26 ideas
| 17651 | Without words or other symbols, we have no world [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Goodman seems to have a particularly extreme version of the commitment to philosophy as linguistic. Non-human animals have no world, it seems. |
| 17652 | Truth is irrelevant if no statements are involved [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Truth pertains solely to what is said ...For nonverbal versions and even for verbal versions without statements, truth is irrelevant. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Goodman is a philosopher of language (like Dummett), but I am a philosopher of thought (like Evans). The test, for me, is whether truth is applicable to the thought of non-human animals. I take it to be obvious that it is applicable. |
| 15091 | Restrict 'logical truth' to formal logic, rather than including analytic and metaphysical truths [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: I favour restricting the term 'logical truth' to what logicians would count as such, excluding both analytic truths like 'Bachelors are unmarried' and Kripkean necessities like 'Gold is an element'. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], I) | |
| A reaction: I agree. There is a tendency to splash the phrases 'logical truth' and 'logical necessity around in vague ways. I take them to strictly arise out of the requirements of formal systems of logic. |
| 17656 | Being primitive or prior always depends on a constructional system [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Nothing is primitive or derivationally prior to anything apart from a constructional system. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4c) | |
| A reaction: Something may be primitive not just because we can't be bothered to analyse it any further, but because even God couldn't analyse it. Maybe. |
| 17661 | We don't recognise patterns - we invent them [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Recognising patterns is very much a matter of inventing or imposing them. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be false. |
| 17659 | Reality is largely a matter of habit [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.6) | |
| A reaction: I'm a robust realist, me, but I sort of see what he means. We become steeped in unspoken conventions about how we take our world to be, and filter out anything that conflicts with it. |
| 17657 | We build our world, and ignore anything that won't fit [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: We dismiss as illusory or negligible what cannot be fitted into the architecture of the world we are building. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4d) | |
| A reaction: I'm trying to think of an example of this, but can't. Maybe poor people are invisible to the rich? |
| 17654 | A world can be full of variety or not, depending on how we sort it [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: A world may be unmanageably heterogeneous or unbearably monotonous according to how events are sorted into kinds. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4a) | |
| A reaction: We might expect this from the man who invented 'grue', which allows you to classify things that change colour with things that don't. Could you describe a bird as 'might have been a fish', and classify it with fish? ('Projectible'?) |
| 15095 | A property's causal features are essential, and only they fix its identity [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: The view I now favour says that the causal features of a property, both forward-looking and backward-looking, are essential to it. And it says that properties having the same causal features are identical. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: In this formulation we have essentialism about properties, as well as essentialism about the things which have the properties. |
| 15097 | I claim that a property has its causal features in all possible worlds [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: The controversial claim of my theory is that the causal features of properties are essential to them - are features that they have in all possible worlds. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: One problem is that a property can come in degrees, so what degree of the property is necessary to it? It is better to assign this claim to the fundamental properties (which are best called 'powers'). |
| 15094 | I now deny that properties are cluster of powers, and take causal properties as basic [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: I now reject the formulation of the causal theory which says that a property is a cluster of conditional powers. That has a reductionist flavour, which is a cheat. We need properties to explain conditional powers, so properties won't reduce. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: [compressed wording] I agree with Mumford and Anjum in preferring his earlier formulation. I think properties are broad messy things, whereas powers can be defined more precisely, and seem to have more stability in nature. |
| 17653 | Things can only be judged the 'same' by citing some respect of sameness [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Identification rests upon organization into entities and kinds. The response to the question 'Same or not the same?' must always be 'Same what?'. ...Identity or constancy in a world is identity with respect to what is within that world as organised. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4a) | |
| A reaction: And the gist of his book is that 'organised' is done by us, not by the world. He seems to be committed to the full Geachean relative identity, rather than the mere Wigginsian relative individuation. An unfashionable view! |
| 15099 | If something is possible, but not nomologically possible, we need metaphysical possibility [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: If it is possible that there could be possible states of affairs that are not nomologically possible, don't we therefore need a notion of metaphysical possibility that outruns nomological possibility? | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: Shoemaker rejects this possibility (p.425). I sympathise. So there is 'natural' possibility (my preferred term), which is anything which stuff, if it exists, could do, and 'logical' possibility, which is anything that doesn't lead to contradiction. |
| 15101 | Once you give up necessity as a priori, causal necessity becomes the main type of necessity [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Once the obstacle of the deeply rooted conviction that necessary truths should be knowable a priori is removed, ...causal necessity is (pretheoretically) the very paradigm of necessity, in ordinary usage and in dictionaries. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VII) | |
| A reaction: The a priori route seems to lead to logical necessity, just by doing a priori logic, and also to metaphysical necessity, by some sort of intuitive vision. This is a powerful idea of Shoemaker's (implied, of course, in Kripke). |
| 15098 | Empirical evidence shows that imagining a phenomenon can show it is possible [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: We have abundant empirical evidence that when we can imagine some phenomenal situation, e.g., imagine things appearing certain ways, such a situation could actually exist. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: There seem to be good reasons for holding the opposite view too. We can imagine gold appearing to be all sorts of colours, but that doesn't make it possible. What does empirical evidence really tell us here? |
| 15100 | Imagination reveals conceptual possibility, where descriptions avoid contradiction or incoherence [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Imaginability can give us access to conceptual possibility, when we come to believe situations to be conceptually possible by reflecting on their descriptions and seeing no contradiction or incoherence. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], VI) | |
| A reaction: If take the absence of contradiction to indicate 'logical' possibility, but the absence of incoherence is more interesting, even if it is a bit vague. He is talking of 'situations', which I take to be features of reality. A priori synthetic? |
| 17660 | Discovery is often just finding a fit, like a jigsaw puzzle [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Discovery often amounts, as when I place a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, not to arrival at a proposition for declaration or defense, but to finding a fit. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: I find Goodman's views here pretty alien, but I like this bit. Coherence really rocks. |
| 17658 | Users of digital thermometers recognise no temperatures in the gaps [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: To use a digital thermometer with readings in tenths of a degree is to recognise no temperature as lying between 90 and 90.1 degrees. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4d) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be nonsense, treating users of digital thermometers as if they were stupid. No one thinks temperatures go up and down in quantum leaps. We all know there is a gap between instrument and world. (Very American, I'm thinking!) |
| 17650 | We lack frames of reference to transform physics, biology and psychology into one another [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: We have no neat frames of reference, no ready rules for transforming physics, biology and psychology into one another. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.2) |
| 15096 | 'Grue' only has causal features because of its relation to green [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps 'grue' has causal features, but only derivatively, in virtue of its relation to green. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], III) | |
| A reaction: I take grue to be a behaviour, and not a property at all. The problem only arises because the notion of a 'property' became too lax. Presumably Shoemaker should also mention blue in his account. |
| 17655 | Grue and green won't be in the same world, as that would block induction entirely [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: Grue cannot be a relevant kind for induction in the same world as green, for that would preclude some of the decisions, right or wrong, that constitute inductive inference. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4b) | |
| A reaction: This may make 'grue' less mad than I thought it was. I always assume we are slicing the world as 'green, blue and grue'. I still say 'green' is a basic predicate of experience, but 'grue' is amenable to analysis. |
| 4055 | It isn't obviously wicked to destroy a potential human being (e.g. an ununited egg and sperm) [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: A week-old embryo without a brain may be a potential human being, but so are a sperm and an ovum that are about to meet in a dish, and it wouldn't be wicked to keep those apart. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (When Does a Life Begin? [1985], p.19) | |
| A reaction: Sounds fine, but it may be a slippery slope. Is it acceptable to deny a place at music school to a potentially great musician? |
| 4054 | I may exist before I become a person, just as I exist before I become an adult [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: It makes perfectly good sense to say that I existed before I became a person, just as I existed before I became an adult, or a philosopher. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (When Does a Life Begin? [1985], p.13) | |
| A reaction: The word 'I' needs thought here. I was once a non-adult, but was I ever a non-person? 'Person' is not a clear concept, despite what many philosophers since Locke may think. |
| 4056 | If the soul is held to leave the body at brain-death, it should arrive at the time of brain-creation [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Any Christian who feels that body and soul go their separate ways at brain death ought in consistency to hold that they come together only at the point when whatever is destroyed at brain death first came into being. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (When Does a Life Begin? [1985], p.24) | |
| A reaction: Hence Christians probably focus less on brain-death than do doctors and the rest of us. |
| 17649 | If the world is one it has many aspects, and if there are many worlds they will collect into one [Goodman] |
| Full Idea: If there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. One world may be taken as many, or many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking. | |
| From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: He cites 'The Pluralistic Universe' by William James for this idea. The idea is that the distinction 'evaporates under analysis'. Parmenides seems to have thought that no features could be distinguished in the true One. |
| 15093 | We might say laws are necessary by combining causal properties with Armstrong-Dretske-Tooley laws [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: One way to get the conclusion that laws are necessary is to combine my view of properties with the view of Armstrong, Dretske and Tooley, that laws are, or assert, relations between properties. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causal and Metaphysical Necessity [1998], I) | |
| A reaction: This is interesting, because Armstrong in particular wants the necessity to arise from relations between properties as universals, but if we define properties causally, and make them necessary, we might get the same result without universals. |