36 ideas
| 17275 | Realist metaphysics concerns what is real; naive metaphysics concerns natures of things [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: We may broadly distinguish between two main branches of metaphysics: the 'realist' or 'critical' branch is concerned with what is real (tense, values, numbers); the 'naive' or 'pre-critical' branch concerns natures of things irrespective of reality. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The 'natures' of things are presumably the essences. He cites 3D v 4D objects, and the status of fictional characters, as examples of the second type. Fine says ground is central to realist metaphysics. |
| 9376 | A sentence may simultaneously define a term, and also assert a fact [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: It doesn't follow from the fact that a given sentence is being used to implicitly define one of its ingredient terms, that it is not a factual statement. 'This stick is a meter long at t' may define an ingredient terms and express something factual. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This looks like a rather good point, but it is tied in with a difficulty about definition, which is deciding which sentences are using a term, and which ones are defining it. If I say 'this stick in Paris is a meter long', I'm not defining it. |
| 17282 | Truths need not always have their source in what exists [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: There is no reason in principle why the ultimate source of what is true should always lie in what exists. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.03) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the weak point of the truthmaker theory, since truths about non-existence are immediately in trouble. Saying reality makes things true is one thing, but picking out a specific bit of it for each truth is not so easy. |
| 17283 | If the truth-making relation is modal, then modal truths will be grounded in anything [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: The truth-making relation is usually explicated in modal terms, ...but this lets in far too much. Any necessary truth will be grounded by anything. ...The fact that singleton Socrates exists will be a truth-maker for the proposition that Socrates exists. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.03) | |
| A reaction: If truth-makers are what has to 'exist' for something to be true, then maybe nothing must exist for a necessity to be true - in which case it has no truth maker. Or maybe 2 and 4 must 'exist' for 2+2=4? |
| 17286 | Logical consequence is verification by a possible world within a truth-set [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Under the possible worlds semantics for logical consequence, each sentence of a language is associated with a truth-set of possible worlds in which it is true, and then something is a consequence if one of these worlds verifies it. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.10) | |
| A reaction: [compressed, and translated into English; see Fine for more symbolic version; I'm more at home in English] |
| 9375 | Conventionalism agrees with realists that logic has truth values, but not over the source [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Conventualism is a factualist view: it presupposes that sentences of logic have truth values. It differs from a realist view in its conception of the source of those truth values, not on their existence. I call the denial of truths Non-Factualism. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: It barely seems to count as truth is we say 'p is true because we say so'. It is a truth about an agreement, not a truth about logic. Driving on the left isn't a truth about which side of the road is best. |
| 17272 | 2+2=4 is necessary if it is snowing, but not true in virtue of the fact that it is snowing [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary that if it is snowing then 2+2=4, but the fact that 2+2=4 does not obtain in virtue of the fact that it is snowing. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: Critics dislike 'in virtue of' (as vacuous), but I can't see how you can disagree with this obvervation of Fine's. You can hardly eliminate the word 'because' from English, or say p is because of some object. We demand the right to keep asking 'why?'! |
| 17276 | If you say one thing causes another, that leaves open that the 'other' has its own distinct reality [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It will not do to say that the physical is causally determinative of the mental, since that leaves open the possibility that the mental has a distinct reality over and above that of the physical. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: The context is a defence of grounding, so that if we say the mind is 'grounded' in the brain, we are saying rather more than merely that it is caused by the brain. A ghost might be 'caused' by a bar of soap. Nice. |
| 17284 | An immediate ground is the next lower level, which gives the concept of a hierarchy [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It is the notion of 'immediate' ground that provides us with our sense of a ground-theoretic hierarchy. For any truth, we can take its immediate grounds to be at the next lower level. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.05 'Mediate') | |
| A reaction: Are the levels in the reality, the structure or the descriptions? I vote for the structure. I'm defending the idea that 'essence' picks out the bottom of a descriptive level. |
| 17285 | 'Strict' ground moves down the explanations, but 'weak' ground can move sideways [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: We might think of strict ground as moving us down in the explanatory hierarchy. ...Weak ground, on the other hand, may also move us sideways in the explanatory hierarchy. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.05 'Weak') | |
| A reaction: This seems to me rather illuminating. For example, is the covering law account of explanation a 'sideways' move in explanation. Are inductive generalities mere 'sideways' accounts. Both fail to dig deeper. |
| 17288 | We learn grounding from what is grounded, not what does the grounding [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It is the fact to be grounded that 'points' to its ground and not the grounds that point to what they ground. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.11) | |
| A reaction: What does the grounding may ground all sorts of other things, but what is grounded only has one 'full' (as opposed to 'partial', in Fine's terminology) ground. He says this leads to a 'top-down' approach to the study of grounds. |
| 17281 | If grounding is a relation it must be between entities of the same type, preferably between facts [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: In so far as ground is regarded as a relation it should be between entities of the same type, and the entities should probably be taken as worldly entities, such as facts, rather than as representational entities, such as propositions. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: That's more like it (cf. Idea 17280). The consensus of this discussion seems to point to facts as the best relata, for all the vagueness of facts, and the big question of how fine-grained facts should be (and how dependent they are on descriptions). |
| 17280 | Ground is best understood as a sentence operator, rather than a relation between predicates [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Ground is perhaps best regarded as an operation (signified by an operator on sentences) rather than as a relation (signified by a predicate) | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: Someone in this book (Koslicki?) says this is to avoid metaphysical puzzles over properties. I don't like the idea, because it makes grounding about sentences when it should be about reality. Fine is so twentieth century. Audi rests ground on properties. |
| 17290 | Only metaphysical grounding must be explained by essence [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: If the grounding relation is not metaphysical (such as normative or natural grounding), there is no need for there to be an explanation of its holding in terms of the essentialist nature of the items involved. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.11) | |
| A reaction: He accepts that some things have partial grounds in different areas of reality. |
| 17274 | Philosophical explanation is largely by ground (just as cause is used in science) [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: For philosophers interested in explanation - of what accounts for what - it is largely through the notion of ontological ground that such questions are to be pursued. Ground, if you like, stands to philosophy as cause stands to science. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: Why does the ground have to be 'ontological'? It isn't the existence of the snow that makes me cold, but the fact that I am lying in it. Better to talk of 'factual' ground (or 'determinative' ground), and then causal grounds are a subset of those? |
| 17278 | We can only explain how a reduction is possible if we accept the concept of ground [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It is only by embracing the concept of a ground as a metaphysical form of explanation in its own right that one can adequately explain how a reduction of the reality of one thing to another should be understood. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: I love that we are aiming to say 'how' a reduction should be understood, and not just 'that' it exists. I'm not sure about Fine's emphasis on explaining 'realities', when I think we are after more like structural relations or interconnected facts. |
| 17287 | Facts, such as redness and roundness of a ball, can be 'fused' into one fact [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Given any facts, there will be a fusion of those facts. Given the facts that the ball is red and that it is round, there is a fused fact that it is 'red and round'. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.10) | |
| A reaction: This is how we make 'units' for counting. Any type of thing which can be counted can be fused, such as the first five prime numbers, forming the 'first' group for some discussion. Any objects can be fused to make a unit - but is it thereby a 'unity'? |
| 17279 | Even a three-dimensionalist might identify temporal parts, in their thinking [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Even the three-dimensionalist might be willing to admit that material things have temporal parts. For given any persisting object, he might suppose that 'in thought' we could mark out its temporal segments or parts. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: A big problem with temporal parts is how thin they are. Hawley says they are as fine-grained as time itself, but what if time has no grain? How thin can you 'think' a temporal part to be? Fine says imagined parts are grounded in things, not vice versa. |
| 17273 | Each basic modality has its 'own' explanatory relation [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: I am inclined to the view that ....each basic modality should be associated with its 'own' explanatory relation. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: He suggests that 'grounding' connects the various explanatory relations of the different modalities. I like this a lot. Why assert any necessity without some concept of where the necessity arises, and hence where it is grounded? You've got to eat. |
| 17289 | Every necessary truth is grounded in the nature of something [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It might be held as a general thesis that every necessary truth is grounded in the nature of certain items. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.11) | |
| A reaction: [He cites his own 1994 for this] I'm not sure if I can embrace the 'every' in this. I would only say, more cautiously, that I can only make sense of necessity claims when I see their groundings - and I don't take a priori intuition as decent grounding. |
| 9369 | 'Snow is white or it isn't' is just true, not made true by stipulation [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Isn't it overwhelmingly obvious that 'Either snow is white or it isn't' was true before anyone stipulated a meaning for it, and that it would have been true even if no one had thought about it, or chosen it to be expressed by one of our sentences? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: Boghossian would have to believe in propositions (unexpressed truths) to hold this - which he does. I take the notion of truth to only have relevance when there are minds around. Otherwise the so-called 'truths' are just the facts. |
| 9367 | The a priori is explained as analytic to avoid a dubious faculty of intuition [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The central impetus behind the analytic explanation of the a priori is a desire to explain the possibility of a priori knowledge without having to postulate a special evidence-gathering faculty of intuition. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: I don't see at all why one has to postulate a 'faculty' in order to talk about intuition. I take an intuition to be an apprehension of a probable truth, combined with an inability to articulate how the conclusion was arrived at. |
| 9373 | That logic is a priori because it is analytic resulted from explaining the meaning of logical constants [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The analytic theory of the apriority of logic arose indirectly, as a by-product of the attempt to explain in what a grasp of the meaning of the logical constants consists. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: Preumably he is referring to Wittgenstein's anguish over the meaning of the word 'not' in his World War I notebooks. He first defined the constants by truth tables, then asserted that they were purely conventional - so logic is conventional. |
| 9380 | We can't hold a sentence true without evidence if we can't agree which sentence is definitive of it [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: If there is no sentence I must hold true if it is to mean what it does, then there is no basis on which to argue that I am entitled to hold it true without evidence. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: He is exploring Quine's view. Truth by convention depends on agreeing which part of the usage of a term constitutes its defining sentence(s), and that may be rather tricky. Boghossian says this slides into the 'dreaded indeterminacy of meaning'. |
| 9384 | We may have strong a priori beliefs which we pragmatically drop from our best theory [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: It is consistent with a belief's being a priori in the strong sense that we should have pragmatic reasons for dropping it from our best overall theory. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], n 6) | |
| A reaction: Does 'dropping it' from the theory mean just ignoring it, or actually denying it? C.I. Lewis is the ancestor of this view. Could it be our 'best' theory, while conflicting with beliefs that were strongly a priori? Pragmatism can embrace falsehoods. |
| 9374 | If we learn geometry by intuition, how could this faculty have misled us for so long? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: If we learn geometrical truths by intuition, how could this faculty have misled us for so long? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This refers to the development of non-Euclidean geometries, though the main misleading concerns parallels, which involves infinity. Boghossian cites 'distance' as a concept the Euclideans had misunderstood. Why shouldn't intuitions be wrong? |
| 17291 | We explain by identity (what it is), or by truth (how things are) [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: I think it should be recognised that there are two fundamentally different types of explanation; one is of identity, or of what something is; and the other is of truth, or of how things are. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.11) |
| 17271 | Is there metaphysical explanation (as well as causal), involving a constitutive form of determination? [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: In addition to scientific or causal explanation, there maybe a distinctive kind of metaphysical explanation, in which explanans and explanandum are connected, not through some causal mechanism, but through some constitutive form of determination. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I'm unclear why determination has to be 'constitutive', since I would take determination to be a family of concepts, with constitution being one of them, as when chess pieces determine a chess set. Skip 'metaphysical'; just have Determinative Explanation. |
| 17277 | If mind supervenes on the physical, it may also explain the physical (and not vice versa) [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It is not enough to require that the mental should modally supervene on the physical, since that still leaves open the possibility that the physical is itself ultimately to be understood in terms of the mental. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: See Horgan on supervenience. Supervenience is a question, not an answer. The first question is whether the supervenience is mutual, and if not, which 'direction' does it go in? |
| 9378 | If meaning depends on conceptual role, what properties are needed to do the job? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual Role Semantics must explain what properties an inference or sentence involving a logical constant must have, if that inference or sentence is to be constitutive of its meaning. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This is my perennial request that if something is to be defined by its function (or role), we must try to explain what properties it has that make its function possible, and those properties will be the more basic explanation. |
| 9377 | 'Conceptual role semantics' says terms have meaning from sentences and/or inferences [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: 'Conceptual role semantics' says the logical constants mean what they do by virtue of figuring in certain inferences and/or sentences involving them and not others, ..so some inferences and sentences are constitutive of an expression's meaning. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: If the meaning of the terms derives from the sentences in which they figure, that seems to be meaning-as-use. The view that it depends on the inferences seems very different, and is a more interesting but more risky claim. |
| 9372 | Could expressions have meaning, without two expressions possibly meaning the same? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Could there be a fact of the matter about what each expression means, but no fact of the matter about whether they mean the same? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §II) | |
| A reaction: He is discussing Quine's attack on synonymy, and his scepticism about meaning. Boghossian and I believe in propositions, so we have no trouble with two statements having the same meaning. Denial of propositions breeds trouble. |
| 17721 | There are no truths in virtue of meaning, but there is knowability in virtue of understanding [Boghossian, by Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Boghossian distinguishes metaphysical analyticity (truth purely in virtue of meaning, debunked by Quine, he says) from epistemic analyticity (knowability purely in virtue of understanding - a notion in good standing). | |
| From: report of Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996]) by Carrie Jenkins - Grounding Concepts 2.4 | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This fits with Jenkins's claim that we have a priori knowledge just through understanding and relating our concepts. She, however, rejects that idea that a priori is analytic. |
| 9368 | Epistemological analyticity: grasp of meaning is justification; metaphysical: truth depends on meaning [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The epistemological notion of analyticity: a statement is 'true by virtue of meaning' provided that grasp of its meaning alone suffices for justified belief in its truth; the metaphysical reading is that it owes its truth to its meaning, not to facts. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: Kripke thinks it is neither, but is a purely semantic notion. How could grasp of meaning alone be a good justification if it wasn't meaning which was the sole cause of the statement's truth? I'm not convinced by his distinction. |
| 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. |