45 ideas
| 18996 | A statement S is 'partly true' if it has some wholly true parts [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A statement S is 'partly true' insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 01.6) | |
| A reaction: He suggests that if we have rival theories, we agree that it is one or the other. And 'we may have pork for dinner, or human flesh' is partly true. |
| 19006 | An 'enthymeme' is an argument with an indispensable unstated assumption [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: An 'enthymeme' is a deductive argument with an unstated assumption that must be true for the premises to lead to the conclusion. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 11.1) |
| 18999 | y is only a proper part of x if there is a z which 'makes up the difference' between them [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The principle of Supplementation says that y is properly part of x, only if a z exists that 'makes up the difference' between them. [note: that is, z is disjoint from y and sums with y to form x] | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) |
| 19001 | 'Pegasus doesn't exist' is false without Pegasus, yet the absence of Pegasus is its truthmaker [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: 'Pegasus does not exist' has a paradoxical, self-undermining flavour. On the one hand, the empty name makes it untrue. But now, why is the name empty? Because Pegasus does not exist. 'Pegasus does not exist' is untrue because Pegasus does not exist. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.7 n20) | |
| A reaction: Beautiful! This is Yablo's reward for continuing to ask 'why?' after everyone else has stopped in bewilderment at the tricky phenomenon. |
| 19002 | A nominalist can assert statements about mathematical objects, as being partly true [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: If I am a nominalist non-Platonist, I think it is false that 'there are primes over 10', but I want to be able to say it like everyone else. I argue that this because the statement has a part that I do believe, a part that remains interestingly true. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 05.8) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously a key motivation for Yablo's book, as it reinforces his fictional view of abstract objects, but aims to capture the phenomena, by investigating what such sentences are 'about'. Admirable. |
| 16185 | Causality indicates which properties are real [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: Causality is a clue to what properties are real. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 9.3) | |
| A reaction: An interesting variant on the Shoemaker proposal that properties actually are causal. I'm not sure that there is anything more to causality that the expression in action of properties, which I take to be powers. Structures are not properties. |
| 12056 | An ancestral relation is either direct or transitively indirect [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: x bears to y the 'ancestral' of the relation R just if either x bears R to y, or x bears R to some w that bears R to y, or x bears R to some w that bears R to some z that bears R to y, or..... | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.10.1) | |
| A reaction: A concept invented by Frege (1879). |
| 12050 | Substances contain a source of change or principle of activity [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Substances are things that have a source of change or principle of activity within them. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.4.1) | |
| A reaction: A vey significant concession. I think we can talk of 'essences' and 'powers', and drop talk of 'substances'. 'Powers' is a much better word, because it immediately pushes the active ingredient to the forefront. |
| 12052 | We never single out just 'this', but always 'this something-or-other' [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: What is singled out is never a bare this or that, but this or that something or other. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: I like, in ontological speculation, to contemplate the problem of the baffling archaeological find. 'This thing I have dug up - what the hell IS it?'. Wiggins is contemptuous of the term 'thisness', and the idea of bare particulars. |
| 12055 | Sortal predications are answers to the question 'what is x?' [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Predications which answer the question 'what is x?' are often called 'sortal predications' in present-day philosophy. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.10.1) | |
| A reaction: The word 'sortal' comes from Locke. Wiggins is the guru of 'sortal essentialism'. I just can't believe that in answer to the question 'what really is David Wiggins?' that he would be happy with a sequence of categorisations. |
| 12059 | A river may change constantly, but not in respect of being a river [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: To say that the river is changing constantly in every respect is not to say that it is changing in respect of being a river. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.11.2) | |
| A reaction: Can't a river become a lake, or a mere stream? Wiggins's proposal does not help with the problem of a river which sometimes dries up (as my local river sometimes does). At what point do we decide it is no longer a river? |
| 12063 | Sortal classification becomes science, with cross reference clarifying individuals [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The sense of the sortal term under which we pick out an individual expands into the scientific account of things of that kind, where the account clarifies what is at issue in questions of sameness and difference of specimens of that kind. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.13.1) | |
| A reaction: This is how the sortal approach is supposed to deal with individuals. So the placid tiger reveals much by falling under 'tiger', and a crucial extra bit by falling under 'placid'. See Idea 12053 for problems with this proposal. |
| 12051 | If the kinds are divided realistically, they fall into substances [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Substance are what the world is articulated into when the segments of kinds corresponds to the real divisions in reality. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: This is very helpful in clarifying Wiggins's very obscurely expressed views. He appears to be saying that if we divide the sheep from the goats correctly, we reveal sheep-substance and goat-substance (one substance per species). Crazy! |
| 12053 | 'Human being' is a better answer to 'what is it?' than 'poet', as the latter comes in degrees [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: One person can be more or less of a poet than another, so 'poet' is not a conclusory answer to the question 'What is it that is singled out here?' 'Poet' rides on the back of the answer 'human being'. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: So apparently one must assign a natural kind, and not just a class. Wiggins lacks science fiction imagination. In the genetic salad of the far future, being a poet may be more definitive than being a human being. See Idea 12063. |
| 12054 | Secondary substances correctly divide primary substances by activity-principles and relations [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A system of secondary substances with a claim to separate reality into its genuine primary substances must arise from an understanding of a set of principles of activity on the basis of which identities can be glossed in terms of determinate relations. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: I translate this as saying that individual essences are categorised according to principles which explain behaviour and relations. I'm increasingly bewildered by the 'secondary substances' Wiggins got from 'Categories', and loves so much. |
| 12047 | We refer to persisting substances, in perception and in thought, and they aid understanding [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A substance is a persisting and somehow basic object of reference that is there to be discovered in perception and thought, an object whose claim to be recognized as a real entity is a claim on our aspirations to understand the world. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: A lot of components are assigned by Wiggins to the concept, and the tricky job, inititiated by Aristotle, is to fit all the pieces together nicely. Personally I am wondering if the acceptance of 'essences' implies dropping 'substances'. |
| 12057 | Matter underlies things, composes things, and brings them to be [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Matter ex hypothesi is what ultimately underlies (to huperkeimenon) a thing; it is that from which something comes to be and which remains as a non-coincidental component in the thing's make-up. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 192a30) | |
| A reaction: This is an interesting prelude to the much more comprehensive discussion of matter in Metaphysics, where he crucially adds the notion of 'form', and gives it priority over the underlying matter. |
| 18998 | Parthood lacks the restriction of kind which most relations have [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Most relations obtain only between certain kinds of thing. To learn that x is a part of y, however, tells you nothing about x and y taken individually. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: Too sweeping. To be a part of crowd you have to be a person. To be part of the sea you have to be wet. It might depend on whether composition is unrestricted. |
| 19004 | Gettier says you don't know if you are confused about how it is true [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: We know from Gettier that if you are right to regard Q as true, but you are sufficiently confused about HOW it is true - about how things stand with respect to its subject matter - then you don't know that Q. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 07.4) | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to approach Gettier by focusing on the propositions being expressed, where his cases tend to focus on the literal wording of the sentences. What did the utterer mean by the sentences - not what did they appear to say. |
| 19007 | A theory need not be true to be good; it should just be true about its physical aspects [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A physical theory need not be true to be good, Field has argued, and I agree. All we ask of it truth-wise is that its physical implications should be true, or, in my version, that it should be true about the physical. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 12.5) | |
| A reaction: Yablo is, of course, writing a book here about the concept of 'about'. This seems persuasive. The internal terminology of the theory isn't committed to anything - it is only at its physical periphery (Quine) that the ontology matters. |
| 18993 | If sentences point to different evidence, they must have different subject-matter [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: 'All crows are black' cannot say quite the same as 'All non-black things are non-crows', for the two are confirmed by different evidence. Subject matter looks to be the distinguishing feature. One is about crows, the other not. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: You might reply that they are confirmed by the same evidence (but only in its unobtainable totality). The point, I think, is that the sentences invite you to start your search in different places. |
| 19003 | Most people say nonblack nonravens do confirm 'all ravens are black', but only a tiny bit [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The standard response to the raven paradox is to say that a nonblack nonraven does confirm that all ravens are black. But it confirms it just the teeniest little bit - not as much as a black raven does. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 06.5) | |
| A reaction: It depends on the proportion between the relevant items. How do you confirm 'all the large animals in this zoo are mammals'? Check for size every animal which is obviously not a mammal? |
| 16182 | Two main types of explanation are by causes, or by citing a theoretical framework [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: In explaining a phenomenon one can cite the causes of that phenomenon; or one can set the phenomenon in a general theoretical framework. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: The thing is, you need to root an explanation in something taken as basic, and theoretical frameworks need further explanation, whereas causes seem to be basic. |
| 16184 | An explanation is a model that fits a theory and predicts the phenomenological laws [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: To explain a phenomenon is to find a model that fits it into the basic framework of the theory and that thus allows us to derive analogues for the messy and complicated phenomenological laws that are true of it. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 8.3) | |
| A reaction: This summarises the core of her view in this book. She is after models rather than laws, and the models are based on causes. |
| 16167 | Laws get the facts wrong, and explanation rests on improvements and qualifications of laws [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: We explain by ceteris paribus laws, by composition of causes, and by approximations that improve on what the fundamental laws dictate. In all of these cases the fundamental laws patently do not get the facts right. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], Intro) | |
| A reaction: It is rather headline-grabbing to say in this case that laws do not get the facts right. If they were actually 'wrong' and 'lied', there wouldn't be much point in building explanations on them. |
| 16169 | Laws apply to separate domains, but real explanations apply to intersecting domains [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: When different kinds of causes compose, we want to explain what happens in the intersection of different domains. But the laws we use are designed only to tell truly what happens in each domain separately. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Since presumably the laws are discovered through experiments which try to separate out a single domain, in those circumstances they actually are true, so they don't 'lie'. |
| 16176 | Covering-law explanation lets us explain storms by falling barometers [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: Much criticism of the original covering-law model objects that it lets in too much. It seems we can explain Henry's failure to get pregnant by his taking birth control pills, and we can explain the storm by the falling barometer. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 2.0) | |
| A reaction: I take these examples to show that true explanations must be largely causal in character. The physicality of causation is what matters, not 'laws'. I'd say the same of attempts to account for causation through counterfactuals. |
| 16177 | I disagree with the covering-law view that there is a law to cover every single case [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: Covering-law theorists tend to think that nature is well-regulated; in the extreme, that there is a law to cover every case. I do not. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: The problem of coincidence is somewhere at the back of this thought. Innumerable events have their own explanations, but it is hard to explain their coincidence (see Aristotle's case of bumping into a friend in the market). |
| 16180 | You can't explain one quail's behaviour by just saying that all quails do it [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: 'Why does that quail in the garden bob its head up and down in that funny way whenever it walks?' …'Because they all do'. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: She cites this as an old complaint against the covering-law model of explanation. It captures beautifully the basic error of the approach. We want to know 'why', rather than just have a description of the pattern. 'They all do' is useful information. |
| 16171 | The covering law view assumes that each phenomenon has a 'right' explanation [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: The covering-law account supposes that there is, in principle, one 'right' explanation for each phenomenon. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the law is held to be 'right', but there must be a bit of flexibility in describing the initial conditions, and the explanandum itself. |
| 12064 | The category of substance is more important for epistemology than for ontology [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: For us the importance of the category of substance, if it has any importance, is not so much ontological as relative to our epistemological circumstances and the conditions under which we have to undertake inquiry. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.13.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a rather significant concession. Wiggins has revived the notion of substance in recent times, but he is not quite adding it to the furniture of the world. Personally I increasingly think we can dump it, in ontology and epistemology. |
| 12049 | Naming the secondary substance provides a mass of general information [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Answering 'what is it?' with the secondary substance identifies an object with a class of continuants which survive certain changes, come into being in certain ways, are qualified in certain ways, behave in certain ways, and cease to be in certain ways. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.3.3) | |
| A reaction: Thus the priority of this sort of answer is that a huge range of explanations immediately flow from it. I take the explanation to be prior, and the primary substance to be prior, since secondary substance is inductively derived from it. |
| 16183 | In science, best explanations have regularly turned out to be false [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: There are a huge number of cases in the history of science where we now know our best explanations were false. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Laudan 1981 for this] The Ptolemaic system and aether are the standard example cited for this. I believe strongly in the importance of best explanation. Only a fool would just accept the best explanation available. Coherence is needed. |
| 12065 | Seeing a group of soldiers as an army is irresistible, in ontology and explanation [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: It seems mandatory to an observer of soldiers to give 'the final touch of unity' to their aggregate entity (the army). ...Similar claims arise with the ontological and explanatory claims of other corporate entities. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.13.3) | |
| A reaction: Wiggins must say (following Leibniz Essays II.xxiv,1) that we add the unity, but I take the view that an army has powers, and hence offers explanations, which are lacking in a merely group of disparate soldiers. So an army has an essence and identity. |
| 18992 | Sentence-meaning is the truth-conditions - plus factors responsible for them [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: A sentence's meaning is to do with its truth-value in various possible scenarios, AND the factors responsible for that truth-value. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The thesis of his book, which I welcome. I'm increasingly struck by the way in which much modern philosophy settles for a theory being complete, when actually further explanation is possible. Exhibit A is functional explanations. Why that function? |
| 18994 | The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Assertive content - what a sentence is heard as saying - can be at quite a distance from compositional content. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is the obvious reason why semantics cannot be entirely compositional, since there is nearly always a contextual component which then has to be added. In the case of irony, the compositional content is entirely reversed. |
| 18997 | Truth-conditions as subject-matter has problems of relevance, short cut, and reversal [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: If the subject-matter of S is how it is true, we get three unfortunate results: S has truth-value in worlds where its subject-matter draws a blank; learning what S is about tells you its truth-value; negating S changes what it's about. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 02.8) | |
| A reaction: Together these make fairly devastating objections to the truth-conditions (in possible worlds) theory of meaning. The first-objection concerns when S is false |
| 19005 | Not-A is too strong to just erase an improper assertion, because it actually reverses A [Yablo] |
| Full Idea: The idea that negation is, or can be, a cancellation device raises an interesting question. What does one do to wipe the slate clean after an improper assertion? Not-A is too strong; it reverses our stand on A rather than nullifying it. | |
| From: Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], 09.8) | |
| A reaction: [He is discussing a remark of Strawson 1952] It seems that 'not' has two meanings or uses: a weak use of 'nullifying' an assertion, and a strong use of 'reversing' an assertion. One could do both: 'that's not right; in fact, it's just the opposite'. |
| 16175 | A cause won't increase the effect frequency if other causes keep interfering [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: A cause ought to increase the frequency of the effect, but this fact may not show up in the probabilities if other causes are at work. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Patrick Suppes for this one] Presumably in experimental situations you can weed out the interference, but that threatens to eliminate mere 'probability' entirely. |
| 6781 | There are fundamental explanatory laws (false!), and phenomenological laws (regularities) [Cartwright,N, by Bird] |
| Full Idea: Nancy Cartwright distinguishes between 'fundamental explanatory laws', which we should not believe, and 'phenomenological laws', which are regularities established on the basis of observation. | |
| From: report of Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983]) by Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: The distinction is helpful, so that we can be clearer about what everyone is claiming. We can probably all agree on the phenomenological laws, which are epistemological. Personally I claim truth for the best fundamental explanatory laws. |
| 16166 | Laws of appearances are 'phenomenological'; laws of reality are 'theoretical' [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers distinguish phenomenological from theoretical laws. Phenomenological laws are about appearances; theoretical ones are about the reality behind the appearances. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I'm suspecting that Humeans only really believe in the phenomenological kind. I'm only interested in the theoretical kind, and I take inference to the best explanation to be the bridge between the two. Cartwright rejects the theoretical laws. |
| 16179 | Good organisation may not be true, and the truth may not organise very much [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: There is no reason to think that the principles that best organise will be true, nor that the principles that are true will organise much. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account of laws, as axiomatisations of the observed patterns in nature. |
| 16170 | To get from facts to equations, we need a prepared descriptions suited to mathematics [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: To get from a detailed factual knowledge of a situation to an equation, we must prepare the description of the situation to meet the mathematical needs of the theory. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], Intro) | |
| A reaction: She is clearly on to something here, as Galileo is blatantly wrong in his claim that the book of nature is written in mathematics. Mathematics is the best we can manage in getting a grip on the chaos. |
| 16181 | Simple laws have quite different outcomes when they act in combinations [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: For explanation simple laws must have the same form when they act together as when they act singly. ..But then what the law states cannot literally be true, for the consequences that occur if it acts alone are not what occurs when they act in combination. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: This is Cartwright's basic thesis. Her point is that the laws 'lie', because they claim to predict a particular outcome which never ever actually occurs. She says we could know all the laws, and still not be able to explain anything. |
| 16178 | There are few laws for when one theory meets another [Cartwright,N] |
| Full Idea: Where theories intersect, laws are usually hard to come by. | |
| From: Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of Physics Lie [1983], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: There are attempts at so-called 'bridge laws', to get from complex theories to simple ones, but her point is well made about theories on the same 'level'. |