31 ideas
| 14799 | Metaphysics rests on observations, but ones so common we hardly notice them [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysics really rests on observations, whether consciously or not. The only reason this is not recognised is that it rests upon kinds of phenomena with which every man's experience is so saturated that he pays no particular attention to them. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Approach to Metaphysics [1898], p.311) | |
| A reaction: I think this is entirely right. I would say that the only thing that distinguishes metaphysical thought is its extreme level of generality, which makes it very hard to substantiate, because it is so remote from its evidential base. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 2584 | Lobotomised patients can cease to care about a pain [Block] |
| Full Idea: After frontal lobotomies, patients typically report that they still have pains, though the pains no longer bother them. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 83) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be an endorsement of reductive physicalism, because what matters about pains is that they bother us, not how they feel, so frog pain could do the job, if it felt different from ours, but was disliked by the frog. |
| 2582 | A brain looks no more likely than anything else to cause qualia [Block] |
| Full Idea: NO physical mechanism seems very intuitively plausible as a seat of qualia, least of all a brain. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 78) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about "least of all", given the mind-boggling complexity of the brain's connections. Certainly, though, nothing in either folk physics or academic physics suggests that any physical object is likely to be aware of anything. |
| 2574 | Behaviour requires knowledge as well as dispositions [Block] |
| Full Idea: A desire cannot be identified with a disposition to act, since the agent might not know that a particular act leads to the thing desired, and thus might not be disposed to do it. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: One might have a disposition to act, but not in a particular way. "Something must be done". To get to the particular act, it seems that indeed a belief must be added to the desire. |
| 2576 | In functionalism, desires are internal states with causal relations [Block] |
| Full Idea: According to functionalism, a system might have the behaviouristic input-output relations, yet not desire something, as this requires internal states with certain causal relations. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: Such a system might be Putnam's 'superactor', who only behaves as if he desires something. Of course, the internal states might need more than just 'causal relations'. |
| 2575 | Functionalism is behaviourism, but with mental states as intermediaries [Block] |
| Full Idea: Functionalism is a new incarnation of behaviourism, replacing sensory inputs with sensory inputs plus mental states, and replacing dispositions to act with dispositions plus certain mental states. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: I think of functionalism as behaviourism which extends inside the 'black box' between stimulus and response. It proposes internal stimuli and responses. Consequently functionalism inherits some behaviourist problems. |
| 2583 | You might invert colours, but you can't invert beliefs [Block] |
| Full Idea: It is hard to see how to make sense of the analog of color spectrum inversion with respect to non-qualitative states such a beliefs (where they are functionally equivalent but have different beliefs). | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 81) | |
| A reaction: I would suggest that beliefs can be 'inverted', because there are all sorts of ways to implement a belief, but colour can't be inverted, because that depends on a particular brain state. It makes good sense to me... |
| 2578 | Could a creature without a brain be in the right functional state for pain? [Block] |
| Full Idea: If pain is a functional state, it cannot be a brain state, because creatures without brains could realise the same Turing machine as creatures with brains. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a poorly grounded claim. There may be some hypothetical world where brainless creatures implement all our functions, but from here brains look the only plausible option. |
| 2585 | Not just any old functional network will have mental states [Block] |
| Full Idea: If there are any fixed points in the mind-body problem, one of them is that the economy of Bolivia could not have mental states, no matter how it is distorted. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 86) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to disagree with this, but then it can hardly be a serious suggestion that anyone could see how to reconfigure an economy so that it mapped the functional state of the human brain. This is not a crucial problem. |
| 2586 | In functionalism, what are the special inputs and outputs of conscious creatures? [Block] |
| Full Idea: In functionalism, it is very hard to see how there could be a single physical characterization of the inputs and outputs of all and only creatures with mentality. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 87) | |
| A reaction: It would be theoretically possible if the only way to achieve mentality was to have a particular pattern of inputs and outputs. I don't think, though, that 'mentality' is an all-or-nothing concept. |
| 2579 | Physicalism is prejudiced in favour of our neurology, when other systems might have minds [Block] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism is a chauvinist theory: it withholds mental properties from systems that in fact have them. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 71) | |
| A reaction: This criticism interprets physicalism too rigidly. There may be several ways to implement a state. My own view is that other systems might implement our functions, but they won't experience them in a human way. |
| 2577 | Simple machine-functionalism says mind just is a Turing machine [Block] |
| Full Idea: In the simplest Turing-machine version of functionalism (Putnam 1967), mental states are identified with the total Turing-machine state, involving a machine table and its inputs and outputs. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: This obviously invites the question of why mental states would be conscious and phenomenal, given that modern computers are devoid of same, despite being classy Turing machines. |
| 2580 | A Turing machine, given a state and input, specifies an output and the next state [Block] |
| Full Idea: In a Turing machine, given any state and input, the machine table specifies an output and the next state. …To have full power the tape must be infinite in at least one direction, and be movable in both directions. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 71) | |
| A reaction: In retrospect, the proposal that this feeble item should be taken as a model for the glorious complexity and richness of human consciousness doesn't look too plausible. |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| Full Idea: Linguistics rejects (on theoretical grounds) the intuition that the sentence "the boy the girl the cat bit scratched died" is ungrammatical. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 78) | |
| A reaction: Once we have disentangled it, we practical speakers have no right to say it is ungrammatical. It isn't only theory. The sentence is just stylistically infelicitous. |
| 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'. |