37 ideas
| 22496 | Wisdom only implies the knowledge achievable in any normal lifetime [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Wisdom implies no more knowledge and understanding than anyone of normal capacity can and should acquire in the course of an ordinary life. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: Have philosophers stopped talking about wisdom precisely because you now need three university degrees to be considered even remotely good at phillosophy? Hence wisdom is an inferior attainment, because Foot is right. |
| 8166 | Truth is part of semantics, since valid inference preserves truth [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The concept of truth belongs to semantics, since after all truth is what must be preserved by a valid deductive inference. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 2) | |
| A reaction: Does this conclusion follow? Compare 'nice taste belongs to cooking, since that is what cooking must preserve'. I don't like this. I take 'truth' to be a relevant concept to a discussion of a dog's belief that it is going to be taken for a walk. |
| 8173 | Language can violate bivalence because of non-referring terms or ill-defined predicates [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Two features of natural languages cause them to violate bivalence: singular terms (or proper names) which have a sense but fail to denote an object ('the centre of the universe'); and predicates which are not well defined for every object. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: If we switch from sentences to propositions these problems might be avoided. If there is no reference, or a vague predicate, then there is (maybe) just no proposition being expressed which could be evaluated for truth. |
| 8179 | The law of excluded middle is the logical reflection of the principle of bivalence [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The law of excluded middle is the reflection, within logic, of the principle of bivalence. It states that 'For any statement A, the statement 'A or not-A' is true'. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: True-or-not-true is an easier condition to fulfil than true-or-false. The second says that 'false' is the only alternative, but the first allows other alternatives to 'true' (such as 'undecidable'). It is hard to challenge excluded middle. Somewhat true? |
| 8184 | Philosophers should not presume reality, but only invoke it when language requires it [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher's task is not to make a prior commitment for or against realism, but to discover how far realist considerations must be invoked in order to describe our understanding of our language: they may be invoked only if they must be invoked. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 6) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why the default position should be solipsism, or a commitment to Ockham's Razor. This is the Cartesian 'Enlightenment Project' approach to philosophy - that everything has to be proved. There is more to ontology than language. |
| 8185 | We can't make sense of a world not apprehended by a mind [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: We can make no clear sense of there being a world that is not apprehended by any mind. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 8) | |
| A reaction: I find Dummett's view quite baffling. It is no coincidence that Dummett is a theist, along (it seems) Berkeleian lines. I see no more problem with imagining such worlds than with imagining ships sunken long ago which will never be found. |
| 8163 | Since 'no bird here' and 'no squirrel here' seem the same, we must talk of 'atomic' facts [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: What complex of objects constitutes the fact that there is no bird on the bough, and how is that distinct from no squirrel on the bough? This drives us to see the world as composed of 'atomic' facts, making complexes into compounds, not reality itself. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites early Wittgenstein as an example] But 'no patch of red here' (or sense-datum) seems identical to 'no patch of green here'. I suppose you could catalogue all the atomic facts, and note that red wasn't among them. But you could do that for birds. |
| 8161 | We know we can state facts, with true statements [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: One thing we know about facts, namely that we can state them. Whenever we make some true statement, we state some fact. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 1) | |
| A reaction: Then facts become boring, and are subsumed within the problem of what 'true' means. Personally I have a concept of facts which includes unstatable facts. The physical basis of melancholy I take to be a complex fact which is beyond our powers. |
| 8180 | 'That is red or orange' might be considered true, even though 'that is red' and 'that is orange' were not [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: A statement of the form 'that is red or orange', said of something on the borderline between the two colours, might rank as true, although neither 'that is red' nor 'that is orange' was true. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that the problem here would be epistemological rather than ontological. One of the two is clearly true, but sometimes we can't decide which. How can anyone say 'It isn't red and it isn't orange, but it is either red or orange'? |
| 8178 | Empirical and a priori knowledge are not distinct, but are extremes of a sliding scale [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Our sentences cannot be divided into two classes, empirical and a priori, the truth of one to be decided by observation, the other by ratiocination. They lie on a scale, with observational sentences at one end, and mathematical ones at the other. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: The modern post-Kantian dissolution of the rationalist-empiricist debate. I would say that mathematical sentences require no empirical evidence (for their operation, rather than foundation), but a bit of reasoning is involved in observation. |
| 8175 | A theory of thought will include propositional attitudes as well as propositions [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: A comprehensive theory of thought will include such things as judgement and belief, as well as the mere grasp of propositions. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: This seems to make any theory of thought a neat two-stage operation. Beware of neatness. While propositions might be explained using concepts, syntax and truth, the second stage looks faintly daunting. See Idea 2209, for example. |
| 8174 | The theories of meaning and understanding are the only routes to an account of thought [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: For the linguistic philosopher, the theory of meaning, and the theory of understanding that is built upon it, form the only route to a philosophical account of thought. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: I am of the party that thinks thought is prior to language (esp. because of animals), but Dummett's idea does not deny this. He may well be right that this is the 'only route'. We can only hope to give an account of human thought. |
| 8165 | To 'abstract from' is a logical process, as opposed to the old mental view [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The phrase 'abstracted from' does not refer to the mental process of abstraction by disregarding features of concrete objects, in which many nineteenth century thinkers believed; it is a logical (not mental) process of concept-formation. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 1) | |
| A reaction: I take Frege's attack on 'psychologism' to be what dismissed the old view (Idea 5816). Could one not achieve the same story by negating properties in quantified logical expressions, instead of in the mind? |
| 8168 | To know the truth-conditions of a sentence, you must already know the meaning [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: You can know the condition for a sentence to be true only when you know what the sentence means. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 3) | |
| A reaction: This makes the truth-conditions theory of meaning circular, and is Dummett's big objection to Davidson's view. The composition of a sentence creates a model of a world. Truth-conditions may only presuppose knowledge of concepts. |
| 8181 | A justificationist theory of meaning leads to the rejection of classical logic [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: If we adopt a justificationist theory of meaning, we must reject the universal law of excluded middle, and with it classical logic (which rests on the two-valued semantics of bivalence). We admit only intuitionist logic, which preserves justifiability. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is Dummett's philosophy in a very neat nutshell. He seems to have started by accepting Brouwer's intuitionism, and then working back to language. It all implies anti-realism. I don't buy it. |
| 8182 | Verificationism could be realist, if we imagined the verification by a superhuman power [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: There is a possible route to realism, which has been called 'ideal verificationism', if we base our grasping the understanding and truth of a range of sentences on the procedure that would be available to an imagined being with superhuman powers. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is actually a slippery slope for verificationists, as soon as they allow that verification could be done by other people. A verifier might turn up who had telepathy, or x-ray vision, or could see quarks... |
| 8183 | If truths about the past depend on memories and current evidence, the past will change [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: If justificationists succumb to the temptation for statements in the past, we shall view their senses as given by present memories and present traces of past events; but this will force us into a view of the past as itself changing. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 6) | |
| A reaction: Obviously Dummett attempts to sidestep this problem, but it strikes me as powerful support for the realist view about the past. How can we not be committed to the view that there are facts about the past quite unconnected to our verifying abilities? |
| 8176 | We could only guess the meanings of 'true' and 'false' when sentences were used [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Even if we guessed that the two words denoted the two truth-values, we should not know which stood for the value 'true' and which for the value 'false' until we knew how the sentences were in practice used. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: These types of problem are always based on the idea that some one item must have logical priority in the process, but there is a lot of room for benign circularity in the development of mental and linguistic functions. |
| 8170 | Sentences are the primary semantic units, because they can say something [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: While words are semantic atoms, sentences remain the primary semantic units, in the sense of the smallest bits of language by means of which it is possible to say anything. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 3) | |
| A reaction: Syncategorematic terms (look it up!) may need sentences, but most nouns and verbs can communicate quite a lot on their own. Whether words or sentences come first may not be a true/false issue. |
| 8169 | We can't distinguish a proposition from its content [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: No distinction can be drawn between a proposition and its content; no two distinct propositions can have the same content. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 3) | |
| A reaction: And one proposition cannot have two possible contents (ambiguity). Are we to say that a proposition supervenes on its content, or that proposition and content are identical? Ockham favours the latter. |
| 23694 | All criterions of practical rationality derive from goodness of will [Foot] |
| Full Idea: I want to say, baldly, that there is no criterion for practical rationality that is not derived from that of goodness of will. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: Where does that put the successful and clever criminal? Presumably they are broadly irrational, but narrowly rational - but that is not very clear distinction. She says Kant's concept of the good will is too pure, and unrelated to human good. |
| 12165 | Romantics say music expresses ideas, or the Will, or intuitions, or feelings [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: According to the Romantic theory music was an expression of something, of an idea (Hegel), of the Will (Schopenhauer), of 'intuitions' (Croce), or of feelings (Collingwood). | |
| From: Roger Scruton (The Nature of Musical Expression [1981], p.54) | |
| A reaction: Deryck Cooke was the culmination of music as expression of feeling, and Stravinsky was the greatest rebel against the whole idea of expression in music. You can set out to create interesting music which does or does not grab the emotions. |
| 12164 | Expressing melancholy is a good thing, but arousing it is a bad thing [Scruton] |
| Full Idea: To describe a piece of music as expressive of melancholy is to give a reason for listening to it; to describe it as arousing or evoking melancholy is to give a reason for avoiding it. | |
| From: Roger Scruton (The Nature of Musical Expression [1981], p.49) | |
| A reaction: Expressing sexual desire, while avoiding arousing it, is the nice challenge for a particular type of art. Would Scruton say that expressing joy is a good thing, but arousing it is bad? It is a nice observation, though. |
| 23686 | Moral reason is not just neutral, because morality is part of the standard of rationality [Foot, by Hacker-Wright] |
| Full Idea: In her late period she again reverses her thoughts on moral rationalism; …rather than a neutral rationality which fulfils desires, she argues that morality ought to be thought of as part of the standard of rationality itself. | |
| From: report of Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001]) by John Hacker-Wright - Philippa Foot's Moral Thought Intro | |
| A reaction: This comes much closer to the Greek and Aristotelian concept of logos. They saw morality as inseparable from our judgements about how the world is. All 'sensible' thinking will involve what is good for humanity. |
| 23693 | Practical rationality must weigh both what is morally and what is non-morally required [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Different considerations are on a par, in that judgement about what is required by practical rationality must take account of their interaction: of the weight of the ones we call non-moral as well as those we call moral. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: Her final settled view of rationalism in morality, it seems. The point is that moral considerations are not paramount, because she sees possible justifications for ignoring moral rules (like 'don't lie') in certain practical situations. |
| 23687 | Moral virtues arise from human nature, as part of what makes us good human beings [Foot, by Hacker-Wright] |
| Full Idea: In her later work she offers a view of the relationship of morality to human nature, arguing that the moral virtues are part of what makes us good as human beings. | |
| From: report of Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001]) by John Hacker-Wright - Philippa Foot's Moral Thought Intro | |
| A reaction: In this phase she talks explicitly of the Aristotelian idea that successful function is the grounding of what is good for any living being, including humans. |
| 22493 | Sterility is a human defect, but the choice to be childless is not [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Lack of capacity to reproduce is a defect in a human being. But choice of childlessness and even celibacy is not thereby shown to be defective choice, because human good is not the same as plant or animal good. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 3) | |
| A reaction: Is failure to reproduce a defect in an animal? If goodness and virtue derive from function, it is hard to see how deliberate childlessness could be a human good, even if it is not a defect. Choosing to terminate a hereditary defect seems good. |
| 22492 | Virtues are as necessary to humans as stings are to bees [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Virtues play a necessary part in the life of human beings as do stings in the life of a bee. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 2) | |
| A reaction: This presumably rests on the Aristotelian idea that humans are essentially social (as opposed to solitary humans who choose to be social, perhaps in a contractual way, as Plato implies). |
| 22491 | Moral evaluations are not separate from facts, but concern particular facts about functioning [Foot] |
| Full Idea: A moral evaluation does not stand over against the statement of a matter of fact, but rather has to do with facts about a particular subject matter, as do evaluations of such things as sight and hearing in animals. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: She avoids the word 'function', and only deals with living creatures, but she uses a 'good knife' as an example, and this Aristotelian view clearly applies to any machine which has a function. |
| 22497 | Deep happiness usually comes from the basic things in life [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Possible objects of deep happiness seem to be things that are basic in human life, such as home, and family, and work, and friendship. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 6) | |
| A reaction: I've not encountered discussion of 'deep' happiness before. I heard of an old man in tears because he had just seen a Purple Emperor butterfly for the first time. She makes it sound very conservative. How about mountaineering achievements? |
| 22498 | Happiness is enjoying the pursuit and attainment of right ends [Foot] |
| Full Idea: In my terminology 'happiness' is understood as the enjoyment of good things, meaning the enjoyment in attaining, and in pursuing, right ends. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 6) | |
| A reaction: A modified version of Aristotle's view, which she contrasts with McDowell's identification of happiness with the life of virtue. They all seem to have an optimistic hope that the pleasure in being a bit wicked is false happiness. |
| 23695 | Good actions can never be justified by the good they brings to their agent [Foot] |
| Full Idea: There is no good case for assessing the goodness of human action by reference only to good that each person brings to himself. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: She observes that even non-human animals often act for non-selfish reasons. The significance of this is its rejection of her much earlier view that virtues are justified by the good they bring their possessor. |
| 22499 | We all know that just pretending to be someone's friend is not the good life [Foot] |
| Full Idea: We know perfectly well that it is not true that the best life would consist in successfully pretending friendship: having friends to serve one but without being a real friend oneself. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 7) | |
| A reaction: For some skallywags the achieving of something for nothing seems to be very much the good life, but not many of them want to exploit people who are seen to be their friends. |
| 22495 | Someone is a good person because of their rational will, not their body or memory [Foot] |
| Full Idea: To speak of a good person is to speak of an individual not in respect of his body, or of faculties such as sight and memory, but as concerns his rational will (his 'will as controllable by reason'). | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: She more or less agrees with Kant that the only truly good moral thing is a good will, though she has plenty of other criticisms of his views. |
| 22502 | Refraining from murder is not made good by authenticity or self-fulfilment [Foot] |
| Full Idea: If a stranger should come on us when we are sleeping he will not think it all right to kill us. …In human life as it is, this kind of action is not made good by authenticity or self-fulfilment in the one who does it. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 7) | |
| A reaction: A rare swipe from Foot at existentialism, which she hardly ever mentions. I find it hard to see these existential virtues as in any way moral. It means nothing to other citizens whether one of their number is 'authentic'. |
| 8186 | Time is the measure of change, so we can't speak of time before all change [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Time is the measure of change, and it makes no sense to speak of how things were before there was anything that changed. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 8) | |
| A reaction: Something creating its own measure sounds like me marking my own exam papers. If an object appears, then inverts five seconds later, how can the inversion create the five seconds? How does that differ from inverting ten seconds later? |
| 8167 | If Presentism is correct, we cannot even say that the present changes [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: If Presentism is correct - the doctrine that there is nothing at all, save what holds good at the present moment - then we cannot even say that the present changes, because that requires that things are not now as they were some time ago. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably we can compare our present memory with our present experience. See Idea 6668. The logic (very ancient!) is that the present has not duration at all, and so no experiences can occur during it. |