19 ideas
| 7306 | If the only property of a name was its reference, we couldn't explain bearerless names [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: If having a reference were the only semantic property in terms of which we could explain the functioning of names, we would be in trouble with respect to names that simply have no bearer. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 2.1.1) | |
| A reaction: (Miller is discussing Frege) 'Odysseus' is given as an example. Instead of switching to a bundle of descriptions, we could say that we just imagine an object which is stamped with the name. Names always try to refer. |
| 3509 | Externalism may be the key idea in philosophical naturalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Some people view an externalist approach to epistemology as the essence of philosophical naturalism. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I suspect philosophers avoid psychology and mental events, simply because they are elusive. Externalism is a theory about justification, and independent of naturalism as a metaphysic. |
| 7322 | Constitutive scepticism is about facts, and epistemological scepticism about our ability to know them [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: We should distinguish 'constitutive scepticism' (about the existence of certain sorts of facts) from the traditional 'epistemological scepticism' (which concedes that the sort of fact in question exists, but questions our right to claim knowledge of it). | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 4.7) | |
| A reaction: I would be inclined to call the first type 'ontological scepticism'. Miller is discussing Quine's scepticism about meaning. Atheists fall into the first group, and agnostics into the second. An important, and nicely simple, distinction. |
| 3513 | How does a dualist mind represent, exist outside space, and be transparent to itself? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Even dualists must explain how the mind represents things, but then their mind-stuff has so many special powers already (being outside space but in time, being transparent to itself etc.) that one more scarcely seems worth worrying about. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.1 n1) | |
| A reaction: I share the exasperation. It is hard to see how a dualist could even begin to formulate a theory about HOW the mind does so many different things. Could Descartes get a research grant for it? Would we understand God if he tried to explain it to us? |
| 7325 | Dispositions say what we will do, not what we ought to do, so can't explain normativity [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Dispositional facts are facts about what we will do, not about what we ought to do, and as such cannot capture the normativity of meaning. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: Miller is discussing language, but this raises a nice question for all behaviourist accounts of mental events. Perhaps there is a disposition to behave in a guilty way if you do something you think you shouldn't do. (Er, isn't 'guilt' a mental event?) |
| 3514 | Functionalism needs causation and intentionality to explain actions [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The functionalist approach to the mind needs to invoke assumptions about what desires are for and beliefs are about, in order to infer what agents will do. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Isn't the idea that you discover what desires are for and what beliefs are about by examining their function, and what the agent does? Which end should we start? |
| 3510 | Epiphenomenalism is supervenience without physicalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is a necessary condition for physicalism, but it is not sufficient. Epiphenomenalism rules out mental variation without physical variation, but says mental properties are quite distinct from physical properties. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: I take full epiphenomenalism about mind to be incoherent, and not worth even mentioning (see Idea 7379). Papineau seems to be thinking of so-called property dualism (which may also be incoherent!). |
| 3511 | Supervenience requires all mental events to have physical effects [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The argument for supervenience rests on the principle that any mental difference must be capable of showing itself in differential physical consequences. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: With our current knowledge of the brain, to assume anything less than this sort of correlation would be crazy. |
| 3515 | Knowing what it is like to be something only involves being (physically) that thing [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism does not deny that there are conscious experiences, nor that 'it is like something to have them'. The claim is only that this is nothing different from what it is to be a physical system of the relevant kind. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: The implication is that no physicalist is an extreme eliminativist about consciousness, which seems to be correct. We all concede that weather exists, but have a reductive view of it. The key question is whether mind is reducible to physics. |
| 3512 | If a mental state is multiply realisable, why does it lead to similar behaviour? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: If functionalism implies that there is nothing physically in common among the realisations of a given mental state, then there is no possibility of any uniform explanation of why they all give rise to a common physical result. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the well known interaction problem for dualism. The standard reply is to accept interaction as a given (with no apparent explanation). A miracle, if you like. |
| 7324 | Explain meaning by propositional attitudes, or vice versa, or together? [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Grice wants to explain linguistic meaning in terms of the content of propositional attitudes, Dummett has championed the view that propositional attitudes must be explained by linguistic meaning, while Davidson says they must be explained together. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: A useful map. My intuition says propositional attitudes come first, for evolutionary reasons. We are animals first, and speakers second. Thought precedes language. A highly social animal flourishes if it can communicate. |
| 7323 | If truth is deflationary, sentence truth-conditions just need good declarative syntax [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: On a deflationary concept of truth, for a sentence to possess truth-conditions it is sufficient that it be disciplined by norms of correct usage, and that it possess the syntax distinctive of declarative sentences. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Idea 6337 gives the basic deflationary claim. He mentions Boghossian as source of this point. So much the worse for the deflationary concept of truth, say I. What are the truth-conditions of "Truth rotates"? |
| 7315 | 'Jones is a married bachelor' does not have the logical form of a contradiction [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: The syntactic notion of contradiction (p and not-p) is well understood, but is no help in explaining analyticity, since "Jones is a married bachelor" is not of that syntactic form. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: This point is based on Quine. This means we cannot define analytic sentences as those whose denial is a contradiction, even though that seems to be true of them. Both the Kantian and the modern logical versions of analyticity are in trouble. |
| 3516 | The Private Language argument only means people may misjudge their experiences [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I take the moral of the Private Language argument to be that there must be room for error in people's judgements about their experiences, not that those judgements must necessarily be expressed in a language used by a community. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.4 n10) | |
| A reaction: These two readings don't seem to be in conflict, and the argument must have something to say about the communal nature of thought expressed in language. Language imposes introspection on us? |
| 7328 | The principle of charity is holistic, saying we must hold most of someone's system of beliefs to be true [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Properly construed, the principle of charity is a holistic constraint applying, not to individual beliefs, but rather to systems of belief: we must interpret a speaker so that most of the beliefs in his system are, by our lights, true. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: This is a lot more plausible than applying the principle to individual sentences, particularly if you are in the company of habitual ironists or constitutional liars. |
| 7329 | Maybe we should interpret speakers as intelligible, rather than speaking truth [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: A more sophisticated version of the principle of charity holds that we interpret speakers not as necessarily having beliefs that are true by our own lights, but as having beliefs that are intelligible by our own lights. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: Consider Idea 4161 in the light of this. Presumably this means that we treat them as having a coherent set of beliefs, even if they seem to us to fail to correspond to reality. I prefer the stronger version that there has to be some proper truth in there. |
| 7333 | The Frege-Geach problem is that I can discuss the wrongness of murder without disapproval [Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: The main problem faced by non-cognitivism is known as the Frege-Geach problem: if I say "If murder is wrong, then getting your brother to murder people is wrong", that is an unasserted context, and I don't necessarily express disapproval of murder. | |
| From: Alexander Miller (Philosophy of Language [1998], 9.2) | |
| A reaction: The emotivist or non-cognitivist might mount a defence by saying there is some second-order or deep-buried emotion involved. Could a robot without feelings even understand what humans meant when they said "It is morally wrong"? |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |