12 ideas
| 2546 | Philosophy is a magnificent failure in its attempt to overstep the limits of our knowledge [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy marks the limits of human theoretical intelligence. Philosophy is an attempt to overstep our cognitive bounds, a kind of magnificent failure. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.209) | |
| A reaction: No one attempts to overstep boundaries once they are confirmed as such. The magnificent attempts persist because failure is impossible to demonstrate (except, perhaps, by Gödel's Theorem). |
| 17962 | The truth-maker principle is that every truth has a sufficient truth-maker [Forrest] |
| Full Idea: Item x is said to be a sufficient truth-maker for truth-bearer p just in case necessarily if x exists then p is true. ...Every truth has a sufficient truth-maker. Hence, I take it, the sum of all sufficient truth-makers is a universal truth-maker. | |
| From: Peter Forrest (General Facts,Phys Necessity, and Metaph of Time [2006], 1) | |
| A reaction: Note that it is not 'necessary', because something else might make p true instead. |
| 2544 | Thoughts have a dual aspect: as they seem to introspection, and their underlying logical reality [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Our thoughts have a kind of duality, corresponding to their surface appearance to introspection and their underlying logical reality. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.147) |
| 19730 | Epistemic virtues: love of knowledge, courage, caution, autonomy, practical wisdom... [Kvanvig] |
| Full Idea: Virtue theorists may focus on the particular habits or virtues of successful cognizers, such as love of knowledge, firmness, courage and caution, humility, autonomy, generosity, and practical wisdom. | |
| From: Jonathan Kvanvig (Virtue Epistemology [2011], III) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Roberts and Wood 2007] It is interesting that most of these virtues do not merely concern cognition. How about diligence, self-criticism, flexibility...? |
| 19731 | If epistemic virtues are faculties or powers, that doesn't explain propositional knowledge [Kvanvig] |
| Full Idea: Conceiving of the virtues in terms of faculties or powers doesn't help at all with the problem of accounting for propositional knowledge. | |
| From: Jonathan Kvanvig (Virtue Epistemology [2011], IV B) | |
| A reaction: It always looks as if epistemic virtues are a little peripheral to the main business of knowledge, which is getting beliefs to be correct and well-founded. Given that epistemic saints make occasional mistakes, talk of virtues can't be enough. |
| 19732 | The value of good means of attaining truth are swamped by the value of the truth itself [Kvanvig] |
| Full Idea: The Swamping Problem is that the value of truth swamps the value of additional features of true beliefs which are only instrumentally related to them. True belief is no more valuable if one adds a feature valuable for getting one to the truth. | |
| From: Jonathan Kvanvig (Virtue Epistemology [2011], IV B) | |
| A reaction: His targets here are reliabilism and epistemic virtues. Kvanvig's implication is that the key to understanding the nature of knowledge is to pinpoint why we value it so much. |
| 2539 | Mental modules for language, social, action, theory, space, emotion [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The prevailing view in cognitive psychology is that the mind consists of separate faculties, each with a certain cognitive task: linguistic, social, practical, theoretical, abstract, spatial and emotional. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.40) | |
| A reaction: 'Faculties' are not quite the same as 'modules', and this list mostly involves more higher-order activities than a modules list (e.g. Idea 2495). The idea that emotion is a 'faculty' sounds old-fashioned. |
| 2545 | Free will is mental causation in action [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Free will is mental causation in action. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.167) |
| 2543 | Brains aren't made of anything special, suggesting panpsychism [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: All matter must contain the potential to underlie consciousness, since there is nothing special about the matter that composes brain tissue. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.100) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me one of the most basic assumptions which we should all make about the mind. The mind is made of the brain, and the brain is made of food. However, there must be something 'special' about the brain. |
| 2540 | Examining mind sees no brain; examining brain sees no mind [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: You can look into your mind until you burst and not discover neurons and synapses, and you can stare at someone's brain from dawn till dusk and not perceive the consciousness that is so apparent to the person whose brain it is. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.47) | |
| A reaction: This is a striking symmetry of ignorance, though hardly enough to justify McGinn's pessimism about understanding the mind. 'When you are in the grass you can't see the whole of England; if you can see the whole of England, you won't see the grass'. |
| 2547 | There is information if there are symbols which refer, and which can combine into a truth or falsehood [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: There is information in a system if there are symbols in it that refer to things and that together form strings that can be true or false. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.225) | |
| A reaction: We can also directly apprehend information by perception. Are facts identical with correct information? Can a universal generalisation be information? |
| 2542 | Causation in the material world is energy-transfer, of motion, electricity or gravity [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Causation in the material world works by energy transfer of some sort: transfer of motion, of electrical energy, of gravitational force. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Mysterious Flame [1999], p.92) |