13 ideas
| 22642 | Man has an intense natural interest in the consistency of his own thinking [James] |
| Full Idea: After man's interest in breathing freely, the greatest of all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits….) is his interest in consistency, in feeling that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions. | |
| From: William James (The Pragmatist Account of Truth [1908], 'Seventh') | |
| A reaction: People notoriously contradict themselves all the time, but I suspect that it is when they get out of their depth in complexities such as politics. They probably achieve great consistency within their own expertise, and in common knowledge. |
| 10397 | Abelard's mereology involves privileged and natural divisions, and principal parts [Abelard, by King,P] |
| Full Idea: Abelard's theory of substantial integral wholes is not a pure mereology in the modern sense, since he holds that there are privileged divisions; ..the division of a whole must be into its principal parts. Some wholes have a natural division. | |
| From: report of Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Peter King - Peter Abelard 2 | |
| A reaction: This is a mereology that cuts nature at the joints, rather than Lewis's 'unrestricted composition', so I find Abelard rather appealing. |
| 22641 | Realities just are, and beliefs are true of them [James] |
| Full Idea: Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are true of them. | |
| From: William James (The Pragmatist Account of Truth [1908], 'Fourth') | |
| A reaction: At last, a remark by James about truth which I really like. For 'realities' I would use the word 'facts'. |
| 10396 | If 'animal' is wholly present in Socrates and an ass, then 'animal' is rational and irrational [Abelard, by King,P] |
| Full Idea: Abelard argued that if the universal 'animal' were completely present in both Socrates and an ass, making each wholly an animal, then the same thing, animal, will be simultaneously rational and irrational, with contraries present in the whole thing. | |
| From: report of Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Peter King - Peter Abelard 2 | |
| A reaction: If we have universals for rationality and irrationality, they can distinguish the two. But we must also say that rationality is not an aspect of animal, which seems to mean that mind isn't either. What is the essence of an animal? Not reason? |
| 10395 | Abelard was an irrealist about virtually everything apart from concrete individuals [Abelard, by King,P] |
| Full Idea: Abelard was an irrealist about universals, but also about propositions, events, times other than the present, natural kinds, relations, wholes, absolute space, hylomorphic composites, and the like. The concrete individual is enough to populate the world. | |
| From: report of Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Peter King - Peter Abelard 2 | |
| A reaction: If a Nominalist claims that 'only particulars exist', this makes him an extreme nominalist, and remarkably materialistic for his time (though he accepted the soul, as well as God). |
| 15384 | Only words can be 'predicated of many'; the universality is just in its mode of signifying [Abelard, by Panaccio] |
| Full Idea: Abelard concluded that only words can be 'predicated of many'. A universal is nothing but a general linguistic predicate, and its universality depends not on its mode of being, but on its mode of signifying. | |
| From: report of Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Claude Panaccio - Medieval Problem of Universals 'Peter' | |
| A reaction: Abelard seems to be the originator of what is now called Predicate Nominalism, with Nelson Goodman as his modern representative. If it is just words, is there no fact of two things having the 'same' property? |
| 8481 | The de dicto-de re modality distinction dates back to Abelard [Abelard, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: The de dicto-de re modality distinction dates back to Abelard. | |
| From: report of Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.7 | |
| A reaction: Most modern philosophers couldn't (apparently) care less where a concept originated, but one of the principles of this database is that such things do matter. I'm not sure why, but if we want the whole picture, we need the historical picture. |
| 22640 | We find satisfaction in consistency of all of our beliefs, perceptions and mental connections [James] |
| Full Idea: We find satisfaction in consistency between the present idea and the entire rest of our mental equipment, including the whole order of our sensations, and that of our intuitions of likeness and difference, and our whole stock previously acquired truths. | |
| From: William James (The Pragmatist Account of Truth [1908], 'Fourth') | |
| A reaction: I like this, apart from the idea that the criterion of good coherence seems to be subjective 'satisfaction'. We should ask why some large set of beliefs is coherent. I assume nature is coherent, and truth is the best explanation of our coherence about it. |
| 21687 | It seems obvious to prefer the simpler of two theories, on grounds of beauty and convenience [Quine] |
| Full Idea: It is not to be wondered that theory makers seek simplicity. When two theories are equally defensible on other counts, certainly the simpler of the two is to be preferred on the score of both beauty and convenience. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On Simple Theories of a Complex World [1960], p.255) | |
| A reaction: A simple application of Ockham's Razor. Quine goes on to nicely deconstruct what is involved in simplicity, and identify a certain amount of dubious prejudice in the concept. |
| 21688 | There are four suspicious reasons why we prefer simpler theories [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We prefer simpler theories through wishful thinking, or a bias which slants the data, or a bias where the simpler hypothesis is more open to confirmation, or simpler hypotheses tolerating wider deviations in score-keeping. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On Simple Theories of a Complex World [1960], p.258) | |
| A reaction: [a compression of his summary of the paper] Quine is not dismissing our preference for simpler theories, but just very nicely inviting us to focus of aspects about which we should be cautious. |
| 15385 | Abelard's problem is the purely singular aspects of things won't account for abstraction [Panaccio on Abelard] |
| Full Idea: Abelard's problem is that it is not clear how singular forms could do the job they are supposed to do - to account for abstraction, namely - if they were purely singular aspects. | |
| From: comment on Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Claude Panaccio - Medieval Problem of Universals 'Peter' | |
| A reaction: A very nice question! If we say that abstracta are just acquired by ignoring all but that feature in some objects, how do we identify 'that' feature in order to select it? The instances must share something in common to be abstracted. |
| 15383 | Nothing external can truly be predicated of an object [Abelard, by Panaccio] |
| Full Idea: Abelard argued from the commonly accepted definition of a universal as 'what can be predicated of man', that no external thing can ever be predicated of anything. | |
| From: report of Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Claude Panaccio - Medieval Problem of Universals 'Peter' | |
| A reaction: It sounds to me as if Abelard is confusing predicates with properties! Maybe no external can be a property of anything, but I take predicates to just be part of what you can say about anything, and that had better included external facts. |
| 10398 | Natural kinds are not special; they are just well-defined resemblance collections [Abelard, by King,P] |
| Full Idea: In Abelard's view a natural kind is a well-defined collection of things that have the same features, so that natural kinds have no special status, being no more than discrete integral wholes whose principle of membership is similarity. | |
| From: report of Peter Abelard (works [1135]) by Peter King - Peter Abelard 2 | |
| A reaction: I take a natural kind to be a completely stable and invariant class of things. Presumably this invariance has an underlying explanation, but Abelard seems to take the Humean line that we cannot penetrate beyond the experienced surface. |