28 ideas
| 8013 | In the Reformation, morality became unconditional but irrational, individually autonomous, and secular [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Three concepts about morality emerge from the Reformation period: that moral rules are unconditional demands that lack rational justification; that moral agents are sovereign in choices; and that secular powers have their own norms and justifications. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I get the impression that a rather frank admission of the role of self-interest emerged at that time as well. It is only in the late seventeenth century that the possibility of a secular altruism begins to be investigated. But there's Shakespeare... |
| 8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: John Lilburne, the Leveller, 'Free-Born John', was the most important of them. They mainly fought for rights of religious conscience, but it quickly escalated into a demand for economic and social rights. It spread to France and the United States. |
| 12596 | Reasoning aims at increasing explanatory coherence [Harman] |
| Full Idea: In reasoning you try among other things to increase the explanatory coherence of your view. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.2) | |
| A reaction: Harman is a champion of inference to the best explanation (abduction), and I agree with him. I think this idea extends to give us a view of justification as coherence, and that extends from inner individual coherence to socially extended coherence. |
| 12599 | Reason conservatively: stick to your beliefs, and prefer reasoning that preserves most of them [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Conservatism is important; you should continue to believe as you do in the absence of any special reason to doubt your view, and in reasoning you should try to minimize change in your initial opinions in attaining other goals of reasoning. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.6) | |
| A reaction: One of those principles like Ockham's Razor, which feels right but hard to justify. It seems the wrong principle for someone who can reason well, but has been brainwashed into a large collection of daft beliefs. Japanese soldiers still fighting WWII. |
| 12595 | We have a theory of logic (implication and inconsistency), but not of inference or reasoning [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There is as yet no substantial theory of inference or reasoning. To be sure, logic is well developed; but logic is not a theory of inference or reasoning. Logic is a theory of implication and inconsistency. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.2) | |
| A reaction: One problem is that animals can draw inferences without the use of language, and I presume we do so all the time, so it is hard to see how to formalise such an activity. |
| 12597 | I might accept P and Q as likely, but reject P-and-Q as unlikely [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Principles of implication imply there is not a purely probabilistic rule of acceptance for belief. Otherwise one might accept P and Q, without accepting their conjunction, if the conjuncts have a high probability, but the conjunction doesn't. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.2) | |
| A reaction: [Idea from Scott Soames] I am told that my friend A has just won a very big lottery prize, and am then told that my friend B has also won a very big lottery prize. The conjunction seems less believable; I begin to suspect a conspiracy. |
| 12598 | Reality is the overlap of true complete theories [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Reality is what is invariant among true complete theories. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.2.4) | |
| A reaction: The sort of slogan that gets coined in the age of Quine. The whole manner of starting from your theories and working out to what we think reality is seems to be putting the cart before the horse. |
| 8006 | When Aristotle speaks of soul he means something like personality [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: When Aristotle speaks of the soul we could very often retain his meaning by speaking of personality. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: MacIntyre contrasts this strongly with Plato's dualist view. Famously Aristotle thinks the soul is the 'form' of the body, but this implies that he also includes the higher-level functions of the body. Soul is character? |
| 12602 | There is no natural border between inner and outer [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There is no natural border between inner and outer. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.4) | |
| A reaction: Perhaps this is the key idea for the anti-individualist view of mind. Subjectively I would have to accept this idea, but looking objectively at another person it seems self-evident nonsense. |
| 12603 | We can only describe mental attitudes in relation to the external world [Harman] |
| Full Idea: No one has ever described a way of explaining what beliefs, desires, and other mental states are except in terms of actual or possible relations to things in the external world. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.4) | |
| A reaction: If I pursue my current favourite idea, that how we explain things is the driving force in what ontology we adopt, then this way of seeing the mind, and taking an externalist anti-individualist view of it seems quite attractive. |
| 12601 | The way things look is a relational matter, not an intrinsic matter [Harman] |
| Full Idea: According to functionalism, the way things look to you is a relational characteristic of your experience, not part of its intrinsic character. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.3) | |
| A reaction: No, can't make sense of that. How would being in a relation determine what something is? Similar problems with the structuralist account of mathematics. If the whole family love some one cat or one dog, the only difference is intrinsic to the animal. |
| 12592 | Concepts in thought have content, but not meaning, which requires communication [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Concepts and other aspects of mental representation have content but not (normally) meaning (unless they are also expressions in a language used in communication). | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Given his account of meaning as involving some complex 'role', he has to say this, though it seems a dubious distinction, going against the grain of a normal request to ask what some concept 'means'. What is 'democracy'? |
| 12590 | Take meaning to be use in calculation with concepts, rather than in communication [Harman] |
| Full Idea: (Nonsolipsistic) conceptual role semantics is a version of the theory that meaning is use, where the basic use is taken to be in calculation, not in communication, and where concepts are treated as symbols in a 'language of thought'. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.1) | |
| A reaction: The idea seems to be to connect the highly social Wittgensteinian view of language with the reductive physicalist account of how brains generate concepts. Interesting, thought I never like meaning-as-use. |
| 12593 | The use theory attaches meanings to words, not to sentences [Harman] |
| Full Idea: A use theory of meaning has to suppose it is words and ways of putting words together that have meaning because of their uses, not sentences. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.3) | |
| A reaction: He says that most sentences are unique, so cannot have a standard use. Words do a particular job over and over again. How do you distinguish the quirky use of a word from its standard use? |
| 12588 | Meaning from use of thoughts, constructed from concepts, which have a role relating to reality [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual role semantics involves meanings of expressions determined by used contents of concepts and thoughts, contents constructed from concepts, concepts determined by functional role, which involves relations to things in the world. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: This essay is the locus classicus for conceptual-role semantics. Any attempt to say what something IS by giving an account of its function always feels wrong to me. |
| 12589 | Some regard conceptual role semantics as an entirely internal matter [Harman] |
| Full Idea: I call my conceptual role semantics 'non-solipsistic' to contrast it with that of authors (Field, Fodor, Loar) who think of conceptual role solipsistically as a completely internal matter. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: Evidently Harman is influenced by Putnam's Twin Earth, and that meanings ain't in the head, so that the conceptual role has to be extended out into the world to get a good account. I prefer extending into the language community, rather into reality. |
| 12600 | The content of thought is relations, between mental states, things in the world, and contexts [Harman] |
| Full Idea: In (nonsolipsistic) conceptual role semantics the content of thought is not in an 'intrinsic nature', but is rather a matter of how mental states are related to each other, to things in the external world, and to things in a context understood as normal. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.3.3) | |
| A reaction: This is part of Harman's functional view of consciousness, which I find rather dubious. If things only have identity because of some place in a flow diagram, we must ask why that thing has that place in that diagram. |
| 12594 | If one proposition negates the other, which is the negative one? [Harman] |
| Full Idea: A relation of negation might hold between two beliefs without there being anything that determines which belief is the negative one. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.4) | |
| A reaction: [He attributes this thought to Brian Loar] This seems to give us a reason why we need a semantics for a logic, and not just a structure of inferences and proofs. |
| 12591 | Mastery of a language requires thinking, and not just communication [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If one cannot think in a language, one has not yet mastered it. A symbol system used only for communication, like Morse code, is not a language. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics [1987], 12.1.2) | |
| A reaction: This invites the question of someone who has mastered thinking, but has no idea how to communicate. No doubt we might construct a machine with something like that ability. I think it might support Harman's claim. |
| 8002 | Sophists don't distinguish a person outside one social order from someone outside all order [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The sophist tradition failed to distinguish the difference between the concept of a man who stands outside and is able to question the conventions of some one given social order, and the concept of a man who stands outside social life as such. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: A very nice distinction. Compare foreigners in Athens with Diogenes of Sinope, who renounced all cities. This is the germ of MacIntyre's view that morality is essentially dependent on some sort of social order. He is a reviver of virtue theory. |
| 8012 | The value/fact logical gulf is misleading, because social facts involve values [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: One reason why it is highly misleading to talk of a logical gulf between value and fact....is that we cannot characterize the social life of a tribe in their factual terms and escape their evaluations. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: Personally I like the objection that facts about functions cannot avoid the value of good functions, but this is very good. It is much better than simply trying to find a specific counterexample, such as facts about promises. Values just are facts. |
| 8005 | 'Happiness' is a bad translation of 'eudaimonia', which includes both behaving and faring well [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The name 'eudaimonia' is badly but inevitably translated by 'happiness', badly because it includes both the notion of behaving well and the notion of faring well. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that it does not include the notion of feeling good. Aristotle, however, concludes that pleasure is part of eudaimonia. I take our 'happiness' to be an internal notion, while the Greek word is an external notion. |
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |
| 8001 | 'Dikaiosune' is justice, but also fairness and personal integrity [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The Greek 'dikaiosune' is inadequately translated as 'justice', but also as any other word; it combines the notion of fairness in externals with that of personal integrity in a way that no English word does. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 1) | |
| A reaction: 'Dikaiosune' is said to be the main topic of Plato's 'Republic'. Plato seems to have meant it to cover whatever makes a good character. Justice in behaviour presumably flows from internal justice of character (which is, roughly, inner harmony). |
| 8023 | My duties depend on my identity, which depends on my social relations [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: I cannot answer the question 'What ought I to do?' until I have answered the question 'Who am I?', and any answer to this question will specify my place in a nexus of social relationships. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This is the beginning of the modern critique of deontological ethics coming from revived virtue theory. As it stands, MacIntyre's idea sounds contractual, but I think he intends it in a more organic way. I am a fan. |
| 8022 | I am naturally free if I am not tied to anyone by a contract [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The essence of the claim to natural rights is that no one has a right against me unless he can cite some contract, my consent to it, and his performance of his obligations under it. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: This has become the foundation of western democracy, and the rebellious teenager's charter. Children have not consented to a contract with their parents. Close and loving relationships cease to be contractual. |
| 8031 | Fans of natural rights or laws can't agree on what the actual rights or laws are [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: It is notorious that adherents of theories about natural rights or natural laws offer lists of rights or laws which differ in substance from each other. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.17) | |
| A reaction: There seems to have been a consensus early on that self-defence was a natural right, but divergence presumably occurs when you get bolder and more complex. There is a lot of divergence over which is Shakespeare's best play. |
| 8008 | The Bible is a story about God in which humans are incidental characters [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The Bible is a story about God in which human beings appear as incidental characters. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: Very illuminating. He creates man, is betrayed by man, drowns him and starts again, sends a redeemer who gets murdered, and finally enlightens a small band who continue the uphill struggle to promote God's way. What next? |