33 ideas
| 10455 | Free logic at least allows empty names, but struggles to express non-existence [Bach] |
| Full Idea: Unlike standard first-order logic, free logic can allow empty names, but still has to deny existence by either representing it as a predicate, or invoke some dubious distinction such as between existence and being. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L1) |
| 10454 | In first-order we can't just assert existence, and it is very hard to deny something's existence [Bach] |
| Full Idea: In standard logic we can't straightforwardly say that n exists. We have to resort to using a formula like '∃x(x=n)', but we can't deny n's existence by negating that formula, because standard first-order logic disallows empty names. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L1) |
| 10453 | In logic constants play the role of proper names [Bach] |
| Full Idea: In standard first-order logic the role of proper names is played by individual constants. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L1) |
| 10452 | Proper names can be non-referential - even predicate as well as attributive uses [Bach] |
| Full Idea: Like it or not, proper names have non-referential uses, including not only attributive but even predicate uses. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L1) | |
| A reaction: 'He's a right little Hitler'. 'You're doing a George Bush again'. 'Try to live up to the name of Churchill'. |
| 10456 | Millian names struggle with existence, empty names, identities and attitude ascription [Bach] |
| Full Idea: The familiar problems with the Millian view of names are the problem of positive and negative existential statements, empty names, identity sentences, and propositional attitude ascription. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L1) | |
| A reaction: I take this combination of problems to make an overwhelming case against the daft idea that the semantics of a name amounts to the actual object it picks out. It is a category mistake to attempt to insert a person into a sentence. |
| 10440 | An object can be described without being referred to [Bach] |
| Full Idea: An object can be described without being referred to. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear how this is possible for a well-known object, though it is clearly possible for a speculative object, such as a gadget I would like to buy. In the former case reference seems to occur even if the speaker is trying to avoid it. |
| 10444 | Definite descriptions can be used to refer, but are not semantically referential [Bach] |
| Full Idea: If Russell is, as I believe, basically right, then definite descriptions are the paradigm of singular terms that can be used to refer but are not linguistically (semantically) referential. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.1 s5) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure that we can decide what is 'semantically referential'. Most of the things we refer to don't have names. We don't then 'use' definite descriptions (I'm thinking) - they actually DO the job. If we use them, we can 'use' names too? |
| 20657 | There are 23 core brain functions, with known circuit, transmitters, genes and behaviour [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In 2014 the National Institutes of Mental Health published a list of 23 core brain functions and their associated neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and genes, and the behaviour and emotions that go with them. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 16 'Physics') | |
| A reaction: They were interested in the functions behind mental health, but I am interested in the functions behind our belief systems, which might produce a different focus. Sub-functions, perhaps. |
| 20656 | Traditional ideas of the mind were weakened in the 1950s by mind-influencing drugs [Watson] |
| Full Idea: One development in particular in the 1950s helped to discredit the traditional concept of the mind. This was medical drugs that influenced the workings of the brain. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 16 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This explains Ryle's 1949 book, and the Australian physicalists emerging in the late 1950s. Philosophers don't grasp how their subject is responsive to other areas of human knowledge. Of course, opium had always done this. |
| 10446 | Fictional reference is different inside and outside the fiction [Bach] |
| Full Idea: We must distinguish 'reference' in a fiction from reference outside the fiction to fictional entities. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.1) | |
| A reaction: This may be more semantically than ontologically significant. It is perhaps best explicated by Coleridge's distinction over whether or not I am 'suspending my disbelief' when I am discussing a character. |
| 10447 | We can refer to fictional entities if they are abstract objects [Bach] |
| Full Idea: If fictional entities, such as characters in a play, are real, albeit abstract entities, then we can genuinely refer to them. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Nathan Salmon 1998] Personally I would prefer to say that abstract entities are fictions. Fictional characters have uncertain identity conditions. Do they all have a pancreas, if this is never mentioned? |
| 10443 | You 'allude to', not 'refer to', an individual if you keep their identity vague [Bach] |
| Full Idea: If you say 'a special person is coming to visit', you are not referring to but merely 'alluding to' that individual. This does not count as referring because you are not expressing a singular proposition about it. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.1 s2) | |
| A reaction: If you add 'I hope he doesn't wear his red suit, but I hope he plays his tuba', you seem to be expressing singular propositions about the person. Bach seems to want a very strict notion of reference, as really attaching listeners to individuals. |
| 10439 | What refers: indefinite or definite or demonstrative descriptions, names, indexicals, demonstratives? [Bach] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers agree that some expressions refer, but disagree over which ones. Few include indefinite descriptions, but some include definite descriptions, or only demonstrative descriptions. Some like proper names, some only indexicals and demonstratives. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: My initial prejudice is rather Strawsonian - that people refer, not language, and it can be done in all sorts of ways. But Bach argues well that only language intrinsically does it. Even pointing fails without linguistic support. |
| 10441 | If we can refer to things which change, we can't be obliged to single out their properties [Bach] |
| Full Idea: We can refer to things which change over time, which suggests that in thinking of and in referring to an individual we are not constrained to represent it as that which has certain properties. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems a good argument against the descriptive theory of reference which is not (I think) in Kripke. Problems like vagueness and the Ship of Theseus rear their heads. |
| 10442 | We can think of an individual without have a uniquely characterizing description [Bach] |
| Full Idea: Being able to think of an individual does not require being able to identify that individual by means of a uniquely characterizing description. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.1 s1) | |
| A reaction: There is a bit of an equivocation over 'recognise' here. His example is 'the first child born in the 4th century'. We can't visually recognise such people, but the description does fix them, and a records office might give us 'recognition'. |
| 10445 | It can't be real reference if it could refer to some other thing that satisfies the description [Bach] |
| Full Idea: If one is referring to whatever happens to satisfy a description, and one would be referring to something else were it to have satisfied the description instead, this is known as 'weak' reference,...but surely this is not reference at all. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.1 s7) | |
| A reaction: Bach wants a precise notion of reference, as success in getting the audience to focus on the correct object. He talks of this case as 'singling out' some unfixed thing, and he also has 'alluding to' an unstated thing. Plausible view. |
| 10457 | Since most expressions can be used non-referentially, none of them are inherently referential [Bach] |
| Full Idea: An embarrassingly simple argument is that most expressions can be used literally but not referentially, no variation in meaning explains this fact, so its meaning is compatible with being non-referential, so no expression is inherently referential. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L2) | |
| A reaction: I think I have decided that no expression is 'inherently referential', and that it is all pragmatics. |
| 10463 | Just alluding to or describing an object is not the same as referring to it [Bach] |
| Full Idea: Much of what speakers do that passes for referring is merely alluding or describing. ...It is one thing for a speaker to express a thought about a certain object using an expression, and quite another for the expression to stand for that object. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.3) | |
| A reaction: Bach builds up a persuasive case for this view. If the question, though, is 'what are you talking about?', then saying what is being alluded to or singled out or described seems fine. Bach is being rather stipulative. |
| 10459 | Context does not create reference; it is just something speakers can exploit [Bach] |
| Full Idea: Context does not determine or constitute reference; rather, it is something for the speaker to exploit to enable the listener to determine the intended reference. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L3) | |
| A reaction: Bach thinks linguistic reference is a matter of speaker's intentions, and I think he is right. And this idea is right too. The domain of quantification constantly shifts in a conversation, and good speakers and listeners are sensitive to this. |
| 10460 | 'That duck' may not refer to the most obvious one in the group [Bach] |
| Full Idea: If one ducks starts quacking furiously, and you say 'that duck is excited', it isn't context that makes me take it that you are referring to the quacking duck. You could be referring to a quiet duck you recognise by its distinctive colour. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L3) | |
| A reaction: A persuasive example to make his point against the significance of context in conversational reference. Speaker's intended reference must always trump any apparent reference suggested by context. |
| 10461 | What a pronoun like 'he' refers back to is usually a matter of speaker's intentions [Bach] |
| Full Idea: To illustrate speakers' intentions, consider the anaphoric reference using pronouns in these: "A cop arrested a robber; he was wearing a badge", and "A cop arrested a robber; he was wearing a mask". The natural supposition is not the inevitable one. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L4) | |
| A reaction: I am a convert to speakers' intentions as the source of all reference, and this example seems to illustrate it very well. 'He said..' 'Who said?' |
| 10462 | Information comes from knowing who is speaking, not just from interpretation of the utterance [Bach] |
| Full Idea: It is a fallacy that all the information in an utterance must come from its interpretation, which ignores the essentially pragmatic fact that the speaker is making the utterance. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L4) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Barwise and Perry 1983:34] This is blatantly obvious in indexical remarks like 'I am tired', where the words don't tell you who is tired. But also 'the car has broken down, dear'. |
| 10458 | People slide from contextual variability all the way to contextual determination [Bach] |
| Full Idea: People slide from contextual variability to context relativity to context sensitivity to context dependence to contextual determination. | |
| From: Kent Bach (What Does It Take to Refer? [2006], 22.2 L3) | |
| A reaction: This is reminiscent of the epistemological slide from cultural or individual relativity of some observed things, to a huge metaphysical denial of truth. Bach's warning applies to me, as I have been drifting down his slope lately. Nice. |
| 20655 | Humans have been hunter-gatherers for 99.5% of their existence [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Anthropology shows that the hunter-gathering lifestyle has occupied 99.5 per cent of the time humans have been on earth. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 13 'Emergence') | |
| A reaction: If you are trying to understand humanity, you ignore this fact at your peril. Even agriculture is only a tiny part of our history, and that only disappeared as a major human activity (in many nations) in the last hundred years. |
| 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'). |
| 20650 | The Uncertainty Principle implies that cause and effect can't be measured [Watson] |
| Full Idea: The Uncertainty Principle implied that in the subatomic world cause and effect could never be measured. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 05 'Against') | |
| A reaction: The fact that it can't be measured does not, presumably, entail that it doesn't exist. Physicists seem to ignore causation, rather than denying it. Can causation be real if it only exists at the macro-level, as an emergent phenomenon? |
| 20649 | The interference of light through two slits confirmed that it is waves [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Thomas Young in 1803 confirmed the idea of Huyghens that light is waves, showing how light passing through two slits produces an interference pattern that resembles water waves sluicing through two slits. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 04 'Conception') | |
| A reaction: The great puzzle emerges when it also turns out to be quantised particles. |
| 20661 | Electrons rotate in hyrogen atoms 10^13 times per second [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In the hydrogen atom the electron rotates some 10,000 billion times per second. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 18 'Evolutionary') | |
| A reaction: That's an awful lot. Is it at the speed of light? |
| 20647 | Quantum theory explains why nature is made up of units, such as elements [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Planck's quantum idea explained so much, including the observation that the chemical world is made up of discrete units - the elements. Discrete elements implied fundamental units of matter that were themselves discrete (as Dalton had said). | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 4 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: The atomic theory was only finally confirmed by Einstein in 1905. This idea implies that the very lowest level of all must have distinct building blocks, but so far we have got down to 'fields', which seem to be a sort of 'foam'. |
| 20654 | Only four particles are needed for matter: up and down quark, electron, electron-neutrino [Watson] |
| Full Idea: We need twelve particles in the master equation of the standard model, but it is necessary to have only four to build a universe (up and down quarks, the electron and the electron neutrino (or lepton). The existence of the others is 'a bit of a mystery'. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 11 'First Three') |
| 20651 | The shape of molecules is important, as well as the atoms and their bonds [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Pauling showed that the architecture - the shape of molecules was relevant (as well as the bonds). This meant that molecules were just as important as atoms in the understanding of matter. Molecules were not just the sum of their parts. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 05 'Three') | |
| A reaction: If Aristotle struggled to understand matter, then so should modern philosophers. This involves thermodynamics and chemistry, as well as quantum theory. |
| 20652 | In 1828 the animal substance urea was manufactured from inorganic ingredients [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In 1828 Wöhler, in an iconic experiment, had manufactured an organic substance, urea, hitherto the product solely of animals, out of inorganic materials, and without any interventions of vital force. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 06 'Inorganic') | |
| A reaction: For reductionists like me, the gradual explanation of life in inorganic terms is the great role model of explanation. I take it for granted that the human mind will go the same way, despite partisan resistance from a lot of philosophers. |
| 20658 | Information is physical, and living can be seen as replicating and preserving information [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In passing information, physical changes take place, and information is thus physical. On this account, the act of living can be seen as replicating and preserving the information that a living body is comprised of. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 17 'Dreams') | |
| A reaction: [He emphasises 'the act' of living, rather than a life] |