94 ideas
| 3879 | Philosophy aims to provide a theory of everything [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy studies everything: it tries to provide a theory of the whole of things. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: Good, but you can't avoid value-judgements about which things are important; philosophers place more value on moral theories than on theories about glacier movement. There is a tension in philosophy between human and eternal concerns. |
| 3891 | If p entails q, then p is sufficient for q, and q is necessary for p [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: If p entails q, then p is sufficient for q, and q is necessary for p. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 15.7) |
| 3894 | We may define 'good' correctly, but then ask whether the application of the definition is good [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The 'open question' argument is clearly invalid. A question remains open just so long as our ignorance permits. …It may be an open question whether promoting happiness is good, even though this is what 'good' means. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 20.1) | |
| A reaction: A nice objection. Like small children, we can keep asking questions forever. Whether there is a question to be asked about a thing is not a property of that thing, but of us who ask it. |
| 18019 | People have dreams which involve category mistakes [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: It is an empirical fact that people often sincerely report having had dreams which involve category mistakes. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: She doesn't give any examples, but I was thinking that this might be the case before I read this idea. Dreams seem to allow you to live with gaps in reality that we don't tolerate when awake. |
| 17998 | Category mistakes are either syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: A plausible case can be made for explaining the phenomenon of category mistakes in terms of each of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: I want to explain them in terms of (structured) ontology, but she totally rejects that on p.156. Her preferred account is that they are presupposition failures, which is pragmatics. She splits the semantic view into truth-valued and non-truth-valued. |
| 18011 | Category mistakes seem to be universal across languages [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The infelicity of category mistakes seems to be universal across languages. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Magidor rightly offers this fact to refute the claim that category mistakes are purely syntax (since syntax obviously varies hugely across languages). I also take the fact to show that category mistakes concern the world, and not merely language. |
| 18012 | Category mistakes as syntactic needs a huge number of fine-grained rules [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: A syntactic theory of category mistakes would require not only general syntactic features such as must-be-human, but also highly particular ones such as must-be-a-grape. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Her grape example comes from Hebrew, but an English example might be the verb 'to hull', which is largely exclusive to strawberries. The 'must-be' form is one of Chomsky's 'selectional features'. |
| 18013 | Embedded (in 'he said that…') category mistakes show syntax isn't the problem [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The embedding data (such as 'John said that the number two is green', compared to '*John said that me likes apples') strongly suggests that category mistakes are not syntactically ill-formed. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: Sounds conclusive. The report of John's category error, unlike the report of his remark about apples, seems perfectly syntactically acceptable. |
| 18016 | Two good sentences should combine to make a good sentence, but that might be absurd [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The principle that if 'p' and 'q' are meaningful sentences then 'p and q' is a meaningful sentence seems highly plausible. But now consider the following example: 'That is a number and that is green'. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This challenges the defence of the meaningfulness of category mistakes on the basis of strong compositionality. |
| 18015 | The normal compositional view makes category mistakes meaningful [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The principle that if a competent speaker understands some terms then they understand a sentence made up of them entails that category mistakes are meaningful (as in understanding 'the number two' and 'is green'). | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.2.1) | |
| A reaction: [compressed version] It is normal to impose restrictions on plausible compositionality, and thus back away from this claim, but I rather sympathise with it. She adds to a second version of the principle the proviso 'IF the sentence is meaningful'. |
| 18017 | If a category mistake is synonymous across two languages, that implies it is meaningful [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Two sentences are synonymous if they have the same meaning, suggesting that they must both be meaningful. On the face of it the English 'two is green' and French 'deux est vert' are synonymous, suggesting meaningful category mistakes. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: I'm fairly convinced already that most category mistakes are meaningful, and this seems to confirm the view. Some mistakes could be so extreme that no auditor could compute their meaning, especially if you concatenated lots of them. |
| 18021 | Category mistakes are meaningful, because metaphors are meaningful category mistakes [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Metaphors must have literal meanings. …Since many metaphors involving category mistakes manage to achieve their metaphorical purpose, they must also have literal meanings, so category mistakes must be (literally) meaningful. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: Hm. 'This guy is so weird that to meet him is to encounter a circular square'. |
| 18031 | If a category mistake has unimaginable truth-conditions, then it seems to be meaningless [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: One motivation for taking category mistakes to be meaningless is that one cannot even imagine what it would take for 'Two is green' to be true. …Underlying this complaint is sometimes the thought that the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: I defend the view that most sentences are meaningful if they compose from meaningful parts, but you have to acknowledge this view. It seems to come in degrees. Sentences can have fragmentary meaning, or be almost meaningful, or offer a glimpse of meaning? |
| 18030 | A good explanation of why category mistakes sound wrong is that they are meaningless [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The meaninglessness view does seem to offer a simple and compelling explanation for the fact that category mistakes are highly infelicitous. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: However, I take there to be quite a large gulf between why meaningless sentences like 'squares turn happiness into incommensurability', which I would call 'category blunders', and subtle category mistakes, which are meaningful. |
| 18032 | Category mistakes are neither verifiable nor analytic, so verificationism says they are meaningless [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: No sense experience shows that 'two is green' is true or false. But neither is 'two is green' analytically true or false. So it fails to have legitimate verification conditions and hence, by the lights of traditional verificationism, it is meaningless. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6.2) | |
| A reaction: If a category mistake is an error in classification, then it would seem to be analytically false. If it wrongly attributes a property to something, that makes it verifiably false. The problem is to verify anything at all about 'two'. |
| 18034 | Category mistakes play no role in mental life, so conceptual role semantics makes them meaningless [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: One might argue that conceptual role semantics entails that category mistakes are meaningless. Sentences such as 'two is green' play no role in the cognitive life of any agent. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.6.2) | |
| A reaction: [She quotes Block's definition of conceptual role semantics] I would have thought that if a category mistake is believed by an agent, it could play a huge role in their cognitive life. |
| 18037 | Maybe when you say 'two is green', the predicate somehow fails to apply? [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: One might argue that although 'two' refers to the number two, and 'is green' expresses the property of being green, in 'two is green' the property somehow fails to apply to the number two. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: It is an interesting thought that you say something which applies a predicate to an object, but the predicate then 'fails to apply' for reasons of its own, over which you have no control. The only possible cause of the failure is the nature of reality. |
| 18039 | If category mistakes aren't syntax failure or meaningless, maybe they just lack a truth-value? [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Having rejected the syntactic approach and the meaninglessness view, one might feel that the last resort for explaining the defectiveness of category mistakes is to claim that they are truth-valueless (even if meaningful). | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.3.1) | |
| A reaction: She rejects this one as well, and votes for a pragmatic explanation, in terms of presupposition failure. The view I incline towards is just that they are false, despite being well-formed, meaningful and truth-valued. |
| 18041 | Category mistakes suffer from pragmatic presupposition failure (which is not mere triviality) [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: I argue that category mistakes are infelicitous because they suffer from (pragmatic) presupposition failure, ...but I reject the 'naive pragmatic approach' according to which category mistakes are infelicitous because they are trivially true or false. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: She supports her case quite well, but I vote for them being false. The falsity may involve presuppositions. 'Two is green' is a category mistake, and false, because 'two' lacks the preconditions for anything to be coloured (notably, emitting light). |
| 18058 | Maybe the presuppositions of category mistakes are the abilities of things? [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The most promising way to characterise the presuppositions involved in category mistakes might be to rephrase them in modal terms ('x is able to be pregnant', 'x is able to be green'). | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.3) | |
| A reaction: This catches my attention because it suggests that category mistakes contradict dispositions, rather than contradicting classifications or types. 'Let's use a magnet to repel this iron'? The dispositions of 'two' and 'green' in 'two is green'? Hm |
| 18056 | Category mistakes because of presuppositions still have a truth value (usually 'false') [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: I am assuming that even in those contexts in which the presupposition of 'the number two is green' fails and the utterance is infelicitious, it nevertheless receives a bivalent truth-value (presumably 'false'). | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.1) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me obvious that, in normal contexts, 'the number two is green' is false, rather than meaningless. Is 'the number eight is an odd number' meaningless? |
| 18055 | In 'two is green', 'green' has a presupposition of being coloured [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: My proposal is that the truth-conditional content of 'green' (in 'two is green') is the property of being green, and its presuppositional content is the property of being coloured. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.1) | |
| A reaction: This requires a two-dimensional semantics of truth-conditional and presuppositional content. I fear it may have a problem she spotted elsewhere, of overgenerating presuppositions. Eyes are presupposed by 'green'. Ambient light is required. |
| 18057 | 'Numbers are coloured and the number two is green' seems to be acceptable [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: 'The number two is green' is normally infelicitous, but, interestingly, 'numbers are coloured and the number two is green' is not infelicitous. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.4.1) | |
| A reaction: A nice example, which gives good support for her pragmatic account of category mistakes in terms of presupposition failure. But how about 'figures can have contradictory shapes, and this square is circular'? Numbers are not coloured!!! |
| 18059 | The presuppositions in category mistakes reveal nothing about ontology [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: My pragmatic account of category mistakes does not support a key role for them in metaphysics. It is highly doubtful that the presuppositions associated with category mistakes reveal anything about the fundamental nature of ontological categories. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: Thus she dashes my hope, without even bothering to offer a reason. I think she should push her enquiry further, and ask why we presuppose things. Why do we take presuppositions for granted? Why are they obvious? |
| 3883 | A true proposition is consistent with every other true proposition [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: A true proposition is consistent with every other true proposition: no truth is contradicted by another. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 9.1) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. It resembles the rule that if you always tell the truth you don't need to remember what you said. Close to the heart of the concept of truth. Coherence and correspondence. |
| 3884 | The pragmatist does not really have a theory of truth [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The pragmatist does not really have a theory of truth. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 9.4) |
| 18040 | Intensional logic maps logical space, showing which predicates are compatible or incompatible [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Intensional logic aims to capture necessary relations between certain predicates, such as that 'green all over' and 'red all over' cannot be co-instantiated. Each predicate is allocated a set of points in logical space, and every object has one point. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This produces an intriguing model of reality, as a vast and rich space of multiply overlapping modal predicates. Things can be blue, square, dangerous and large. They can't be small and large, or square and round. Objects are optional extras! |
| 11115 | 'All horses' either picks out the horses, or the things which are horses [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Two ways to see 'all horses are animals' are as picking out all the horses (so that it is a 'horse-quantifier'), ..or as ranging over lots of things in addition to horses, with 'horses' then restricting the things to those that satisfy 'is a horse'. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: Jubien says this gives you two different metaphysical views, of a world of horses etc., or a world of things which 'are horses'. I vote for the first one, as the second seems to invoke an implausible categorical property ('being a horse'). Cf Idea 11116. |
| 3907 | Could you be intellectually acquainted with numbers, but unable to count objects? [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Could someone have a perfect intellectual acquaintance with numbers, but be incapable of counting a flock of sheep? | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 26.6) |
| 17997 | Some suggest that the Julius Caesar problem involves category mistakes [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Various authors have argued that identity statements arising in the context of the 'Julius Caesar' problem in philosophy of mathematics constitute category mistakes. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1 n1) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Benacerraf 1965 and Shapiro 1997:79] |
| 3908 | If maths contains unprovable truths, then maths cannot be reduced to a set of proofs [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: If there can be unprovable truths of mathematics, then mathematics cannot be reduced to the proofs whereby we construct it. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 26.7) |
| 3906 | If possible worlds are needed to define properties, maybe we should abandon properties [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: If the only way of defining properties involves quantifying over possible worlds, this could be taken as another reason for abandoning properties altogether. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 26.4) |
| 11116 | Being a physical object is our most fundamental category [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Being a physical object (as opposed to being a horse or a statue) really is our most fundamental category for dealing with the external world. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: This raises the interesting question of why any categories should be considered to be more 'fundamental' than others. I can only think that we perceive something to be an object fractionally before we (usually) manage to identify it. |
| 11117 | Haecceities implausibly have no qualities [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Properties of 'being such and such specific entity' are often called 'haecceities', but this term carries the connotation of non-qualitativeness which I don't favour. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 2) | |
| A reaction: The way he defines it makes it sound as if it was a category, but I take it to be more like a bare individual essence. If it has not qualities then it has no causal powers, so there could be no evidence for its existence. |
| 18060 | We can explain the statue/clay problem by a category mistake with a false premise [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Since 'the lump of clay is Romanesque' is a category mistake, a pragmatic account of that phenomenon is key to pursuing the strategy of saying that the problem rests on a false premise. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 3888 | Hume assumes that necessity can only be de dicto, not de re [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: It was one of the assumptions of Hume's empiricism that all necessities are de dicto: i.e. they are artefacts of language. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 13.5) |
| 11119 | De re necessity is just de dicto necessity about object-essences [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that the de re is to be analyzed in terms of the de dicto. ...We have a case of modality de re when (and only when) the appropriate property in the de dicto formulation is an object-essence. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 5) |
| 11118 | Modal propositions transcend the concrete, but not the actual [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Where modal propositions may once have seemed to transcend the actual, they now seem only to transcend the concrete. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: This is because Jubien has defended a form of platonism. Personally I take modal propositions to be perceptible in the concrete world, by recognising the processes involved, not the mere static stuff. |
| 11108 | Your properties, not some other world, decide your possibilities [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The possibility of your having been a playwright has nothing to do with how people are on other planets, whether in our own or in some other realm. It is only to do with you and the relevant property. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to think that this simple point is conclusive disproof of possible worlds as an explanation of modality (apart from Jubien's other nice points). What we need to understand are modal properties, not other worlds. |
| 11111 | Modal truths are facts about parts of this world, not about remote maximal entities [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Typical modal truths are just facts about our world, and generally facts about very small parts of it, not facts about some infinitude of complex, maximal entities. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: I think we should embrace this simple fact immediately, and drop all this nonsense about possible worlds, even if they are useful for the semantics of modal logic. |
| 3903 | The conceivable can't be a test of the possible, if there are things which are possible but inconceivable [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: If there are things which are possible but inconceivable, we must abandon the view, which has had a considerable following since Descartes, that the conceivable is a test of the possible. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 25) |
| 11109 | If other worlds exist, then they are scattered parts of the actual world [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Any other realms that happened to exist would just be scattered parts of the actual world, not entire worlds at all. It would just happen that physical reality was fragmented in this remarkable but modally inconsequential way. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed explicitly at Lewis's modal realism, and strikes me as correct. Jubien's key point here is that they are irrelevant to modality, just as foreign countries are irrelevant to the modality of this one. |
| 11106 | If all possible worlds just happened to include stars, their existence would be necessary [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: If all of the possible worlds happened to include stars, how plausible is it to think that if this is how things really are, then we've just been wrong to regard the existence of stars as contingent? | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11112 | Possible worlds just give parallel contingencies, with no explanation at all of necessity [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: In the world theory, what passes for 'necessity' is just a bunch of parallel 'contingencies'. The theory provides no basis for understanding why these contingencies repeat unremittingly across the board (while others do not). | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11113 | Worlds don't explain necessity; we use necessity to decide on possible worlds [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: The suspicion is that the necessity doesn't arise from how worlds are, but rather that the worlds are taken to be as they are in order to capture the intuitive necessity. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) | |
| A reaction: It has always seemed to me rather glaring that you need a prior notion of 'possible' before you can start to talk about 'possible worlds', but I have always been too timid to disagree with the combination of Saul Kripke and David Lewis. Thank you, Jubien! |
| 11105 | We have no idea how many 'possible worlds' there might be [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: As soon as we start talking about 'possible world', we beg the question of their relevance to our prior notion of possibility. For all we know, there are just two such realms, or twenty-seven, or uncountably many, or even set-many. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11107 | If there are no other possible worlds, do we then exist necessarily? [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: Suppose there happen to be no other concrete realms. Would we happily accept the consequence that we exist necessarily? | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 11110 | We mustn't confuse a similar person with the same person [Jubien] |
| Full Idea: If someone similar to Humphrey won the election, that nicely establishes the possibility of someone's winning who is similar to Humphrey. But we mustn't confuse this possibility with the intuitively different possibility of Humphrey himself winning. | |
| From: Michael Jubien (Analyzing Modality [2007], 1) |
| 3897 | Epistemology is about the justification of belief, not the definition of knowledge [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: In my view the concept of knowledge is of no very great interest in epistemology, which actually concerns the justification of belief. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 22) | |
| A reaction: I think this is an excellent thought. I see knowledge as slippery, and partially contextual, and I don't care whether someone precisely 'knows' something. I just want to know why they believe it. |
| 3881 | In the Cogito argument consciousness develops into self-consciousness [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: In the course of the argument the first person has acquired a character; he is not merely conscious, but self-conscious. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 4) |
| 3887 | Maybe our knowledge of truth and causation is synthetic a priori [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: 'Every event has a cause' and 'truth is correspondence to facts' are candidates for being synthetic a priori knowledge. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 13.2) |
| 3901 | Touch only seems to reveal primary qualities [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Touch seems to deliver a purely primary-quality account of the world. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 24) | |
| A reaction: Interesting, though a little over-confident. It seems occasionally possible for touch to be an illusion. |
| 3885 | We only conceive of primary qualities as attached to secondary qualities [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Bradley argued that we cannot conceive of primary qualities except as attached to secondary qualities. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 10.1) |
| 3910 | If primary and secondary qualities are distinct, what has the secondary qualities? [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: If primary and secondary qualities are distinct, what do secondary qualities inhere in? | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], Ch.10 n) | |
| A reaction: What is the problem? A pin causes me pain, but I know the pain isn't in the pin. It is the same with colour. It is a mental property, if you like, triggered by a wavelength of radiation. |
| 3899 | The representational theory says perceptual states are intentional states [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The representational theory is the unsurprising view that perceptual states are intentional, like beliefs, emotions and desires. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 23.3) |
| 3898 | My belief that it will rain tomorrow can't be caused by its raining tomorrow [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible that my present belief that it will rain tomorrow is caused by its raining tomorrow. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 22.4) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't demolish a causal account of belief. It would be very surprising if I were to believe it was going to rain tomorrow for no cause whatsoever. That would be irrational. |
| 3880 | Logical positivism avoids scepticism, by closing the gap between evidence and conclusion [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: If the evidence for p is q, and that is the only evidence there is or can be, then 'p' means q. Hence there is no gap between evidence and conclusion, and the sceptical problem does not arise. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 3.2) |
| 3878 | Why should you believe someone who says there are no truths? [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 1.1) |
| 3892 | Every event having a cause, and every event being determined by its cause, are not the same [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: To say that every event has a cause is one thing; to say that every event is determined by its cause is quite another thing. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 17.1) |
| 3911 | The very concept of a substance denies the possibility of mutual interaction and dependence [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: It is often held to be a consequence of the rationalist conception of substance, that separate substances cannot interact (since causal interaction is a form of mutual dependence). | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], Ch.16 n) | |
| A reaction: Yes, substances seem incapable of interaction, just as Leibniz argues that perfections could never interact. They are too pure. |
| 18020 | Propositional attitudes relate agents to either propositions, or meanings, or sentence/utterances [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Three views of the semantics of propositional attitudes: they are relations between agents and propositions ('propositional' view); relations between individuals and meanings (Fregean); or relations of individuals and sentences/utterances ('sentential'). | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: I am a propositionalist on this one. Meanings are too vague, and sentences are too linguistic. |
| 18035 | Two sentences with different meanings can, on occasion, have the same content [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: It is commonly assumed that meaning and content can come apart: the sentence 'I am writing' and 'Ofra is writing' may have different meanings, even if, as currently uttered, they express the same content. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: From that, I would judge 'content' to mean the same as 'proposition'. |
| 18018 | To grasp 'two' and 'green', must you know that two is not green? [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Is it a necessary condition on possessing the concepts of 'two' and 'green' that one does not believe that two is green? I think this claim is false. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: To see that it is false one only has to consider much more sophisticated concepts, which are grasped without knowing their full implications. I might think two is green because I fully grasp 'two', but have not yet mastered 'green'. |
| 18008 | Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Generative semanticists claimed that the structure of a sentence is determined by both 'syntactic' and 'semantic' considerations which interact with each other in complex ways. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: [She mentions George Lakoff for this view] You need to study a range of examples, but this sounds a better view to me than the tidy picture of producing a syntactic structure and then adding a semantics. We make up sentences while speaking them. |
| 18010 | 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The sentences 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' can have very different deep structure (with the latter concerning John as a pleaser, while the former concerns John as the one being pleased). | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This demolishes the old idea of grammar as 'parts of speech' strung together according to superficial rules. The question is whether we now just have deeper syntax, or whether semantics is part of the process. |
| 18053 | The semantics of a sentence is its potential for changing a context [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The basic semantics of sentences are not truth-conditions, but rather context change potential, which is a rule which determines what the effect of uttering the sentence would be on the context. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
| A reaction: [I. Heim's 'renowned' 1983 revision of Stalnaker] This means the semantics of a sentence can vary hugely, depending on context. It is known as 'dynamic semantics'. 'I think you should go ahead and do it'. |
| 18000 | Weaker compositionality says meaningful well-formed sentences get the meaning from the parts [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: A weaker principle of compositionality states that if a syntactically well-formed sentence is meaningful, then its meaning is a function of the meaning of its parts. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: I would certainly accept this as being correct. I take the meaning of a sentence to be something which you assemble in your head as you hear the parts of it unfold. ….However, irony might exhibit meaning that only comes from the whole sentence. Hm. |
| 17999 | Strong compositionality says meaningful expressions syntactically well-formed are meaningful [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: In the strong form of the principle of compositionality any meaningful expressions combined in a syntactically well-formed manner compose a meaningful expression. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Montague as holding this view] I find this plausible, at least. If you look at whole sentences they can seem meaningless, but if you track the process of composition a collective meaning emerges, despite the oddities. |
| 18014 | Understanding unlimited numbers of sentences suggests that meaning is compositional [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The fact that speakers of natural languages have the capacity to understand indefinitely many new sentences suggests that meaning must be compositional. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.2.1) | |
| A reaction: To some extent, the compositionality of meaning is so obvious as to hardly require pointing out. It is the precise nature of the claim, and the extent to which whole sentences can add to the compositional meaning, that is of interest. |
| 18001 | Are there partial propositions, lacking truth value in some possible worlds? [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Are there such things as 'partial propositions', which are truth-valueless relative to some possible worlds? | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this could be expressed without possible worlds. Are there propositions meaningful in New Guinea, and meaningless in England? Do some propositions require the contingent existence of certain objects to be meaningful? |
| 3882 | Wittgenstein makes it impossible to build foundations from something that is totally private [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Wittgenstein's point is that if I search for foundations in what can only be known to me, then the belief that I have discovered those foundations will also fall victim to Descartes' demon. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Why should foundations based in wider society or a language community fare any better? Getting a lot of people to agree won't trouble the demon too much. Flat earthers. |
| 18036 | A sentence can be meaningful, and yet lack a truth value [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: 'That is red' in a context where the demonstrative fails to refer is truth-valueless, despite being meaningful, as is 'the queen of France in 2010 is bald'. ...The claim that some sentences are meaningful but truth-valueless is, then, widely accepted. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: The lack of truth value is usually because of reference failure. It is best to say the words are meaningful, but no proposition is expressed. |
| 18051 | In the pragmatic approach, presuppositions are assumed in a context, for successful assertion [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: According to the pragmatic approach, presuppositions are constraints on the context: if a sentence s generates a presupposition p, an assertion of s cannot proceed smoothly unless the context already entails p (p is taken for granted). | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
| A reaction: She credits Stalnaker for this approach. There is a choice between the presuppositions being largely driven by internal features of the sentence, or by external features of context. You may not know the context of some statements. |
| 18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: In Grice's theory if a sentence is trivially true, asserting it would violate the maxim of quantity. For Stalnaker, if p is trivially true, it involves no update to the context-set, and is thus pointless. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.2) | |
| A reaction: 'Let us remind ourselves, before we proceed, of the following trivial truth: p'. |
| 18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: In Grice's theory if a sentence is trivially false, asserting it would violate the maxim of quality. For Stalnaker if p is trivially false, removing all worlds incompatible with p would result in an empty context-set, preventing any further communication. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.2) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I'm not sure whether we need to 'explain' the inappropriateness of uttering trivial falsities. I take the main rule of conversation to be 'don't be boring', but we all violate that. |
| 18050 | If both s and not-s entail a sentence p, then p is a presupposition [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: In the traditional account, a sentence s presupposes p if and only if both s and ¬s entail p. Standardly, this entails that if s presupposes p, then whenever p is false, s must be neither true nor false. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
| A reaction: 'I'm looking down on the garden' presupposes 'I'm upstairs'. Why would 'I'm not looking down on the garden' entail 'I'm upstairs'? I seem to have missed something. |
| 18047 | A presupposition is what makes an utterance sound wrong if it is not assumed? [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The most obvious test for presupposition would be this: if s generates the presupposition p, then an utterance of s would be infelicitous, unless p is taken for granted by participants in the conversation. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.1.1) | |
| A reaction: The principle of charity seems to be involved here - that we try to make people's utterances sound right, so we add in the presuppositions which would achieve that. The problem, she says, is that the infelicity may have other causes. |
| 18048 | A test for presupposition would be if it provoked 'hey wait a minute - I have no idea that....' [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: A proposed test for presupposition is the 'Hey, wait a minute' test. S presupposes that p, just in case it would be felictious to respond to an utterance of s with something like 'Hey, wait a minute - I had not idea that p!'. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: [K. Von Finkel 2004 made the suggestion] That is, you think 'hm ...this statement seems to presuppose p'. She says the suggestion vastly over-generates possible presuppositions - unlikely ones, as well as the obvious ones. |
| 18049 | The best tests for presupposition are projecting it to negation, conditional, conjunction, questions [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The most robust tests for presupposition are the projection tests. If s presupposes p, then ¬s does too. If s1 presupposes p, then 'if s1 then s2' presupposes p. If s1 presupposes p, then 's1 and s2' presupposes p. If s presupposes p, then 's?' does too. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.1.3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] She also discusses quantifiers. In other words, the presupposition remains stable through various transformations of the underlying proposition. |
| 18054 | Why do certain words trigger presuppositions? [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: We can ask why a range of lexical items (e.g. 'stop' or 'know') trigger the presuppositions they do. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.3.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure whether we'll get an answer, but I would approach the question by thinking about mental files. |
| 18022 | Metaphors tend to involve category mistakes, by joining disjoint domains [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The fact that most metaphors involve category mistakes is not a coincidence. …A big part of them is to do with connecting objects and properties that normally seem to belong to disjoint domains. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: Metaphysica poets took disjoint domains and 'yoked them together by violence', according to Dr Johnson. |
| 18023 | Theories of metaphor divide over whether they must have literal meanings [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: There are theories of metaphors that require them to have literal meanings in order to achieve their metaphorical purpose, and those that do not. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: I take almost any string of proper language to have literal meaning (for compositional reasons), even if the end result is somewhat ridiculous. 'Churchill was a lion' obviously has literal meaning. And so does 'Churchill was a transcendental number'. |
| 18024 | One theory says metaphors mean the same as the corresponding simile [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: On standard versions of the simile theory of metaphors, they mean the same as the corresponding simile. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: Magidor points out that this allows the metaphor to work while being meaningless, since all the work is done by the perfectly meaningful simile. But the metaphor must at least mean enough to indicate what the simile is. |
| 18027 | Metaphors as substitutes for the literal misses one predicate varying with context [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: A problem with the substitution view of metaphors is that the same predicate can have very different metaphorical contributions in different contexts. Consider 'Juliet is the sun' uttered by Romeo, and 'Stalin is the sun' from a devoted communist. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: The substitution view never looked good (especially if you like poetry), and now it looks a lot worse. |
| 18025 | The simile view of metaphors removes their magic, and won't explain why we use them [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: The simile theory of metaphors makes them too easy to figure out, when they cannot be paraphrased in literal terms, …and it does not explain why we use metaphors as well as similes. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Davidson for these points] They might just be similes with the added frisson of leaving out 'like', so that they seem at first to be false, until you work out the simile and see their truth. |
| 18026 | Maybe a metaphor is just a substitute for what is intended literally, like 'icy' for 'unemotional' [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: According to the substitution view of metaphors, a word used metaphorically is merely a substitute for another word or phrase that expresses the same meaning literally. Thus 'John is an ice-cube' is a substitute for 'John is cruel and unemotional'. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to capture the denotation but miss the connotation. Whoever came up with this theory didn't read much poetry. |
| 18028 | Gricean theories of metaphor involve conversational implicatures based on literal meanings [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Gricean theories of metaphor …assume that conversational implicatures are generated via literal contents, and hence that a sentence cannot generate an implicature without being literally meaningful. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: Magidor gives not details of such theories, but presumably the metaphor is all in the speaker's intention, which is parasitic on the wayward literal meaning, as in cases of irony. |
| 18029 | Non-cognitivist views of metaphor says there are no metaphorical meanings, just effects of the literal [Magidor] |
| Full Idea: According to non-cognitivists there is no such thing as metaphorical meaning. …The effects on the hearer are induced directly via the literal meaning of the metaphor. | |
| From: Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: [This is said to be Davidson's view] I wonder how many people defended some explicit 'metaphorical meaning', as opposed to connotations that accumulate as you take in the metaphor? Any second meaning is just a further literal meaning. |
| 3896 | Any social theory of morality has the problem of the 'free rider', who only pretends to join in [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Any attempt to provide a social justification of morality runs the risk of the 'free rider' - one who pretends to play the game in order to enjoy the fruits of it. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 20.6) |
| 3886 | Membership is the greatest source of obligation [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Membership is the greatest source of obligation. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 11.2) | |
| A reaction: An interesting and rather Aristotelian idea. The alternative is individual debt or obligation. |
| 3895 | The categorical imperative is not just individual, but can be used for negotiations between strangers [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The categorical imperative is also an instrument of negotiation and compromise between strangers, through which they can rise out of enmity and confront each other as equals. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 20.6) |
| 3890 | 'Cause' used to just mean any valid explanation [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Traditionally (before Leibniz and Spinoza) the world 'cause' signified any valid explanation. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 14) |
| 3904 | Measuring space requires no movement while I do it [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: I can measure the length of something only if I know that it has not moved between the moment when I locate one end of it and the moment when I locate the other. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 25.3) | |
| A reaction: A nice example of how even simple propositions have many presuppositions. |
| 3905 | 'Existence' is not a predicate of 'man', but of the concept of man, saying it has at least one instance [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: When I say that a man exists, Frege argues, I do not predicate existence of a man, but rather of the concept man: I say the concept has at least one instance (and existence is a predicate of predicates). | |
| From: Roger Scruton (Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey [1994], 26.2) |