Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority', 'Identity, Essence and Indiscernibility' and 'Justified Belief as Responsible Belief'

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12 ideas

2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 6. Coherence
12801 Coherentists seek relations among beliefs that are simple, conservative and explanatory [Foley]
     Full Idea: Coherentists try to provide an explication of epistemic rationality in terms of a set of deductive and probabilistic relations among beliefs and properties such as simplicity, conservativeness, and explanatory power.
     From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.317)
     A reaction: I have always like the coherentist view of justification, and now I see that this has led me to the question of explanation, which in turn has led me to essentialism. It's all coming together. Watch this space. 'Explanatory' is the key to everything!
2. Reason / D. Definition / 13. Against Definition
9331 How do we determine which of the sentences containing a term comprise its definition? [Horwich]
     Full Idea: How are we to determine which of the sentences containing a term comprise its definition?
     From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §2)
     A reaction: Nice question. If I say 'philosophy is the love of wisdom' and 'philosophy bores me', why should one be part of its definition and the other not? What if I stipulated that the second one is part of my definition, and the first one isn't?
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / c. Statue and clay
14381 A statue is essentially the statue, but its lump is not essentially a statue, so statue isn't lump [Yablo, by Rocca]
     Full Idea: Yablo proposes the argument that Statue A is essentially a statue, and Lump 1 is not essentially a statue, so Statue A is not identical with Lump 1.
     From: report of Stephen Yablo (Identity, Essence and Indiscernibility [1987]) by Michael della Rocca - Essentialists and Essentialism I
     A reaction: Della Rocca and Yablo unashamedly elide necessary properties with essential properties, so this argument doesn't bother me too much. It concerns the statue and the clay having different modal properties.
12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 1. Nature of the A Priori
9333 A priori belief is not necessarily a priori justification, or a priori knowledge [Horwich]
     Full Idea: It is one thing to believe something a priori and another for this belief to be epistemically justified. The latter is required for a priori knowledge.
     From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §8)
     A reaction: Personally I would agree with this, because I don't think anything should count as knowledge if it doesn't have supporting reasons, but fans of a priori knowledge presumably think that certain basic facts are just known. They are a priori justified.
12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 6. A Priori from Reason
9342 Understanding needs a priori commitment [Horwich]
     Full Idea: Understanding is itself based on a priori commitment.
     From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §12)
     A reaction: This sounds plausible, but needs more justification than Horwich offers. This is the sort of New Rationalist idea I associate with Bonjour. The crucial feature of the New lot is, I take it, their fallibilism. All understanding is provisional.
12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 8. A Priori as Analytic
9332 Meaning is generated by a priori commitment to truth, not the other way around [Horwich]
     Full Idea: Our a priori commitment to certain sentences is not really explained by our knowledge of a word's meaning. It is the other way around. We accept a priori that the sentences are true, and thereby provide it with meaning.
     From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §8)
     A reaction: This sounds like a lovely trump card, but how on earth do you decide that a sentence is true if you don't know what it means? Personally I would take it that we are committed to the truth of a proposition, before we have a sentence for it.
12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 9. A Priori from Concepts
9341 Meanings and concepts cannot give a priori knowledge, because they may be unacceptable [Horwich]
     Full Idea: A priori knowledge of logic and mathematics cannot derive from meanings or concepts, because someone may possess such concepts, and yet disagree with us about them.
     From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §12)
     A reaction: A good argument. The thing to focus on is not whether such ideas are a priori, but whether they are knowledge. I think we should employ the word 'intuition' for a priori candidates for knowledge, and demand further justification for actual knowledge.
9334 If we stipulate the meaning of 'number' to make Hume's Principle true, we first need Hume's Principle [Horwich]
     Full Idea: If we stipulate the meaning of 'the number of x's' so that it makes Hume's Principle true, we must accept Hume's Principle. But a precondition for this stipulation is that Hume's Principle be accepted a priori.
     From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §9)
     A reaction: Yet another modern Quinean argument that all attempts at defining things are circular. I am beginning to think that the only a priori knowledge we have is of when a group of ideas is coherent. Calling it 'intuition' might be more accurate.
12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 10. A Priori as Subjective
9339 A priori knowledge (e.g. classical logic) may derive from the innate structure of our minds [Horwich]
     Full Idea: One potential source of a priori knowledge is the innate structure of our minds. We might, for example, have an a priori commitment to classical logic.
     From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §11)
     A reaction: Horwich points out that to be knowledge it must also say that we ought to believe it. I'm wondering whether if we divided the whole territory of the a priori up into intuitions and then coherent justifications, the whole problem would go away.
13. Knowledge Criteria / A. Justification Problems / 3. Internal or External / c. Disjunctivism
12800 Externalists want to understand knowledge, Internalists want to understand justification [Foley]
     Full Idea: Externalists are principally interested in understanding what knowledge is, ..while internalists, by contrast, are principally interested in explicating a sense of justification ..from one's own perspective.
     From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.314)
     A reaction: I find this very helpful, since I have a strong bias towards internalism (with a social dimension), and I see now that it is because I am more interested in what a (good) justification is than what some entity in reality called 'knowledge' consists of.
13. Knowledge Criteria / B. Internal Justification / 2. Pragmatic justification
12802 We aren't directly pragmatic about belief, but pragmatic about the deliberation which precedes it [Foley]
     Full Idea: It is rare for pragmatic considerations to influence the rationality of our beliefs in the crass, direct way that Pascal's Wager envisions. Instead, they determine the direction and shape of our investigative and deliberative projects and practices.
     From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.320)
     A reaction: [See Idea 6684 for Pascal's Wager] Foley is evidently a full-blown pragmatist (which is bad), but this is nicely put. We can't deny the importance of the amount of effort put into an enquiry. Maybe it is an epistemic duty, rather than a means to an end.
12803 Justification comes from acceptable procedures, given practical constraints [Foley]
     Full Idea: One justifiably believes a proposition if one has an epistemically rational belief that one's procedures with respect to it have been acceptable, given practical limitations, and one's goals.
     From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.322)
     A reaction: I quite like this, except that it is too individualistic. My goals, and my standards of acceptability decree whether I know? I don't see the relevance of goals; only a pragmatist would mention such a thing. Standards of acceptability are social.