31 ideas
| 17867 | If a concept is not compact, it will not be presentable to finite minds [Almog] |
| Full Idea: If the notion of 'logically following' in your language is not compact, it will not be locally presentable to finite minds. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 02) |
| 17877 | The number series is primitive, not the result of some set theoretic axioms [Almog] |
| Full Idea: On Skolem's account, to 'get' the natural numbers - that primal structure - do not 'look for it' as the satisfier of some abstract (set-theoretic) axiomatic essence; start with that primitive structure. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 12) | |
| A reaction: [Skolem 1922 and 1923] Almog says the numbers are just 0,1,2,3,4..., and not some underlying axioms. That makes it sound as if they have nothing in common, and that the successor relation is a coincidence. |
| 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. |
| 17872 | Definitionalists rely on snapshot-concepts, instead of on the real processes [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The definitionalist errs by abstracting away from differences cosmic processes, freezing real, dynamic processes in snapshot-concepts. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 08) | |
| A reaction: You could hardly do science at all if you didn't 'abstract away from the differences in cosmic processes'. We can't write about sea-waves, because they all differ slightly? 'Electron' is a snapshot concept. |
| 17871 | Fregean meanings are analogous to conceptual essence, defining a kind [Almog] |
| Full Idea: Ever since Frege, semantic definitionalists have posited a meaning ('sinn') for a name; the meaning/sinn is their semantic analog to the conceptual essence, as ontologically defining of the kind. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 07) |
| 17866 | Essential definition aims at existence conditions and structural truths [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The essentialist encapsulating formula is meant to be existence-exhaustive (an attribute the satisfaction of which is logically necessary and sufficient to be the thing) and truth-exhaustive (promising all the structural truths). | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 01) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] If he thinks essentialism means that one short phrase can achieve all this, then it is not surprising that Almog renounces his former essentialism in this essay. He may, however, have misunderstood. He should reread Aristotle. |
| 17868 | Surface accounts aren't exhaustive as they always allow unintended twin cases [Almog] |
| Full Idea: A surface-functional characterisation is not exhaustive. It allows unintended twins, alien intruders with different structures - water lookalikes that are not H2O and lookalike infinite structures that are not the natural numbers. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 03) | |
| A reaction: He rests this on the claim in mathematical logic that fully expressive systems are always non-categorical (having unintended twins). Set theory is not fully categorical, but Peano Arithmetic is. Almog's main anti-essentialist argument. |
| 17870 | Alien 'tigers' can't be tigers if they are not related to our tigers [Almog] |
| Full Idea: Animals roaming jungles on some planet at the other end of the galaxy with the tiger-look and the tiger genetic make-up but with a disjoint evolutionary history are not the same species as the earthly tigers. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 10) | |
| A reaction: I disagree. If two independent cultures build boats, they are both boats. If we manufacture a tiger which can breed with other tigers, we've made a tiger. His 'tigers' would scream for explanation, precisely because they are tigers. If not, no puzzle. |
| 17869 | Kripke and Putnam offer an intermediary between real and nominal essences [Almog] |
| Full Idea: Kripke and Putnam offer us enhanced essences, still formulable in one short sentence and locally graspable. They offer between Locke's mind-boggling definitive real essence and his mind-friendly but not definitive nominal essence. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 04) | |
| A reaction: The solution is to add a 'deep structure' which serves both ends. |
| 17876 | Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The key for the essentialist is classificatory predication. It is only a subsequent extension of this prime idea that leads us to cobble together enough such essential predications to make an individuative essential property. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 11) | |
| A reaction: So the essence is just a cross-reference of all the ways we can think of to classify it? I don't think so. Which are the essential classifications? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 5987 | Alcmaeon was the first to say the brain is central to thinking [Alcmaeon, by Staden, von] |
| Full Idea: Alcmaeon apparently was the first Greek to assign central cognitive and biological functions to the brain. | |
| From: report of Alcmaeon (fragments/reports [c.490 BCE]) by Heinrich von Staden - Alcmaeon | |
| A reaction: The name of Alcmaeon should be remembered with honour. This was 200 years before Aristotle, who still hadn't worked it out. I presume Alcmaeon inferred the truth from head injuries, which is overwhelming evidence, if you notice it. |
| 17873 | Water must be related to water, just as tigers must be related to tigers [Almog] |
| Full Idea: It is a blindspot to say that to be a tiger one must come from tigers, but to be water one needn't come from water. ...The error lies in not appreciating that to be water one still must come from somewhere in the cosmos, indeed, from hydrogen and oxygen. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 09) | |
| A reaction: A unified picture is indeed desirable, but a better solution is to say that the essence of a tiger is in its structure, not in its origins. There are many ways to produce an artefact. There could be many ways to produce a tiger. |
| 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. |
| 17864 | Defining an essence comes no where near giving a thing's nature [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The natures of things are neither exhausted nor even partially given by 'defining essences'. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A better criticism of essentialism. 'Natures' is a much vaguer word than 'essences', however, because the latter refers to what is stable and important, whereas natures could include any aspect. Being ticklish is in my nature, but not in my essence. |
| 17863 | Essences promise to reveal reality, but actually drive us away from it [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The essentialist line (one I trace to Aristotle, Descartes and Kripke) is driving us away from, not closer to, the real nature of things. It promised a sort of Hubble telescope - essences - able to reveal the deep structure of reality. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I suspect this is tilting at a straw man. No one thinks we should hunt for essences instead of doing normal science. 'Essence' just labels what you've got when you succeed. |
| 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'. |
| 24043 | Soul must be immortal, since it continually moves, like the heavens [Alcmaeon, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Alcmaeon says that the soul is immortal because it resembles immortal things and that this affection belongs to it because it is always in movement, like divine things, such the moon, the sun, the stars and the whole heaven. | |
| From: report of Alcmaeon (fragments/reports [c.490 BCE], DK 24) by Aristotle - De Anima 405a30 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Fish and rivers seem to be continually moving too. Presumably we are like gods, but then Greek gods seem awfully like humans. I don't know the history of belief in immortality; an interesting topic. |