79 ideas
| 14227 | We could refer to tables as 'xs that are arranged tablewise' [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: We could paraphrase 'some chairs are heavier than some tables' as 'there are xs that are arranged chairwise and there are ys that are arranged tablewise and the xs are heavier than the ys'. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 11) | |
| A reaction: Liggins notes that this involves plural quantification. Being 'arranged tablewise' has become a rather notorious locution in modern ontology. We still have to retain identity, to pick out the xs. |
| 10928 | Maybe we can quantify modally if the objects are intensional, but it seems unlikely [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps there is no objection to quantifying into modal contexts as long as the values of any variables thus quantified are limited to intensional objects, but they also lead to disturbing examples. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §3) | |
| A reaction: [Quine goes on to give his examples] I take it that possibilities are features of actual reality, not merely objects of thought. The problem is that they are harder to know than actual objects. |
| 10662 | Mereology is 'nihilistic' (just atoms) or 'universal' (no restrictions on what is 'whole') [Inwagen, by Varzi] |
| Full Idea: Van Ingwagen writes of 'mereological nihilism' (that only mereological atoms exist) and of 'mereological universalism' (adhering to the principle of Unrestricted Composition). | |
| From: report of Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], p.72-) by Achille Varzi - Mereology 4.3 | |
| A reaction: They both look mereologically nihilistic to me, in comparison with an account that builds on 'natural' wholes and their parts. You can only be 'unrestricted' if you view the 'wholes' in your vast ontology as pretty meaningless (as Lewis does, Idea 10660). |
| 17587 | The 'Law' of Excluded Middle needs all propositions to be definitely true or definitely false [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I think the validity of the 'Law' of Excluded Middle depends on the assumption that every proposition is definitely true or definitely false. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: I think this is confused. He cites vagueness as the problem, but that is a problem for Bivalence. If excluded middle is read as 'true or not-true', that leaves the meaning of 'not-true' open, and never mentions the bivalent 'false'. |
| 17558 | Variables are just like pronouns; syntactic explanations get muddled over dummy letters [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Explanations in terms of syntax do not satisfactorily distinguish true variables from dummy or schematic letters. Identifying variables with pronouns, however, provides a genuine explanation of what variables are. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 02) | |
| A reaction: I like this because it shows that our ordinary thought and speech use variables all the time ('I've forgotten something - what was it?'). He says syntax is fine for maths, but not for ordinary understanding. |
| 3005 | 'Jocasta' needs to be distinguished from 'Oedipus's mother' because they are connected by different properties [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the concept 'Jocasta' needs to be distinguished from the concept 'Oedipus's mother', that's all right because the two concepts are connected with different properties. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 84) |
| 10925 | Failure of substitutivity shows that a personal name is not purely referential [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Failure of substitutivity shows that the occurrence of a personal name is not purely referential. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §1) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I understand the notion of a name being 'purely' referential, as if it somehow ceased to be a word, and was completely transparent to the named object. |
| 10926 | Quantifying into referentially opaque contexts often produces nonsense [Quine] |
| Full Idea: If to a referentially opaque context of a variable we apply a quantifier, with the intention that it govern that variable from outside the referentially opaque context, then what we commonly end up with is unintended sense or nonsense. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §2) |
| 17583 | There are no heaps [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Fortunately ....there are no heaps. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: This is the nihilist view of (inorganic) physical objects. If a wild view solves all sorts of problems, one should take it serious. It is why I take reductive physicalism about the mind seriously. (Well, it's true, actually) |
| 17578 | I reject talk of 'stuff', and treat it in terms of particles [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I have a great deal of difficulty with an ontology that includes 'stuffs' in addition to things. ...I prefer to replace talk of sameness of matter with talk of sameness of particles. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 14) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen is wedded to the idea that reality is composed of 'simples' - even if physicists seem now to talk of 'fields' as much as they do about objects in the fields. Has philosophy yet caught up with Maxwell? |
| 17582 | Singular terms can be vague, because they can contain predicates, which can be vague [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Since singular terms can contain predicates, and since vague predicates are common, vague singular terms are common. For 'the tallest man that Sally knows' there are lots of men for whom it is unclear whether Sally knows them. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 17) |
| 7014 | A particle and a coin heads-or-tails pick out to perfectly well-defined predicates and properties [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: 'Is a particle and my coin is heads' and 'is a particle and my coin is tails' are perfectly well defined predicates and they pick out perfectly well defined (relational) properties of physical particles. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: (Somewhat paraphrased). This is a very nice offering for the case that all predicates are properties, and hence that 'properties' is an entirely conventional category. It strikes me as self-evident that Fodor is not picking out 'natural' properties. |
| 17556 | Material objects are in space and time, move, have a surface and mass, and are made of some stuff [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A thing is a material object if it occupies space and endures through time and can move about in space (literally move, unlike a shadow or wave or reflection) and has a surface and has a mass and is made of a certain stuff or stuffs. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 01) | |
| A reaction: It is not at all clear what electrons (which must count for him as 'simples') are made of. |
| 8264 | Maybe table-shaped particles exist, but not tables [Inwagen, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Van Ingwagen holds that although table-shaped collections of particles exist, tables do not. | |
| From: report of Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], Ch.13) by E.J. Lowe - The Possibility of Metaphysics 2.3 | |
| A reaction: I find this idea appealing. See the ideas of Trenton Merricks. When you get down to micro-level, it is hard to individuate a table among the force fields, and hard to distinguish a table from a smashed or burnt table. An ontology without objects? |
| 17565 | Nihilism says composition between single things is impossible [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Nihilism about objects says there is a Y such that the Xs compose it if and only if there is only one of the Xs. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 08) | |
| A reaction: He says that Unger, the best known 'nihilist' about objects, believes a different version - claiming there are composites, but they never make up the ordinary objects we talk about. |
| 14228 | If there are no tables, but tables are things arranged tablewise, the denial of tables is a contradiction [Liggins on Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Van Inwagen says 'there are no tables', and 'there are tables' means 'there are some things arranged tablewise'. Presumably 'there are no tables' negates the latter claim, saying no things are arranged tablewise. But he should think that is false. | |
| From: comment on Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 10) by David Liggins - Nihilism without Self-Contradiction 3 | |
| A reaction: Liggins's nice paper shows that Van Inwagen is in a potential state of contradiction when he starts saying that there are no tables, but that there are things arranged tablewise, and that they amount to tables. Liggins offers him an escape. |
| 14468 | Actions by artefacts and natural bodies are disguised cooperations, so we don't need them [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: All the activities apparently carried out by shelves and stars and other artefacts and natural bodies can be understood as disguised cooperative activities. And, therefore, we are not forced to grant existence to any artefacts or natural bodies. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 12) | |
| A reaction: In 'the crowd tore her to pieces' are we forced to accept the existence of a crowd? We can't say 'Jack tore her to pieces' and 'Jill tore her to pieces'. If a plural quantification is unavoidable, we have to accept the plurality. Perhaps. |
| 17571 | Every physical thing is either a living organism or a simple [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The thesis about composition and parthood that I am advocating has far-reaching ontological consequences: that every physical thing is either a living organism or a simple. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 10) | |
| A reaction: A 'simple' is a placeholder for anything considered to be a fundamental unit of existence (such as an electron or a quark). This amazingly sharp distinction strikes me as utterly implausible. There is too much in the middle ground. |
| 17562 | The statue and lump seem to share parts, but the statue is not part of the lump [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Those who believe that the statue is distinct from the lump should concede that whatever shares a part with the statue shares a part with the lump but deny that the statue is a part of the lump. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 05) | |
| A reaction: Standard mereology says if they share all their parts then they are the same thing, so it is hard to explain how they are 'distinct'. The distinction is only modal - that they could be separated (by squashing, or by part substitution). |
| 17574 | If you knead clay you make an infinite series of objects, but they are rearrangements, not creations [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If you can make a (random) gollyswoggle by accident by kneading clay, then you must be causing the generation and corruption of a series of objects of infinitesimal duration. ...We have not augmented the furniture of the world but only rearranged it. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 13) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen's final conclusion is a bit crazy, but I am in sympathy with his general scepticism about what sorts of things definitively constitute 'objects'. He overrates simples, and he overrates lives. |
| 17531 | I assume matter is particulate, made up of 'simples' [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I assume in this book that matter is ultimately particulate. Every material being is composed of things that have no proper parts: 'elementary particles' or 'mereological atoms' or 'metaphysical simples'. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], Pref) | |
| A reaction: It may be that modern physics doesn't support this, if 'fields' is the best term for what is fundamental. Best to treat his book as hypothetical - IF there are just simples, proceed as follows. |
| 17560 | If contact causes composition, do two colliding balls briefly make one object? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If composition just requires contact, if I cause the cue ball to rebound from the eight ball, do I thereby create a short-lived object shaped like two slightly flattened spheres in contact? | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 03) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 17561 | If bricks compose a house, that is at least one thing, but it might be many things [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If composition just requires contact, that tells us that the bricks of a house compose at least one thing; it does not tell us that they also compose at most one thing. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 04) |
| 17566 | I think parthood involves causation, and not just a reasonably stable spatial relationship [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I propose that parthood essentially involves causation. Too many philosophers have supposed that objects compose something when and only when they stand in some (more or less stable) spatial relationship to one another. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) | |
| A reaction: I have to say that I like this, even though it comes from a thinker who is close to nihilism about ordinary non-living objects. He goes on to say that only a 'life' provides the right sort of causal relationship. |
| 14230 | We can deny whole objects but accept parts, by referring to them as plurals within things [Inwagen, by Liggins] |
| Full Idea: Van Inwagen's claim that nothing has parts causes incredulity. ..But the problem is not with endorsing the sentence 'Some things have parts'; it is with interpreting this sentence by means of singular resources rather than plural ones. | |
| From: report of Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 7) by David Liggins - Nihilism without Self-Contradiction | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen notoriously denies the existence of normal physical objects. Liggins shows that modern formal plural quantification gives a better way of presenting his theory, by accepting tables and parts of tables as plurals of basic entities. |
| 17557 | Special Composition Question: when is a thing part of something? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The Special Composition Question asks, In what circumstances is a thing a (proper) part of something? | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 02) | |
| A reaction: [He qualifies this formulation as 'misleading'] It's a really nice basic question for the metaphysics of objects. |
| 17564 | The essence of a star includes the released binding energy which keeps it from collapse [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I think it is part of the essence of a star that the radiation pressures that oppose the star's tendency to gravitational collapse has its source in the release of no-longer-needed nuclear binding energy when colliding nuclei fuse in the star's hot core. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 07) | |
| A reaction: A perfect example of giving the essence of something as the bottom level of its explanation. This even comes from someone who doesn't really believe in stars! |
| 17575 | The persistence of artifacts always covertly involves intelligent beings [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Statements that are apparently about the persistence of artifacts make covert reference to the dispositions of intelligent beings to maintain certain arrangements of matter. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 13) | |
| A reaction: If you build a self-sustaining windmill that pumps water, that seems to have an identity of its own, apart from the intentions of whoever makes it and repairs it. The function of an artefact is not just the function we want it to have. |
| 10930 | Quantification into modal contexts requires objects to have an essence [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A reversion to Aristotelian essentialism is required if quantification into modal contexts is to be insisted on. An object must be seen as having some of its traits necessarily. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §3) | |
| A reaction: This thought leads directly to Kripke's proposal of rigid designation of objects (and Lewis response of counterparts), which really gets modal logic off the ground. Quine's challenge remains - the modal logic entails a huge metaphysical commitment. |
| 17577 | When an electron 'leaps' to another orbit, is the new one the same electron? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Is the 'new' electron in the lower orbit the one that was in the higher orbit? Physics, as far as I can tell, has nothing to say about this. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 14) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that physicists would say that philosophers are worrying about such questions because they haven't grasped the new conceptual scheme that emerged in 1926. The poor mutts insist on hanging on to 'objects'. |
| 17589 | If you reject transitivity of vague identity, there is no Ship of Theseus problem [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If you have rejected the Principle of the Transitivity of (vague) Identity, it is hard to see how the problem of the Ship of Theseus could arise. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: I think this may well be the best solution to the whole problem |
| 17588 | We should talk of the transitivity of 'identity', and of 'definite identity' [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: In some contexts, the principle of 'the transitivity of identity' should be called 'the transitivity of definite identity'. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: He is making room for a person to retain identity despite having changed. Applause from me. |
| 14645 | To be necessarily greater than 7 is not a trait of 7, but depends on how 7 is referred to [Quine] |
| Full Idea: To be necessarily greater than 7 is not a trait of a number, but depends on the manner of referring to the number. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §2) | |
| A reaction: The most concise quotation of Quine's objection to 'de re' modality. The point is whether the number might have been referred to as 'the number of planets'. So many of these problems are solved by fixing unambiguous propositions first. |
| 9201 | Whether 9 is necessarily greater than 7 depends on how '9' is described [Quine, by Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Quine's metaphysical argument is that if 9 is 7+2 the number 9 will be necessarily greater than 7, but when 9 is described as the number of planets, the number will not be necessarily greater than 7. The necessity depends on how it is described. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953]) by Kit Fine - Intro to 'Modality and Tense' p. 3 | |
| A reaction: Thus necessity would be entirely 'de dicto' and not 'de re'. It sounds like a feeble argument. If I describe the law of identity (a=a) as 'my least favourite logical principle', that won't make it contingent. Describe 9, or refer to it? See Idea 9203. |
| 10927 | Necessity only applies to objects if they are distinctively specified [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Necessity does not properly apply to the fulfilment of conditions by objects (such as the number which numbers the planets), apart from special ways of specifying them. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §3) | |
| A reaction: This appears to say that the only necessity is 'de dicto', and that there is no such thing as 'de re' necessity (of the thing in itself). How can Quine deny that there might be de re necessities? His point is epistemological - how can we know them? |
| 17572 | Actuality proves possibility, but that doesn't explain how it is possible [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A proof of actuality is a proof of possibility, but that does not invariably explain the possibility whose existence it demonstrates, for we may know that a certain thing is actual (and hence possible) but have no explanation of how it could be possible. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 12) | |
| A reaction: I like this, because my project is to see all of philosophy in terms of explanation rather than of description. |
| 9203 | We can't quantify in modal contexts, because the modality depends on descriptions, not objects [Quine, by Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: 'Necessarily 9>7' may be true while the sentence 'necessarily the number of planets < 7' is false, even though it is obtained by substituting a coreferential term. So quantification in these contexts is unintelligible, without a clear object. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953]) by Kit Fine - Intro to 'Modality and Tense' p. 4 | |
| A reaction: This is Quine's second argument against modality. See Idea 9201 for his first. Fine attempts to refute it. The standard reply seems to be to insist that 9 must therefore be an object, which pushes materialist philosophers into reluctant platonism. |
| 17579 | Counterparts reduce counterfactual identity to problems about similarity relations [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Counterpart Theory essentially reduces all problems about counterfactual identity to problems about choosing appropriate similarity relations. That is, Counterpart Theory essentially eliminates problems of counterfactual identity as such. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 14) |
| 17590 | A merely possible object clearly isn't there, so that is a defective notion [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The notion of a merely possible object is an even more defective notion than the notion of a borderline object; after all, a merely possible object is an object that definitely isn't there. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 19) |
| 17591 | Merely possible objects must be consistent properties, or haecceities [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Talk of merely possible objects may be redeemed in either maximally consistent sets of properties or in haecceities. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 19) |
| 2990 | Contrary to commonsense, most of what is in the mind seems to be unlearned [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Contrary to commonsense, it looks as though much of what is in the mind is unlearned. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 15) |
| 3008 | Evolution suggests that innate knowledge of human psychology would be beneficial [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If I had to design homo sapiens, I would have made commonsense knowledge of homo sapiens psychology innate; that way nobody would have to spend time learning it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.132) |
| 3009 | Sticklebacks have an innate idea that red things are rivals [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: God gave the male stickleback the idea that whatever is red is a rival. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.133) |
| 2994 | In CRTT thought may be represented, content must be [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: In the Representation Theory of Mind, programs (the 'laws of thought') may be explicitly represented, but data structures (the 'contents of thought') have to be. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 25) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this is because content is where mental events actually meet up with the reality being considered. It may be an abstract procedure, but if it doesn't plug into reality then it isn't thought, but merely activity, like that of the liver. |
| 7326 | Intentionality doesn't go deep enough to appear on the physicists' ultimate list of things [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue of ultimate and irreducible things, with the likes of spin, charm and charge. But aboutness won't be on the list; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], 4 Intro) | |
| A reaction: I totally agree with this, which I take to be a warning to John Searle against including something called 'intrinsic intentionality' into his ontology. Intentionality 'emerges' out of certain complex brain activity. |
| 15494 | We can't use propositions to explain intentional attitudes, because they would need explaining [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It's not clear what the point would be of an explanation of the intentionality of attitudes which presupposes objects that are intentional intrinsically. Why not just say that the attitudes are? | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], Ch.3) |
| 3001 | Behaviourism has no theory of mental causation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourists had trouble providing a robust construal of mental causation (and hence had no logical space for a psychology of mental processes). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 67) | |
| A reaction: If they could reduce all mental events to stimulus-response, that seems to fall within the normal procedures of physical causation. There is no problem of mental causation if your ontology is entirely physical. |
| 2993 | Any piece of software can always be hard-wired [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: For any machine that computes a function by executing an explicit algorithm, there exists a hard-wired machine that computes the same function by not executing an explicit algorithm. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 23) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly vital for functionalists to understand that software can be hardwired. Presumably we should understand a hardwired alogirthm as 'implicit'? |
| 3011 | Causal powers must be a crucial feature of mental states [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Everybody is a functionalist, in that we all hold that mental states are individuated, at least in part, by reference to their causal powers. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.138) | |
| A reaction: I might individuate the Prime Minister by the carnation in his buttonhole. However, even a dualist must concede that we individuate mental faculties by their role within the mind. |
| 5498 | Mind is a set of hierarchical 'homunculi', which are made up in turn from subcomponents [Fodor, by Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Fodor sees behaviour as manifestations of psychological capacities, which result from the subject being a set of interconnected 'homunculi', which in turn have subcomponents, all of it arranged in a hierarchy. | |
| From: report of Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987]) by William Lycan - Introduction - Ontology p.9 | |
| A reaction: This may well miss out the most interesting parts of a mind (such as awareness, and personal identity), but it sounds basically right, especially when an evolutionary history is added to the system. Parts of my mind intrude into my trains of thought. |
| 2995 | Supervenience gives good support for mental causation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mind/brain supervenience is the best idea anyone has had so far about how mental causation is possible. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 30) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that mind brain identity was a much better idea (see Idea 3440). Supervenience seems to prove that 'mental causation' occurs, but doesn't explain it. |
| 2991 | Hume's associationism offers no explanation at all of rational thought [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: With Associationism there proved to be no way to get a rational mental life to emerge from the sorts of causal relations among thoughts that the 'laws of association' recognised. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 18) | |
| A reaction: This might not be true if you add the concept of evolution, which has refined the associations to generate truth (which is vital for survival). |
| 3002 | If mind is just physical, how can it follow the rules required for intelligent thought? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Central state identity theorists had trouble providing for the nomological possibility of rational machines (and hence no space for a non-biological, e.g. computational, theory of intelligence). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 67) | |
| A reaction: I surmise that a more externalist account of the physical mind might do the trick, by explaining intelligence in terms of an evolved relationship between brain and environment. |
| 2992 | We may be able to explain rationality mechanically [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We are on the verge of solving a great mystery about the mind: how is rationality mechanically possible? | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 20) | |
| A reaction: Optimistic, given that AI has struggled to implement natural languages, mainly because common sense knowledge seems too complex to encode. Can a machine determine logical forms of sentences? |
| 2988 | Folk psychology is the only explanation of behaviour we have [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Commonsense belief/desire psychology explains vastly more of the facts about behaviour than any of the alternative theories available. It could hardly fail to; there are no alternative theories available. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.x) | |
| A reaction: The alternative view wouldn't expect a clear-cut theory, because it deals with the endless complexity of brain events. The charge is that Fodor and co oversimplify their account, in their desperation for a 'theory'. |
| 3010 | Belief and desire are structured states, which need mentalese [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A defence of the language of thought has to be an argument that believing and desiring are typically structured states. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.136) | |
| A reaction: A structure is one thing, and a language is another. Both believings and desirings can be extremely vague, to the point where the owner is unsure what is believed or desired. They can, of course, be extremely precise. |
| 2999 | Obsession with narrow content leads to various sorts of hopeless anti-realism [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: People who ask what the narrow content of the thought that water is wet is (for example) get what they deserve: phenomenalism, verificationism, 'procedural' semantics, or scepticism, according to temperament. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 51) | |
| A reaction: The question is whether content IS narrow. We could opt for broad content because then we wouldn't have to worry about scepticism, but I doubt whether we would then sleep well at night. |
| 3012 | Do identical thoughts have identical causal roles? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If thoughts have their causal roles in virtue of their contents, then two thoughts with identical contents ought to be identical in their causal roles. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.140) | |
| A reaction: A pencil would presumably have the same causal role if it wrote a love poem or hate mail. But a pencil is also good for scratching your back. 'Causal role' can be a rather vacuous idea. |
| 2998 | Grice thinks meaning is inherited from the propositional attitudes which sentences express [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: According to Gricean theories of meaning, the meaning of a sentence is inherited from the propositional attitudes that the sentence is conventionally used to express. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 50) | |
| A reaction: Since the propositional attitudes contain propositions, this seems like a very plausible idea. If an indexical like 'I' is involved, the meaning of the sentence is not the same as its 'conventional' use. |
| 3006 | Whatever in the mind delivers falsehood is parasitic on what delivers truth [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The mechanisms that deliver falsehoods are somehow parasitic on the ones that deliver truths. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.107) | |
| A reaction: In the case of a sentence and its negation it is not clear which one is 'parasitic', because that can usually be reversed by paraphrasing. Historically, I very much hope that truth-speaking came first. |
| 3007 | Many different verification procedures can reach 'star', but it only has one semantic value [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Verification procedures connect terms with their denotations in too many ways. Different routes to 'star' do not determine different semantic values for 'star'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p.125) | |
| A reaction: This fairly conclusively shows that meaning is not 'the method of verification' - but that wasn't a difficult target to hit. |
| 3004 | The meaning of a sentence derives from its use in expressing an attitude [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The meaning of a sentence derives from its use in expressing an attitude. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 79) | |
| A reaction: Among other things. It can also arrive from a desire to remember something. A sentence can also acquire meaning compositionally (by assembling) with no use or aim. |
| 3000 | Meaning holism is a crazy doctrine [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Meaning holism really is a crazy doctrine. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 60) | |
| A reaction: Yes. What is not crazy is a contextualist account of utterances, and a recognition of the contextual and relational ingredient in the meanings of most of our sentences. |
| 3003 | Very different mental states can share their contents, so content doesn't seem to be constructed from functional role [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It's an embarrassment for attempts to construct content from functional role that quite different sorts of mental states can nevertheless share their contents. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: That is, presumably, one content having two different roles. Two contents with the same role is 'multiple realisability'. Pain can tell me I'm damaged, or reveal that my damaged nerves are healing. Problem? |
| 2996 | Mental states may have the same content but different extensions [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The identity of the content of mental states does not ensure the identity of their extensions. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 45) | |
| A reaction: Obviously if I am thinking each day about 'my sheep', that won't change if I am unaware that one of them died this morning. …Because I didn’t have the precise number of sheep in mind. |
| 10931 | We can't say 'necessarily if x is in water then x dissolves' if we can't quantify modally [Quine] |
| Full Idea: To say an object is soluble in water is to say that it would dissolve if it were in water,..which implies that 'necessarily if x is in water then x dissolves'. Yet we do not know if there is a suitable sense of 'necessarily' into which we can so quantify. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §4) | |
| A reaction: This is why there has been a huge revival of scientific essentialism - because Krike seems to offer exacty the account which Quine said was missing. So can you have modal logic without rigid designation? |
| 17563 | The strong force pulls, but also pushes apart if nucleons get too close together [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The strong force doesn't always pull nucleons together, but pushes them apart if they get too close. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 07) | |
| A reaction: Philosophers tend to learn their physics from other philosophers. But that's because philosophers are brilliant at picking out the interesting parts of physics, and skipping the boring stuff. |
| 17559 | Is one atom a piece of gold, or is a sizable group of atoms required? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A physicist once told me that of course a gold atom was a piece of gold, and a physical chemist has assured me that the smallest possible piece of gold would have to be composed of sixteen or seventeen atoms. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 01) | |
| A reaction: The issue is at what point all the properties that we normally begin to associate with gold begin to appear. One water molecule can hardly have a degree of viscosity or liquidity. |
| 17584 | Some events are only borderline cases of lives [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: There are events of which it is neither definitely true nor definitely false that those events are lives. I do not see how we can deny this. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: Very frustrating, since this is my main objection to Van Inwagen's distinction between unified lives and mere collections of simples. Some boundaries are real enough, despite their vagueness, and others indicate that there is no real distinction. |
| 17586 | At the lower level, life trails off into mere molecular interaction [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The lives of the lower links of the Great Chain of Being trail off into vague, temporary episodes of molecular interaction. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: His case involves conceding all sorts of vagueness to life, but asserting the utter distinctness of the full blown cases of more elaborate life. I don't really concede the distinction. |
| 17567 | A flame is like a life, but not nearly so well individuated [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A flame, though it is a self-maintaining event, does not seem to be nearly so well individuated as a life. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) | |
| A reaction: This is to counter the standard problem that if you attempt to define 'life', fire turns out to tick nearly all the same boxes. The concept of 'individuated' often strikes me as unsatisfactory. How does a bonfire fail to be individuated? |
| 17568 | A tumour may spread a sort of life, but it is not a life, or an organism [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A tumour is not an organism (or a parasite) and there is no self-regulating event that is its life. It does not fill one space, but is a locus within which a certain sort of thing is happening: the spreading of a certain sort of (mass-term) life. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) |
| 17569 | Unlike waves, lives are 'jealous'; it is almost impossible for them to overlap [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A wave is not a 'jealous' event. Lives, however, are jealous. It cannot be that the activities of the Xs constitute at one and the same time two lives. Only in certain special cases can two lives overlap. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) |
| 17580 | One's mental and other life is centred on the brain, unlike any other part of the body [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: One's life - not simply one's mental life - is centered in the activity of the simples that virtually compose one's brain in a way in which it is not centered in the activity of any of the other simples that compose one. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 15) | |
| A reaction: This justifies the common view that 'one follows one's brain'. I take that to mean that my brain embodies my essence. I would read 'centered on' as 'explains'. |
| 17576 | If God were to 'reassemble' my atoms of ten years ago, the result would certainly not be me [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If God were to 'reassemble' the atoms that composed me ten years ago, the resulting organism would certainly not be me. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 13) | |
| A reaction: What is obvious to Van Inwagen is not obvious to me. He thinks lives are special. Such examples just leave us bewildered about what counts as 'the same', because our concept of sameness wasn't designed to deal with such cases. |
| 17585 | Life is vague at both ends, but could it be totally vague? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Individual human lives are infected with vagueness at both ends. ...But could there be a 'borderline life'? | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen says (p.239) that there may be wholly vague lives, though it would suit his case better if there were not. |
| 17570 | The chemical reactions in a human life involve about sixteen elements [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: There are sixteen or so chemical elements involved in those chemical reactions that collectively constitute the life of a human being. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) |
| 17581 | Being part of an organism's life is a matter of degree, and vague [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Being caught up in the life of an organism is, like being rich or being tall, a matter of degree, and is in that sense a vague condition. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 17) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen is trying to cover himself, given that he makes a sharp distinction between living organisms, which are unified objects, and everything else, which isn't. There may be a vague centre to a 'life', as well as vague boundaries. |
| 17573 | There is no reason to think that mere existence is a valuable thing [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: There is no reason to suppose - whatever Saint Anselm and Descartes may have thought - that mere existence is a valuable thing. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 12) | |
| A reaction: This is one of the simplest and most powerful objections to the Ontological Argument. God's existence may be of great value, but the existence of Hitler wasn't. |