16 ideas
| 22026 | Philosophy is homesickness - the urge to be at home everywhere [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is actually homesickness - the urge to be everywhere at home. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 45) | |
| A reaction: The idea of home [heimat] is powerful in German culture. The point of romanticism was seen as largely concerning restless souls like Byron and his heroes, who do not feel at home. Hence ironic detachment. |
| 10825 | The notion of truth is to help us make use of the utterances of others [Field,H] |
| Full Idea: I suspect that the original purpose of the notion of truth was to aid us in utilizing the utterances of others in drawing conclusions about the world,...so we must attend to its social role, and that being in a position to assert something is what counts. | |
| From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §5) | |
| A reaction: [Last bit compressed] This sounds excellent. Deflationary and redundancy views are based on a highly individualistic view of utterances and truth, but we need to be much more contextual and pragmatic if we are to get the right story. |
| 10820 | In the early 1930s many philosophers thought truth was not scientific [Field,H] |
| Full Idea: In the early 1930s many philosophers believed that the notion of truth could not be incorporated into a scientific conception of the world. | |
| From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §3) | |
| A reaction: This leads on to an account of why Tarski's formal version was so important, and Field emphasises Tarski's physicalist metaphysic. |
| 13499 | Tarski reduced truth to reference or denotation [Field,H, by Hart,WD] |
| Full Idea: Tarski can be viewed as having reduced truth to reference or denotation. | |
| From: report of Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972]) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 4 |
| 10818 | Tarski really explained truth in terms of denoting, predicating and satisfied functions [Field,H] |
| Full Idea: A proper account of Tarski's truth definition explains truth in terms of three other semantic notions: what it is for a name to denote something, and for a predicate to apply to something, and for a function symbol to be fulfilled by a pair of things. | |
| From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972]) | |
| A reaction: This is Field's 'T1' version, which is meant to spell out what was really going on in Tarski's account. |
| 10817 | Tarski just reduced truth to some other undefined semantic notions [Field,H] |
| Full Idea: It is normally claimed that Tarski defined truth using no undefined semantic terms, but I argue that he reduced the notion of truth to certain other semantic notions, but did not in any way explicate these other notions. | |
| From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §0) |
| 10819 | Tarski gives us the account of truth needed to build a group of true sentences in a model [Field,H] |
| Full Idea: Model theory must choose the denotations of the primitives so that all of a group of sentences come out true, so we need a theory of how the truth value of a sentence depends on the denotation of its primitive nonlogical parts, which Tarski gives us. | |
| From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §1) |
| 10827 | Model theory is unusual in restricting the range of the quantifiers [Field,H] |
| Full Idea: In model theory we are interested in allowing a slightly unusual semantics for quantifiers: we are willing to allow that the quantifier not range over everything. | |
| From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], n 5) |
| 19591 | Desire for perfection is an illness, if it turns against what is imperfect [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: An absolute drive toward perfection and completeness is an illness, as soon as it shows itself to be destructive and averse toward the imperfect, the incomplete. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 33) | |
| A reaction: Deep and true! Novalis seems to be a particularist - hanging on to the fine detail of life, rather than being immersed in the theory. These are the philosophers who also turn to literature. |
| 10826 | 'Valence' and 'gene' had to be reduced to show their compatibility with physicalism [Field,H] |
| Full Idea: 'Valence' and 'gene' were perfectly clear long before anyone succeeded in reducing them, but it was their reducibility and not their clarity before reduction that showed them to be compatible with physicalism. | |
| From: Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972], §5) |
| 7615 | Field says reference is a causal physical relation between mental states and objects [Field,H, by Putnam] |
| Full Idea: In Field's view reference is a 'physicalistic relation', i.e. a complex causal relation between words or mental representations and objects or sets of objects; it is up to physical science to discover what that physicalistic relation is. | |
| From: report of Hartry Field (Tarski's Theory of Truth [1972]) by Hilary Putnam - Reason, Truth and History Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: I wouldn't hold your breath while the scientists do their job. If physicalism is right then Field is right, but physics seems no more appropriate for giving a theory of reference than it does for giving a theory of music. |
| 21275 | Unlike a stone, the parts of a watch are obviously assembled in order to show the time [Paley] |
| Full Idea: When we come to inspect a watch we perceive (what we could not discover in a stone) that its several parts are put together for a purpose, to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day. | |
| From: William Paley (Natural Theology [1802], Ch 1) | |
| A reaction: Microscopic examination of the stone would have surprised Paley. Should we infer a geometer because the sun is spherical? Crytals look designed, but are explained by deeper chemistry. |
| 21276 | From the obvious purpose and structure of a watch we must infer that it was designed [Paley] |
| Full Idea: The inference is inevitable that the watch had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who designed its use. | |
| From: William Paley (Natural Theology [1802], Ch 1) | |
| A reaction: It rather begs the question to refer to an ordered structure as a 'design'. Why do we think it is absurd to think the the 'purpose' of the sun is to benefit mankind? Suppose we found a freakish natural sundial in the woods. |
| 21277 | Even an imperfect machine can exhibit obvious design [Paley] |
| Full Idea: It is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to show with what design it was made. | |
| From: William Paley (Natural Theology [1802], Ch 1) | |
| A reaction: This encounters Hume's point that you will then have to infer that the designer contains similar imperfections. If you look at plagues, famines and mothers dying in childbirth (see Mill), you might wish the designer had never started. |
| 21278 | All the signs of design found in a watch are also found in nature [Paley] |
| Full Idea: Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature. | |
| From: William Paley (Natural Theology [1802], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: This is far from obvious. It was crucial to the watch analogy that we immediately see its one self-evident purpose. No one looks at nature and says 'Aha, I know what this is all for'. |
| 21357 | No organ shows purpose more obviously than the eyelid [Paley] |
| Full Idea: The eyelid defends the eye; it wipes it; it closes it in sleep. Are there, in any work of art whatever, purposes more evident than those which this organ fulfils? | |
| From: William Paley (Natural Theology [1802], p.24), quoted by Armand Marie LeRoi - The Lagoon: how Aristotle invented science 031 | |
| A reaction: Nice to have another example, in addition to the watch. He is not wholly wrong, because it is impossible to give an evolutionary account of the development of the eyelid without referring to some sort of teleological aspect. The eyelid has a function. |