22 ideas
| 14664 | Necessary beings (numbers, properties, sets, propositions, states of affairs, God) exist in all possible worlds [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: A 'necessary being' is one that exists in every possible world; and only some objects - numbers, properties, pure sets, propositions, states of affairs, God - have this distinction. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976], 2) | |
| A reaction: This a very odd list, though it is fairly orthodox among philosophers trained in modern modal logic. At the very least it looks rather parochial to me. |
| 14666 | Socrates is a contingent being, but his essence is not; without Socrates, his essence is unexemplified [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Socrates is a contingent being; his essence, however, is not. Properties, like propositions and possible worlds, are necessary beings. If Socrates had not existed, his essence would have been unexemplified, but not non-existent. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976], 4) | |
| A reaction: This is a distinctive Plantinga view, of which I can make little sense. I take it that Socrates used to have an essence. Being dead, the essence no longer exists, but when we talk about Socrates it is largely this essence to which we refer. OK? |
| 14662 | Possible worlds clarify possibility, propositions, properties, sets, counterfacts, time, determinism etc. [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: The idea of possible worlds has delivered insights on logical possibility (de dicto and de re), propositions, properties and sets, counterfactuals, time and temporal relations, causal determinism, the ontological argument, and the problem of evil. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This date (1976) seems to be the high-water mark for enthusiasm about possible worlds. I suppose if we just stick to 'insights' rather than 'answers' then the big claim might still be acceptable. Which problems are created by possible worlds? |
| 16472 | Plantinga's actualism is nominal, because he fills actuality with possibilia [Stalnaker on Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Plantinga's critics worry that the metaphysics is actualist in name only, since it is achieved only by populating the actual world with entities whose nature is explained in terms of merely possible things that would exemplify them if anything did. | |
| From: comment on Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976]) by Robert C. Stalnaker - Mere Possibilities 4.4 | |
| A reaction: Plantinga seems a long way from the usual motivation for actualism, which is probably sceptical empiricism, and building a system on what is smack in front of you. Possibilities have to be true, though. That's why you need dispositions in actuality. |
| 2584 | Lobotomised patients can cease to care about a pain [Block] |
| Full Idea: After frontal lobotomies, patients typically report that they still have pains, though the pains no longer bother them. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 83) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be an endorsement of reductive physicalism, because what matters about pains is that they bother us, not how they feel, so frog pain could do the job, if it felt different from ours, but was disliked by the frog. |
| 2582 | A brain looks no more likely than anything else to cause qualia [Block] |
| Full Idea: NO physical mechanism seems very intuitively plausible as a seat of qualia, least of all a brain. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 78) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about "least of all", given the mind-boggling complexity of the brain's connections. Certainly, though, nothing in either folk physics or academic physics suggests that any physical object is likely to be aware of anything. |
| 2574 | Behaviour requires knowledge as well as dispositions [Block] |
| Full Idea: A desire cannot be identified with a disposition to act, since the agent might not know that a particular act leads to the thing desired, and thus might not be disposed to do it. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: One might have a disposition to act, but not in a particular way. "Something must be done". To get to the particular act, it seems that indeed a belief must be added to the desire. |
| 2576 | In functionalism, desires are internal states with causal relations [Block] |
| Full Idea: According to functionalism, a system might have the behaviouristic input-output relations, yet not desire something, as this requires internal states with certain causal relations. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: Such a system might be Putnam's 'superactor', who only behaves as if he desires something. Of course, the internal states might need more than just 'causal relations'. |
| 2575 | Functionalism is behaviourism, but with mental states as intermediaries [Block] |
| Full Idea: Functionalism is a new incarnation of behaviourism, replacing sensory inputs with sensory inputs plus mental states, and replacing dispositions to act with dispositions plus certain mental states. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 69) | |
| A reaction: I think of functionalism as behaviourism which extends inside the 'black box' between stimulus and response. It proposes internal stimuli and responses. Consequently functionalism inherits some behaviourist problems. |
| 2583 | You might invert colours, but you can't invert beliefs [Block] |
| Full Idea: It is hard to see how to make sense of the analog of color spectrum inversion with respect to non-qualitative states such a beliefs (where they are functionally equivalent but have different beliefs). | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 81) | |
| A reaction: I would suggest that beliefs can be 'inverted', because there are all sorts of ways to implement a belief, but colour can't be inverted, because that depends on a particular brain state. It makes good sense to me... |
| 2578 | Could a creature without a brain be in the right functional state for pain? [Block] |
| Full Idea: If pain is a functional state, it cannot be a brain state, because creatures without brains could realise the same Turing machine as creatures with brains. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a poorly grounded claim. There may be some hypothetical world where brainless creatures implement all our functions, but from here brains look the only plausible option. |
| 2585 | Not just any old functional network will have mental states [Block] |
| Full Idea: If there are any fixed points in the mind-body problem, one of them is that the economy of Bolivia could not have mental states, no matter how it is distorted. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 86) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to disagree with this, but then it can hardly be a serious suggestion that anyone could see how to reconfigure an economy so that it mapped the functional state of the human brain. This is not a crucial problem. |
| 2586 | In functionalism, what are the special inputs and outputs of conscious creatures? [Block] |
| Full Idea: In functionalism, it is very hard to see how there could be a single physical characterization of the inputs and outputs of all and only creatures with mentality. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 87) | |
| A reaction: It would be theoretically possible if the only way to achieve mentality was to have a particular pattern of inputs and outputs. I don't think, though, that 'mentality' is an all-or-nothing concept. |
| 2579 | Physicalism is prejudiced in favour of our neurology, when other systems might have minds [Block] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism is a chauvinist theory: it withholds mental properties from systems that in fact have them. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 71) | |
| A reaction: This criticism interprets physicalism too rigidly. There may be several ways to implement a state. My own view is that other systems might implement our functions, but they won't experience them in a human way. |
| 2577 | Simple machine-functionalism says mind just is a Turing machine [Block] |
| Full Idea: In the simplest Turing-machine version of functionalism (Putnam 1967), mental states are identified with the total Turing-machine state, involving a machine table and its inputs and outputs. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 70) | |
| A reaction: This obviously invites the question of why mental states would be conscious and phenomenal, given that modern computers are devoid of same, despite being classy Turing machines. |
| 2580 | A Turing machine, given a state and input, specifies an output and the next state [Block] |
| Full Idea: In a Turing machine, given any state and input, the machine table specifies an output and the next state. …To have full power the tape must be infinite in at least one direction, and be movable in both directions. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 71) | |
| A reaction: In retrospect, the proposal that this feeble item should be taken as a model for the glorious complexity and richness of human consciousness doesn't look too plausible. |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| Full Idea: Linguistics rejects (on theoretical grounds) the intuition that the sentence "the boy the girl the cat bit scratched died" is ungrammatical. | |
| From: Ned Block (Troubles with Functionalism [1978], p. 78) | |
| A reaction: Once we have disentangled it, we practical speakers have no right to say it is ungrammatical. It isn't only theory. The sentence is just stylistically infelicitous. |
| 16469 | Plantinga has domains of sets of essences, variables denoting essences, and predicates as functions [Plantinga, by Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: The domains in Plantinga's interpretation of Kripke's semantics are sets of essences, and the values of variables are essences. The values of predicates have to be functions from possible worlds to essences. | |
| From: report of Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976]) by Robert C. Stalnaker - Mere Possibilities 4.4 | |
| A reaction: I begin to think this is quite nice, as long as one doesn't take the commitment to the essences too seriously. For 'essence' read 'minimal identity'? But I take essences to be more than minimal, so use identities (which Kripke does?). |
| 16470 | Plantinga's essences have their own properties - so will have essences, giving a hierarchy [Stalnaker on Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: For Plantinga, essences are entities in their own right and will have properties different from what instantiates them. Hence he will need individual essences of individual essences, distinct from the essences. I see no way to avoid a hierarchy of them. | |
| From: comment on Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976]) by Robert C. Stalnaker - Mere Possibilities 4.4 | |
| A reaction: This sounds devastating for Plantinga, but it is a challenge for traditional Aristotelians. Only a logician suffers from a hierarchy, but a scientist might have to live with an essence, which contains a super-essence. |
| 14663 | Are propositions and states of affairs two separate things, or only one? I incline to say one [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Are there two sorts of thing, propositions and states of affairs, or only one? I am inclined to the former view on the ground that propositions have a property, truth or falsehood, not had by states of affairs. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976], 1) | |
| A reaction: Might a proposition be nothing more than an assertion that a state of affairs obtains? It would then pass his test. The idea that a proposition is a complex of facts in the external world ('Russellian' propositions?) quite baffles me. |
| 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. |