7 ideas
| 10467 | Individuals consist of 'compresent' tropes [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: 'Qualitons' or 'relatons' (quality and relation tropes) are held to belong to the same individual if they are all 'compresent' with one another. | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §4) | |
| A reaction: There is a perennial problem with bundles - how to distinguish accidental compresence (like people in a lift) from united compresence (like people who make a family). |
| 10464 | A trope is a bit of a property or relation (not an exemplification or a quality) [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: A trope is an instance or bit (not an exemplification) of a property or a relation. Bill Clinton's eloquence is not his participating in the universal eloquence, or the peculiar quality of his eloquence, but his bit, and his alone, of eloquence. | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: If we have identified something as a 'bit' of something, we can ask whether that bit is atomic, or divisible into something else, and we can ask what are the qualities and properties and powers of this bit, we seems to defeat the object. |
| 10465 | Trope theory is ontologically parsimonious, with possibly only one-category [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: A major attraction of tropism has been its promise of parsimony; some adherents (such as Campbell) go so far as to proclaim a one-category ontology. | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to go against the folk idiom which suggests that it is things which have properties, rather than properties ruling to roost. Maybe if one identified tropes with processes, the theory could be brought more into line with modern physics? |
| 10466 | Maybe possible worlds are just sets of possible tropes [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: Meinongian tropism has the advantage that possible worlds might be thought of as sets of 'qualitons' and 'relatons' (quality and relational tropes). | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §3) | |
| A reaction: You are still left with 'possible' to explain, and I'm not sure that anything is explain here. If the actual world is sets of tropes, then possible worlds would also have to be, I suppose. |
| 21513 | We can no more expect a precise definition of coherence than we can of the moral ideal [Ewing] |
| Full Idea: I think it is wrong to tie down the advocates of the coherence theory to a precise definition. ...It would be altogether unreasonable to demand that the moral ideal should be exhaustively defined, and the same may be true of the ideal of thought. | |
| From: A.C. Ewing (Idealism: a critical survey [1934], p.231), quoted by Erik J. Olsson - Against Coherence 7.6 | |
| A reaction: I strongly agree. It is not a council of despair. I think the criteria of coherence can be articulated quite well (e.g by Thagard), and the virtues of enquiry can also be quite well specified (e.g. by Zagzebski). Very dissimilar evidence must cohere. |
| 21497 | If undetailed, 'coherence' is just a vague words that covers all possible arguments [Ewing] |
| Full Idea: Without a detailed account, coherence is reduced to the mere muttering of the word 'coherence', which can be interpreted so as to cover all arguments, but only by making its meaning so wide as to rob it of almost all significance. | |
| From: A.C. Ewing (Idealism: a critical survey [1934], p.246), quoted by Erik J. Olsson - Against Coherence 2.2 | |
| A reaction: I'm a fan of coherence, but it is a placeholder, involving no intrinsic or detailed theory. I just think it points to the reality of how we make judgements, especially practical ones. We can categorise the inputs, and explain the required virtues. |
| 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'). |