12 ideas
| 18914 | Davidson controversially proposed to quantify over events [Davidson, by Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: An alternative, and still controversial, extension of first-order logic is due to Donald Davidson, who allows for quantification over events. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by George Engelbretsen - Trees, Terms and Truth 3 | |
| A reaction: I'm suddenly thinking this is quite an attractive proposal. We need to quantify over facts, or states of affairs, or events, or some such thing, to talk about the world properly. Objects, predicates and sets/parts is too sparse. I like facts. |
| 9843 | You can't identify events by causes and effects, as the event needs to be known first [Dummett on Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Davidson's criterion for the identity of events is a mistake, because we cannot know the causes and effects of an event until we know what that event comprises. | |
| From: comment on Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: How many attempts by analytical philosophers to give necessary and sufficient conditions for things seem to founder in this way. Their predecessor is at the end of 'Theaetetus'; you have to know what the sun is before you can define it. |
| 14602 | Events can only be individuated causally [Davidson, by Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Davidson claims that events can only be individuated causally. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969], 3) by Jonathan Schaffer - Causation and Laws of Nature 3 | |
| A reaction: Schaffer rejects this in favour of individuating events by their spatiotemporal locations and intrinsic natures (which seem to be property instantiations, a la Kim). Schaffer was a pupil of David Lewis. |
| 14004 | We need events for action statements, causal statements, explanation, mind-and-body, and adverbs [Davidson, by Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Davidson claims that we require the existence of events in order to make sense of a) action statements, b) causal statements, c) explanation, d) the mind-body problem, and e) the logic of adverbial modification. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969], Intro IIb) by Craig Bourne - A Future for Presentism | |
| A reaction: Events are a nice shorthand, but I don't like them in a serious ontology. Prior says there objects and what happens to them; Kim reduces events to other things. Processes are more clearly individuated than events. |
| 8278 | The claim that events are individuated by their causal relations to other events is circular [Lowe on Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Davidson has urged that events are individuated by the causal relations which they bear to one another, in accordance with the principle that events are identical just in case they have the same causes and effects. But the principle is viciously circular. | |
| From: comment on Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by E.J. Lowe - The Possibility of Metaphysics 7.4 | |
| A reaction: You wouldn't want to identify a person just by their relationships, even though those will certainly be unique. Generally it is what I am (right now) naming as the Functional Fallacy: believing that specifying the function of x explains x. |
| 21515 | Incoherence may be more important for enquiry than coherence [Olsson] |
| Full Idea: While coherence may lack the positive role many have assigned to it, ...incoherence plays an important negative role in our enquiries. | |
| From: Erik J. Olsson (Against Coherence [2005], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Peirce as the main source for this idea] We can hardly by deeply impressed by incoherence if we have no sense of coherence. Incoherence is just one of many markers for theory failure. Missing the target, bad concepts... |
| 21514 | Coherence is the capacity to answer objections [Olsson] |
| Full Idea: According to Lehrer, coherence should be understood in terms of the capacity to answer objections. | |
| From: Erik J. Olsson (Against Coherence [2005], 9) | |
| A reaction: [Keith Lehrer 1990] We can connect this with the Greek requirement of being able to give an account [logos], which is the hallmark of understanding. I take coherence to be the best method of achieving understanding. Any understanding meets Lehrer's test. |
| 21496 | Mere agreement of testimonies is not enough to make truth very likely [Olsson] |
| Full Idea: Far from guaranteeing a high likelihood of truth by itself, testimonial agreement can apparently do so only if the circumstances are favourable as regards independence, prior probability, and individual credibility. | |
| From: Erik J. Olsson (Against Coherence [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is Olson's main thesis. His targets are C.I.Lewis and Bonjour, who hoped that a mere consensus of evidence would increase verisimilitude. I don't see a problem for coherence in general, since his favourable circumstances are part of it. |
| 21499 | Coherence is only needed if the information sources are not fully reliable [Olsson] |
| Full Idea: An enquirer who is fortunate enough to have at his or her disposal fully reliable information sources has no use for coherence, the need for which arises only in the context of less than fully reliable informations sources. | |
| From: Erik J. Olsson (Against Coherence [2005], 2.6.2) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be entirely false. How do you assess reliability? 'I've seen it with my own eyes'. Why trust your eyes? In what visibility conditions do you begin to doubt your eyes? Why do rational people mistrust their intuitions? |
| 21502 | A purely coherent theory cannot be true of the world without some contact with the world [Olsson] |
| Full Idea: The Input Objection says a pure coherence theory would seem to allow that a system of beliefs be justified in spite of being utterly out of contact with the world it purports to describe, so long as it is, to a sufficient extent, coherent. | |
| From: Erik J. Olsson (Against Coherence [2005], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: Olson seems impressed by this objection, but I don't see how a system could be coherently about the world if it had no known contact with the world. Olson seems to ignore meta-coherence, which evaluates the status of the system being studied. |
| 21512 | Extending a system makes it less probable, so extending coherence can't make it more probable [Olsson] |
| Full Idea: Any non-trivial extension of a belief system is less probable than the original system, but there are extensions that are more coherent than the original system. Hence more coherence does not imply a higher probability. | |
| From: Erik J. Olsson (Against Coherence [2005], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: [Olson cites Klein and Warfield 1994; compressed] The example rightly says the extension could have high internal coherence, but not whether the extension is coherent with the system being extended. |
| 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'). |