13 ideas
| 11181 | Aristotelian essentialism involves a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of modal operators [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Aristotelian essentialism may best be understood on a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of the modal operators. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.189) | |
| A reaction: I record this because I very much like the sound of it, though I have yet to fully understand it. |
| 11184 | Aristotelian essentialism is about shared properties, individuating essentialism about distinctive properties [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: An object must have some of its natural properties in this world. Some of those it has in common with objects of some proximate kind (Aristotelian essentialism), and others individuate it from objects of the same kind (individuating essentialism). | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.193) |
| 11180 | Essentialist sentences are not theorems of modal logic, and can even be false [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: In the range of modal systems for which Saul Kripke has provided a semantics, no essentialist sentence is a theorem. Furthermore, there are models for which such sentences are demonstrably false. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.188) |
| 11186 | 'Essentially' won't replace 'necessarily' for vacuous properties like snub-nosed or self-identical [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: We would never use 'is essentially' for 'is necessarily' where vacuous properties are concerned, as in 'Socrates is essentially snub-nosed' or 'Socrates is essentially Socrates'. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.193) | |
| A reaction: This simple point does us a huge service in rescuing the word 'essential' from several hundred years of misguided philosophy. |
| 11185 | 'Is essentially' has a different meaning from 'is necessarily', as they often cannot be substituted [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be surface synonymy between 'is essentially' and de re occurrences of 'is necessarily', but intersubstitution often fails to preserve sense (as in 'Winston is essentially a cyclist' and 'Winston is necessarily a cyclist'). | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.193) | |
| A reaction: Clearly the two sentences have different meanings, with 'essentially' being a comment about the nature of Winston, and 'necessarily' probably being a comment about the circumstances in which he finds himself. Very nice. See also Idea 11186. |
| 11182 | If essences are objects with only essential properties, they are elusive in possible worlds [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers make a metaphysical shift, by inventing objects (individual concepts, forms, substances) called 'essences', which have only essential properties, and then worry when they can't locate them by rummaging around in possible worlds. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.192) |
| 11183 | The use of possible worlds is to sort properties (not to individuate objects) [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: The usefulness of talk about possible worlds is not for purposes of individuating the object - that can be done in this world; such talk is a way of sorting its properties. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.192) | |
| A reaction: 'Possible worlds are a device for sorting properties' sounds to me like a promising slogan. Ruth Marcus originated rigid designation, before Kripke came up with the label. |
| 11187 | In possible worlds, names are just neutral unvarying pegs for truths and predicates [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: The strategem of talk about possible worlds is that truth assignments of sentences and extensions of predicates may vary, but individual names don't alter their reference (unless they don't refer). They are a neutral peg for descriptions. | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.194) |
| 20643 | Consilience is a common groundwork of explanation [Whewell] |
| Full Idea: Consilience is the jumping together of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. | |
| From: William Whewell (The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences [1840]), quoted by Peter Watson - Convergence Intro 'United' | |
| A reaction: Apparently this is the first use of the word, which was popularised by E.O. Wilson in recent times. If, as I do, you dream of a final theory, in philosophy as well as in science, then you have to be a fan of consilience. |
| 7518 | If folk psychology gives a network of causal laws, that fits neatly with functionalism [Churchland,PM] |
| Full Idea: The portrait of folk psychology as a network of causal laws dovetailed neatly with the emerging philosophy of mind called functionalism. | |
| From: Paul M. Churchland (Folk Psychology [1996], II) | |
| A reaction: And from the lower levels functionalism is supported by the notion that the brain is modular. Note the word 'laws'; this implies an underlying precision in folk psychology, which is then easily attacked. Maybe the network is too complex for simple laws. |
| 7519 | Many mental phenomena are totally unexplained by folk psychology [Churchland,PM] |
| Full Idea: Folk psychology fails utterly to explain a considerable variety of central psychological phenomena: mental illness, sleep, creativity, memory, intelligence differences, and many forms of learning, to cite just a few. | |
| From: Paul M. Churchland (Folk Psychology [1996], III) | |
| A reaction: If folk psychology is a theory, it will have been developed to predict behaviour, rather than as a full-blown psychological map. The odd thing is that some people seem to be very bad at folk psychology. |
| 7520 | Folk psychology never makes any progress, and is marginalised by modern science [Churchland,PM] |
| Full Idea: Folk psychology has not progressed significantly in the last 2500 years; if anything, it has been steadily in retreat during this period; it does not integrate with modern science, and its emerging wallflower status bodes ill for its future. | |
| From: Paul M. Churchland (Folk Psychology [1996], III) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] However, while shares in alchemy and astrology have totally collapsed, folk psychology shows not the slightest sign of going away, and it is unclear how it ever could. See Idea 3177. |
| 11189 | Dispositional essences are special, as if an object loses them they cease to exist [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| Full Idea: Being gold or being a man is not accidental. ..Such essences are dispositional properties of a very special kind: if an object had such a property and ceased to have it, it would have ceased to exist or have changed (as if gold is transmuted to lead). | |
| From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.202) | |
| A reaction: Ruth Marcus is an important founder of modern scientific essentialism, by not only proposing the notion we call rigid designation, but by explicitly defending the essential identities that seem to emerge from modal logic. |