72 ideas
| 14888 | Wisdom prevents us from being ruled by the moment [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The most important thing about wisdom is that it prevents human beings from being ruled by the moment. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [25]) |
| 14863 | Unlike science, true wisdom involves good taste [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Inherent in wisdom [sophia] is discrimination, the possession of good taste: whereas science, lacking such a refined sense of taste, gobbles up anything that is worth knowing. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [086]) | |
| A reaction: This is blatantly unfair to science, which may lack 'taste', but at least prefers deep theories with wide-ranging explanatory power to narrow local theories. Maybe the line across the philosophical community is the one picking out those with taste? |
| 14890 | Suffering is the meaning of existence [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Suffering is the meaning of existence. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 32 [67]) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't mean that he is advocating suffering. The context of his remark is that the pursuit of truth involves suffering. |
| 14861 | Philosophy ennobles the world, by producing an artistic conception of our knowledge [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is indispensable for education because it draws knowledge into an artistic conception of the world, and thereby ennobles it. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [052]) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be an unusual way of saying that philosophy aims at the unification of knowledge, which is roughly my own view. It has hard for us to keep believing that life could be 'ennobled'. |
| 12644 | Who cares what 'philosophy' is? Most pre-1950 thought doesn't now count as philosophy [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Who cares what gets called 'philosophy'? It's my impression that most of what happened in philosophy before 1950 wouldn't qualify according to the present usage. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: A rather breath-taking remark. Fodor is, of course, a devotee of David Hume, and of Descartes, but he never seems to refer to Greeks at all. Personally I presume that if you aren't doing what Plato and Aristotle were interested in, it ain't philosophy. |
| 14885 | The first aim of a philosopher is a life, not some works [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher's product is his life (first, before his works). It is his work of art. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [205]) |
| 14887 | You should only develop a philosophy if you are willing to live by it [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: One should have a philosophy only to the extent that one is capable of living according to this philosophy: so that everything does not become mere words. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [17]) |
| 14889 | Philosophy is pointless if it does not advocate, and live, a new way of life [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: As long as philosophers do not muster the courage to advocate a lifestyle structured in an entirely different way and demonstrate it by their own example, they will come to nothing. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 31 [10]) | |
| A reaction: This is a pretty tough requirement for the leading logicians and metaphysicians of our day, but they must face their marginality. The public will only be interested in philosophers who advocate new ways of living. |
| 14862 | Philosophy is more valuable than much of science, because of its beauty [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The reason why unprovable philosophizing still has some value - more value, in fact, than many a scientific proposition - lies in the aesthetic value of such philosophizing, that is, in its beauty and sublimity. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [076]) | |
| A reaction: I am increasingly inclined to agree. I love wide-ranging and ambitious works of metaphysics, each of which is a unique creation of the human intellect (and with which no other individual will ever entirely agree). A great short paper is also beautiful. |
| 14878 | It would better if there was no thought [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: It would be better if thought did not exist at all. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [004]) |
| 14881 | Why do people want philosophers? [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Why do human beings even want philosophers? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [019]) | |
| A reaction: It is not clear, of course, that they do want philosophers. The standard attitude to them seems to be a mixture of contempt and fear. |
| 14876 | Philosophy is always secondary, because it cannot support a popular culture [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: It is not possible to base a popular culture on philosophy. Thus, with regard to culture, philosophy never can have primary, but always only secondary, significance. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 23 [14]) | |
| A reaction: It is the brilliance of Christianity as a set of ideas that it is simple enough to found a popular culture. A complex theology would make that impossible. Luther brought it back to its roots, when the priesthood lost touch with the people. |
| 14860 | Kant has undermined our belief in metaphysics [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: In a certain sense, Kant's influence was detrimental; for the belief in metaphysics has been lost. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [028]) | |
| A reaction: As I understand it, there are two interpretations of Kant, one of which is fairly thoroughly anti-metaphysical, and another which is less so. Also one path leads to idealism and the other doesn't, but I need to research that. |
| 12633 | Definitions often give necessary but not sufficient conditions for an extension [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Attempts to define a term frequently elicit necessary but not sufficient conditions for membership of its extension. This is called the 'X problem', as in 'kill' means 'cause to die' plus X. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.1 n3) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is one of the great sceptics about definition. I just don't see why we have to have totally successful definitions before we can accept the process as a worthwhile endeavour. |
| 14859 | If philosophy controls science, then it has to determine its scope, and its value [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The philosophy that is in control of science must also consider the extent to which science should be allowed to develop; it must determine its value! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [024]) |
| 14880 | Logic is just slavery to language [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Logic is merely slavery in the fetters of language. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [008]) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I agree with this, but I still like it. |
| 12664 | A truth-table, not inferential role, defines 'and' [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I'm inclined to think that 'and' is defined by its truth-table (and not, for example, by its 'inferential-role'). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: Sounds right, on my general principle that something can only have a function if it has an intrinsic nature. The truth-table just formalises normal understanding of 'and', according to what it makes true. |
| 12648 | Names in thought afford a primitive way to bring John before the mind [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Names in thought (in contrast to, say, descriptions in thought) afford a primitive way of bringing John before the mind. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: I think the 'file' account of concepts which Fodor has now latched onto gives a wonderful account of names. They are simple if you haven't opened the file yet (like 'Louis', in Evans's example). |
| 12650 | 'Paderewski' has two names in mentalese, for his pianist file and his politician file [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Paderewski (as pianist and as politician) has two names in Mentalese. If you think there are two Paderewskis, it's important that what you get when you retrieve the pianist file differs from the politician file. You can then merge the two files. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: The same will apply to 'Hespherus' and 'Phosphorus'. We can re-separate the 'morning star' and 'evening star' files if we wish to discuss ancient Egyptian attitudes to such things. I love this idea of Fodor's. Explanations flow from it. |
| 12656 | P-and-Q gets its truth from the truth of P and truth of Q, but consistency isn't like that [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The truth of P-and-Q is (roughly) a function of the truth of P and the truth of Q; but the consistency of P&Q isn't a function of the consistency of P and the consistency of Q. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.5 n33) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice deep issue. Fodor is interested in artificial intelligence at this point, but I am interested in the notion of coherence, as found in good justifications. Even consistency isn't elementary logic, never mind coherence. |
| 14869 | If some sort of experience is at the root of matter, then human knowledge is close to its essence [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: If pleasure, displeasure, sensation, memory, reflex movements are all part of the essence of matter, then human knowledge penetrates far more deeply into the essence of things. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [161]) | |
| A reaction: I don't think Nietzsche is thinking of monads at this point, but his idea certainly applies to them. Leibniz rested his whole theory on the close analogy between how minds work and how matter must also work. |
| 12653 | There's statistical, logical, nomological, conceptual and metaphysical possibility [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Statistically, logically, nomologically, conceptually, and metaphysically possible. That's all the kinds of possibility there are this week, but feel free to add others. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.3) | |
| A reaction: There's also epistemic possibility (possibility 'for all I know'), but I suppose that isn't the real thing. How about 'imaginative possibility' (possibility 'as far as I can imagine')? |
| 14875 | Belief matters more than knowledge, and only begins when knowledge ceases [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The human being starts to believe when he ceases to know. …Knowledge is not as important for the welfare of human beings as is belief. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 21 [13]) | |
| A reaction: The first idea is now associated with Williamson (and Hossack). The second is something like the pragmatic view of belief espoused by Ramsey. |
| 12651 | Some beliefs are only inferred when needed, like 'Shakespeare had not telephone' [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Maybe some of your beliefs are inferred 'online' from what you have in your files, along with your inferential rules. 'Shakespeare didn't have a telephone' is a classic example, which we infer if the occasion arises. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: A highly persuasive example. There seem to be a huge swathe of blatantly obvious beliefs (especially negative ones) which may never cross our minds during an entire lifetime, but to which we certainly subscribe. |
| 12628 | Knowing that must come before knowing how [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Thought about the world is prior to thought about how to change the world. Accordingly, knowing that is prior to knowing how. Descartes was right, and Ryle was wrong. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: The classical example is knowing how to ride a bicycle, when few people can explain what is involved. Clearly you need quite a bit of propositional knowledge before you step on a bike. How does Fodor's claim work for animals? |
| 14866 | It always remains possible that the world just is the way it appears [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Against Kant we can still object, even if we accept all his propositions, that it is still possible that the world is as it appears to us. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [125]) | |
| A reaction: This little thought at least seems to be enough to block the slide from phenomenalism into total idealism. The idea that direct realism can never be ruled out, even if it is false, is very striking. |
| 12625 | Pragmatism is the worst idea ever [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism is perhaps the worst idea that philosophy ever had. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Not an argument, but an interesting sign of the times. Most major modern American philosophers, such as Quine, seem to fit some loose label of 'pragmatist'. I always smell a feeble relativism, and a refusal to face the interesting questions. |
| 14872 | Our knowledge is illogical, because it rests on false identities between things [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Every piece of knowledge that is beneficial to us involves an identification of nonidentical things, of things that are similar, which means that it is essentially illogical. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [236]) | |
| A reaction: I take the thought to be that no two tigers are alike, but we call them all 'tigers' and merge them into a type, and then all our knowledge is based on this distortion. A wonderful idea. I love particulars You should love particulars. |
| 14879 | The most extreme scepticism is when you even give up logic [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Even skepticism contains a belief: the belief in logic. The most extreme position is hence the abandoning of logic. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [008]) | |
| A reaction: Some might say that flirting with non-classical logic (as in Graham Priest) is precisely travelling down this road. You could also be sceptical about meaning in language, so you couldn't articulate your abandonment of logic. |
| 14873 | If we find a hypothesis that explains many things, we conclude that it explains everything [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The feeling of certainty is the most difficult to develop. Initially one seeks explanation: if a hypothesis explains many things, we draw the conclusion that it explains everything. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [238]) | |
| A reaction: As so often, a wonderful warning from Nietzsche to other philosophers. They love to latch onto a Big Idea, and offer it as the answer to everything (especially, dare I say it, continental philosophers). |
| 12636 | Mental states have causal powers [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mental states have causal powers. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.3) | |
| A reaction: I quote this because it gives you the link between a general account of causal powers as basic to reality, and an active account of what the mind is. It has to be a key link in a decent modern unified account of the world. See Idea 12638. |
| 14868 | Our primary faculty is perception of structure, as when looking in a mirror [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The primary faculty seems to me to be the perception of structure, that is, based upon the mirror. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [153]) | |
| A reaction: The point about the mirror makes this such an intriguingly original idea. Personally I like very much the idea that structure is our prime perception. See Sider 2011 on structure. |
| 12661 | The different types of resemblance don't resemble one another [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The ways in which different kinds of thing are similar to one another aren't, in general, similar to one another. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: Nice, but I think one would say that they lack similarity at the level of primary thought, but have obvious similarity (as concept-connectors) at the level of meta-thought. |
| 14870 | We experience causation between willing and acting, and thereby explain conjunctions of changes [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The only form of causality of which we are aware is that between willing and acting - we transfer this to all things, and thereby explain the relationship between two changes that always occur together. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [209]) | |
| A reaction: This is a rather Humean view, of projecting our experience onto the world, but it may be that we really are experiencing real causation, just as it occurs between insentiate things. |
| 14867 | It is just madness to think that the mind is supernatural (or even divine!) [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: To view 'spirit', the product of the brain, as supernatural. Even to deify it. What madness! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [127]) | |
| A reaction: When I started philolosophy I was obliged to take mind-body dualism very seriously, but I have finally managed to drag myself to the shores of this lake of madness, where Nietzsche awaited with a helping hand. |
| 12632 | In the Representational view, concepts play the key linking role [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the Representational Theory of Mind is true, then concepts are constituents of beliefs, the units of semantic evaluation, a locus of causal interactions among mental representations, and formulas in Mentalese. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.1) | |
| A reaction: I like this aspect of the theory, but then I can't really think of a theory about how the mind works that doesn't make concepts central to it. |
| 12624 | Only the labels of nodes have semantic content in connectionism, and they play no role [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Connectionism has no truck with mental representations; on the one hand, only the node labels in 'neural networks' have semantic content, and, on the other, the node labels play no role in mental processes, in standard formulations. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Connectionism must have some truth in it, yet mere connections can't do the full job. The difficulty is that nothing else seems to do the 'full job' either. Fodor cites productivity, systematicity, compositionality, logical form as the problems. |
| 12640 | Associative thinking avoids syntax, but can't preserve sense, reference or truth [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The virtue of associative theories of thinking is that they don't require thoughts to have syntactic structure. But they can't be right, since association doesn't preserve either sense or reference (to say nothing of truth). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3 n28) | |
| A reaction: This is using the empiricist idea that knowledge is built from mechanical associations to give a complete account of what thinking is. Fodor resolutely opposes it. |
| 12641 | Connectionism gives no account of how constituents make complex concepts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Connectionist architectures provide no counterpart to the relation between a complex concept and its constituents. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3 n29) | |
| A reaction: This is the compositionality of thought, upon which Fodor is so insistent. Not that a theory of how the mind is built up from the body is quite likely to give you a theory about what thinking is. I try to keep them separate, which may be wrong. |
| 12643 | Ambiguities in English are the classic reason for claiming that we don't think in English [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: That there are ambiguities in English is the classic reason for claiming that we don't think in English. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: I have always been impressed by this simple observation, which is my main reason for believing in propositions (as brain events). 'Propositions' may just be useful chunks of mentalese. |
| 12647 | Mental representations name things in the world, but also files in our memory [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mental representations can serve both as names for things in the world and as names of files in the memory. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: I am laughed at for liking this idea (given the present files of ideas before you), but I think this it is very powerful. Chicken before egg. I was drawn to databases precisely because they seemed to map how the mind worked. |
| 12649 | We think in file names [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We think in file names. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: This is Fodor's new view. He cites Treisman and Schmidt (1982) for raising it, and Pylyshyn (2003) for discussing it. I love it. It exactly fits my introspective view of how I think, and I think it would fit animals. It might not fit some other people! |
| 12655 | Frame Problem: how to eliminate most beliefs as irrelevant, without searching them? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The frame problem is, precisely: How does one know that none of one's beliefs about Jupiter are germane to the current question, without having to recall and search one's beliefs about Jupiter? | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably good chess-playing computers have made some progress with this problem. The only answer, as far as I can see, is that brains have a lot in common with relational databases. The mind is structured around a relevance-pattern. |
| 12630 | If concept content is reference, then my Twin and I are referring to the same stuff [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the content of a concept is its reference, we can stop worrying about Twin Earth. If there are no senses, there is no question of whether my twin and I have the same WATER concept. Our WATER concepts aren't even coextensive. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a neat solution. So do 'tap water' and 'holy water' have the same content to a Christian and non-Christian, when they co-refer to the contents of the font? |
| 12658 | Nobody knows how concepts are acquired [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I don't know how concepts are acquired. Nor do you. Nor does anybody else. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: This comes in the context of quietly modifying his earlier claim that concepts weren't acquired, because they were largely innate. Presumably we are allowed to have theories of concept acquisition? I quite like abstractionism. |
| 12662 | We have an innate capacity to form a concept, once we have grasped the stereotype [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: What's learned are stereotypes. What's innate is the disposition to grasp such and such a concept (to lock to such a property) in consequence of having learned such and such a stereotype. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the late Fodor much ameliorated view, after a lot of scoffing about the idea of the tin-opener being innate in all of us. There may be a suspicion of circularity here, if we ask what mental abilities are needed to form a stereotype. |
| 12635 | Having a concept isn't a pragmatic matter, but being able to think about the concept [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism about concepts really is dead, and the only alternative about concept possession is Cartesianism. That is, it's the thesis that having concept C is being able to think about Cs (as such). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.2) | |
| A reaction: I like this. It is very hard to pick out from Fodor the bits where he is clearly right, but this seems to be one of them. I don't like the pragmatic or Wittgensteinian line that having concepts is all about abilities and uses (like sorting or inferring). |
| 12652 | Concepts have two sides; they are files that face thought, and also face subject-matter [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We think in file names, and file names are Janus-faced: one face turned towards thinking and the other face turned towards what is thought about. I do think that is rather satisfactory. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: So do I. I do hope the philosophical community take up this idea (which they probably won't, simply because Fodor is in the late stages of his career!). |
| 12626 | Cartesians put concept individuation before concept possession [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Cartesians think that concept individuation is prior, in order of analysis, to concept possession. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.12) | |
| A reaction: Peacocke is someone who seems to put possession first, to the point where individuation is thereby achieved. The background influence there is Wittgenstein. I think I am more with Fodor, that concepts are entities, which need to be understood. |
| 12637 | Frege's puzzles suggest to many that concepts have sense as well as reference [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers in droves have held that Frege cases are convincing arguments that concepts have not just referents but also senses. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.2) | |
| A reaction: [Frege cases are puzzles where simple reference seems to lead to confusion] I take the Fregean approach to concepts (of Dummett, Peacocke) to attempt to give an account of the sense, once the reference is decided. Idea 12629 gives Fodor's view. |
| 12638 | If concepts have sense, we can't see the connection to their causal powers [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: How are we to understand the connection between the identity of a concept and its causal powers if concepts are (or have) senses? Answer: I haven't a clue. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the key to Fodor's attack on Peacocke and other Fregeans - that while they pay lip-service to the project of naturalising thought, they are actually committing us to some sort of neo-platonism, by losing the causal links. See Idea 12636. |
| 12639 | Belief in 'senses' may explain intentionality, but not mental processes [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Supposing the mind to be conversant with senses can, maybe, provide for a theory of the intentionality of mental states; but it seems to shed no light at all on the nature of mental processes (i.e. of mental state transitions). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3) | |
| A reaction: I would track this back to Frege's hostility to 'psychologism'. That is, Fregeans don't care about Fodor's problem, because all their accounts (of mathematics, of logic, and of concepts) treat the subject-matter as self-contained sui generis. |
| 12654 | You can't think 'brown dog' without thinking 'brown' and 'dog' [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can think 'brown dog' without thinking 'cat', but you can't think 'brown dog' without thinking 'brown' and 'dog'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.3) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is talking about concepts in thought, not about words. The claim is that such concepts have to be compositional, and it is hard to disagree. |
| 12659 | Maybe stereotypes are a stage in concept acquisition (rather than a by-product) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We needn't say that learning a stereotype is just a by-product of acquiring the concept; it could rather be a stage in concept acquisition. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: He rejects stereotypes because they don't give concepts the necessary compositionality in thought. But this idea would mean that children were incapable of compositionality until they had transcended the primitive stereotype stage. |
| 12660 | One stereotype might be a paradigm for two difference concepts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The same stereotype can give difference concepts; chickens are paradigmatic instances both of FOOD and of BARNYARD FOWL. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: And I'm guessing that lots of concepts could have two equally plausible stereotypes, even within a single mind. Stereotypes are interesting, but they don't seem to be the key to our understanding of concepts. |
| 12629 | For the referential view of thought, the content of a concept is just its reference [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Pure referentialism is the kind of semantics RTM requires (reference is the only primitive mind-world semantic property). ...So the content of a concept is its reference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to say that the meaning of a concept is (typically) a physical object, which seems to be the 'Fido'-Fido view of meaning. It seems to me to be a category mistake to say that a meaning can be a cat. |
| 12631 | Compositionality requires that concepts be atomic [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Atomism must be right about the individuation of concepts because compositionality demands it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch1) | |
| A reaction: I suppose this seems right, though Fodor's own example of 'pet fish' is interesting. What is supposed to happen when you take a concept like 'pet' and put it with 'fish', given that both components shift their atomic (?) meaning in the process? |
| 12657 | Abstractionism claims that instances provide criteria for what is shared [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: In the idea of learning concepts by 'abstraction', experiences of the instances provide evidence about which of the shared properties of things in a concept's extension are 'criterial' for being in the concept's extension. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.2 n6) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is fairly sceptical of this approach, and his doubts are seen in the scare-quotes around 'criterial'. He is defending the idea that only a certain degree of innateness in the concepts can get such a procedure off the ground. |
| 12634 | 'Inferential-role semantics' says meaning is determined by role in inference [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: 'Inferential-role semantics' claims that the meaning of a word (/the content of a concept) is determined by its role in inference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.1.2 n14) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is deeply opposed to this view. At first blush it sounds wrong to me, since there seems to be plenty of thought that can go on before inference takes place. Daydreamy speculation, for example. |
| 12642 | Co-referring terms differ if they have different causal powers [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The representation of 'morning star' must be different from 'evening star' because their tokens differ in their causal powers. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3) | |
| A reaction: This is Fodor trying to avoid the standard Fregean move of proposing that there are 'senses' as well as references. See Idea 12629. If these two terms have the same extension, they are the same concept? They 'seem' to have two referents. |
| 12663 | We refer to individuals and to properties, and we use singular terms and predicates [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I assume that there are two kinds of reference: reference to individuals and to properties. This means, from the syntactic point of view, that the vehicles of reference are exhaustively singular terms and predicates. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: The immediate possibility that comes to mind is plural quantification. See George Boolos, who confidently says that he can refer to 'some Cheerios' in his breakfast bowl, and communicate very well. He then looks to formalise such talk. |
| 12645 | Semantics (esp. referential semantics) allows inferences from utterances to the world [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: All you need for inferring from John's utterance to the world is the sort of thing that a semantics (i.e. referential semantics) provides. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is very good at saying nice simple things like that. But it is not enough to infer what objects are being discussed. All the hard cases must be covered (denials of existence, reference to non-existence, intentional contexts, modal claims). |
| 12646 | Semantics relates to the world, so it is never just psychological [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Semantics is about constitutive relations between representations and the world. There is, as a matter of principle, no such thing as a psychological theory of meaning. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: The second sentence is in capital letters, but I am still not convinced. The classic difficulty seems to be that you have to use language to pick out the things in the world that are being referred to. Of course, at some point you just see the objects. |
| 12627 | Before you can plan action, you must decide on the truth of your estimate of success [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can't think a plan of action unless you can think how the world would be if the action were to succeed; and thinking the world will be such and such if all goes well is thinking the kind of thing that can be true or false. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This is part of Fodor's attack on the pragmatic view of concepts (that they should be fully understood in terms of action, rather than of thought). I take Fodor to be blatantly correct. This is counterfactual thinking. |
| 14884 | The shortest path to happiness is forgetfulness, the path of animals (but of little value) [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: If happiness were the goal, then animals would be the highest creatures. Their cynicism is grounded in forgetfulness: that is the shortest path to happiness, even if it is a happiness with little value. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [143]) | |
| A reaction: I would be reluctant to describe an apparently contented cow as 'happy'. Is a comatose person happy? Maybe happiness is fulfilling one's nature, like a monkey swinging through trees? |
| 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'). |
| 14886 | Education is contrary to human nature [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Education runs contrary to the nature of a human being. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [06]) | |
| A reaction: Tell me about it! |
| 14883 | We should evaluate the past morally [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: For the past I desire above all a moral evaluation. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [096]) | |
| A reaction: There is a bit of a contradiction with Idea 14819, of only a few years later. He was always interested in a historical approach to morality, but I'm not sure if his ethics gives a decent basis for moral assessments of remote historical eras. |
| 14882 | Protest against vivisection - living things should not become objects of scientific investigation [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Protest against vivisection of living things, that is, those things that are not yet dead should be allowed to live and not immediately be treated as an object for scientific investigation. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [027]) | |
| A reaction: Wow. How many other people had come up with this idea in 1873? |
| 14865 | We do not know the nature of one single causality [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: We do not know the nature of one single causality. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [121]) |
| 14871 | Laws of nature are merely complex networks of relations [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: All laws of nature are only relations between x, y and z. We define laws of nature as relations to an x, y, and z, each of which in turn, is known to us only in relation to other x's, y's and z's. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [235]) | |
| A reaction: This could be interpreted in Armstrong's terms, as only identifying the x's, y's and z's by their universals, and then seeing laws as how those universal relate. I suspect, though, that Nietzsche has a Humean regularity pattern in mind. |
| 14864 | The Greeks lack a normative theology: each person has their own poetic view of things [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The Greeks lack a normative theology: everyone has the right to deal with it in a poetic manner and he can believe whatever he wants. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [110]) | |
| A reaction: There is quite a lot of record of harshness towards atheists, and the trial of Socrates seems to have been partly over theology. However, no proper theological texts have come down, or records of the teachings of the priests. |