowledge might be hidden, or it might be in what 'know' means [Schiffer,S] |
| Full Idea: One might have a 'hidden-indexical' theory of knowledge sentences: they contain constituents that are not the semantic values of any terms; ...or 'to know' itself might be indexical, as in 'I know[easy] I have hands' or 'I know[tough] I have hands'. | |
| From: Stephen Schiffer (Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism [1996], p.326-7), quoted by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.5 | |
| A reaction: [very compressed] Given the choice, I would have thought it was in 'know', since to say 'either you know p or you don't' sounds silly to me. |
| 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. |
| 7337 | In Mosaic legal theory, crimes are sins and sins are crimes [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: In Mosaic legal theory, all breaches of the law offend God. All crimes are sins, just as all sins are crimes. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: This would seem to define Josephus called a 'theocracy'. Not just rule by a priesthood, but also an attempt to make civil law coincide with the teachings of sacred texts. But doing 80 m.p.h. on a motorway at 2 a.m. hardly seems like a sin. |
| 7339 | Because human life is what is sacred, Mosaic law has no death penalty for property violations [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: Where other codes provided the death penalty for offences against property, in Mosaic law no property offence is capital; human life is too sacred, where the rights of property alone are violated. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: We still preserve this idea in our law, and also in our culture, where we are keen to insist that catastrophes like earthquakes or major fires are measured almost entirely by the loss of life, not the loss of property. I approve. |
| 7353 | The Pharisees undermined slavery, by giving slaves responsibility and status in law courts [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: It is no accident that slavery among Jews disappeared with the rise of the Pharisees, as they insisted that all were equal before God in a court. Masters were no longer responsible for actions of slaves, so a slave had status, and slavery could not work. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt II) | |
| A reaction: As in seventeenth century England, the rise of social freedom comes from religious sources, not social sources. A slave has status in the transcendent world of souls, despite being a nobody in the physical world. |
| 7340 | Mosaic law was the first to embody the rule of law, and equality before the law [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: Mosaic law meant that God ruled through his laws, and since all were equally subject to the law, the system was the first to embody the double merits of the rule of law and equality before the law. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: If this is correct, it seems to be a hugely important step, combined with Idea 1659, that revenge should be the action of a the state, not of the individual. They are the few simple and essential keys to civilization. |
| 7338 | Man's life is sacred, because it is made in God's image [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: In Mosaic theology, man is made in God's image, and so his life is not just valuable, it is sacred. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: The obvious question is what exactly is meant by "in God's image". Physically, spiritually, intellectually, morally? I am guessing that the original idea was intellectual, because we are the only rational animal. The others seem unlikely, or arrogant. |
| 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? |
| 7348 | The Jews sharply distinguish human and divine, but the Greeks pull them closer together [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: The Jews drew an absolute distinction between the human and the divine; the Greeks constantly elevated the human - they were Promethean - and lowered the divine. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt II) | |
| A reaction: An intriguing observation. The Greek idea runs right through European culture, surfacing (for example) in 'Faust', or 'Frankenstein', or the films of James Cameron. I'm with the Greeks; I want to see how far humanity can be elevated. |
| 7336 | A key moment is the idea of a single moral God, who imposes his morality on humanity [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: The discovery of monotheism, and not just of monotheism but of a sole, omnipotent God actuated by ethical principles and seeking methodically to impose them on human beings, is one of the greatest turning-points in history, perhaps the greatest of all. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: 'Discovery' begs some questions, but when put like this you realise what a remarkable event it was. It is a good candidate for the most influential idea ever, even if large chunks of humanity, especially in the orient, never took to monotheism. |
| 7341 | Sampson illustrates the idea that religious heroes often begin as outlaws and semi-criminals [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: Sampson is the outstanding example of the point which the Book of Judges makes again and again, that the Lord and society are often served by semi-criminal types, outlaws and misfits, who become folk-heroes and then religious heroes. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: This illustrates nicely Nietzsche's claim, that the jews were responsible for his 'inversion of values', in which aristocratic virtues are downgraded, and the virtues of a good slave are elevated (though Sampson may not show that point so well!). |
| 7342 | Isaiah moved Israelite religion away from the local, onto a more universal plane [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: The works of Isaiah (740-700 BCE) mark the point at which the Israelite religion began to spiritualize itself, to move from a specific location in space and time on to the universalist plane. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: This is necessary if any religion is going to make converts outside the local culture. The crucial step would be to disembody God, so that He cannot be represented by a statue. The difficulty is for him to be universal, but retain a 'chosen people'. |
| 7355 | The Torah pre-existed creation, and was its blueprint [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: The Torah was not just a book about God. It pre-existed creation, in the same way as God did. In fact, it was the blueprint of creation. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt III) | |
| A reaction: You can only become a 'people of the book' (which Moslems resented in Judaism, and then emulated) if you give this stupendously high status to your book. Hence Christian fundamentalism makes sense, with its emphasis on the divinity of the Bible. |
| 7344 | Judaism involves circumcision, Sabbath, Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles, New Year, and Atonement [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: The practices of Judaism developed during their Exile: circumcision, the Sabbath, the Passover (founding of the nation), Pentecost (giving of the laws), the Tabernacles, the New Year, and the Day of Atonement. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt II) | |
| A reaction: These were the elements of ritual created to replace the existence of a physically located state. An astonishing achievement, not even remotely achieved by any other state that was driven off its lands. A culture is an idea, not a country. |
| 7345 | In exile the Jews became a nomocracy [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy - voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in history. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt II) | |
| A reaction: It is the most remarkable case in history of a people united and strengthened by adversity, and it became an important experiment in the building of human cultures. But what is the point of preserving a culture, with no land? Why not just integrate? |
| 7347 | Zoroastrians believed in one eternal beneficent being, Creator through the holy spirit [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: Cyrus the Great was a Zoroastrian, believing in one, eternal, beneficent being, 'Creator of all things through the holy spirit'. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt II) | |
| A reaction: Is this the actual origin of monotheism, or did they absorb this idea from the Jews? The interesting bit is the fact that the supreme being (called Marduk) is 'beneficent', which one doesn't associate with these remote and supposed pagans. |
| 7349 | Immortality based on judgement of merit was developed by the Egyptians (not the Jews) [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: The idea of judgement at death and immortality on the basis of merit were developed in Egypt before 1000 BCE. It is not Jewish because it was not in the Torah, and the Sadducees, who stuck to their texts, seemed to have denied the afterlife completely. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt II) | |
| A reaction: This is the idea considered crucial to religion by Immanuel Kant (Idea 1455), who should be declared an honorary Egyptian. To me the idea that only the good go to heaven sounds like sadly wishful thinking - a fictional consolation for an unhappy life. |
| 7354 | The main doctrine of the Pharisees was belief in resurrection and the afterlife [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: Belief in resurrection and the afterlife was the main distinguishing mark of Pharisaism, and thus fundamental of rabbinic Judaism. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt II) | |
| A reaction: Belief in an afterlife seems to go back to the Egyptians, but this development in Judaism was obviously very influential, even among early Christians, who initially seem to have only believed in resurrection of the body. |
| 7356 | Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library, with the Archangel Metatron as the librarian: the books in the shelves there pressed themselves together to make room for a newcomer. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt III) | |
| A reaction: I'm tempted to convert to Judaism. |