14 ideas
| 15565 | Events have inbuilt essences, as necessary conditions for their occurrence [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Events have their essences built in, in the form of necessary conditions for their occurrence. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], III) | |
| A reaction: Revealing. He thinks the essence of an event is something which precedes the event. I take it as obvious that if an event has an essence, it will be some features of the event that occur in it and during it. They need to be intrinsic. |
| 15567 | Some events involve no change; they must, because causal histories involve unchanges [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Not all events involve change. We cannot afford to count the unchanges as nonevents, for the unchanges may be needed to complete causal histories. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], VI) | |
| A reaction: You end up calling non-changes 'events' if you commit to a simplistic theory that all causal histories consist of events. Why not allow conditions as well as events? Lewis concedes that he may be abusing language. |
| 15566 | Events are classes, and so there is a mereology of their parts [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If events are classes, as I propose, then they have a mereology in the way that all classes do: the parts of a class are its subclasses. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], V) | |
| A reaction: Lewis says events are properties, which he regards as classes. It is not clear that events are strictly mereological. Could one happening be two events? Is WWII a simple sum of its parts? [see p.260] |
| 15561 | The events that suit semantics may not be the events that suit causation [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: There is no guarantee that events made for semantics are the same as events that are causes and effects. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], I) | |
| A reaction: This little cri de couer could be a motto for a huge amount of analytic philosophy, which (for some odd reason) thought that mathematics, logic, set theory and formal semantics were good tools for explaining nature. |
| 15564 | An event is a property of a unique space-time region [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I propose to identify an event with a property, or in other words with a class, a unique spatio-temporal region corresponding to where that event occurs. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], II) | |
| A reaction: [I've run together two separate bits, on p.244 and 245] Lewis cites Montague's similar view, that events are properties of times. |
| 15563 | Properties are very abundant (unlike universals), and are used for semantics and higher-order variables [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Properties are abundant, numbering at least beth-3 for properties of individuals alone; they are suited to serve as semantic values of arbitrarily complex predicates and gerunds, and higher-order variables. (If there are universals, they are sparse). | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], II n2) | |
| A reaction: To me this is an outrageous hijacking of the notion of property which is needed for explaining the natural world. He seems to be talking about predicates. He wants to leave me with his silly universals - well I don't want them, thank you. |
| 14348 | An 'antidote' allows a manifestation to begin, but then blocks it [Corry] |
| Full Idea: An 'antidote' (or 'mask') to a disposition (unlike a 'finkish' one) leaves the disposition intact, but interferes with the causal chain between the disposition and its manifestation so that the manifestation doesn't come about. | |
| From: Richard Corry (Dispositional Essentialism Grounds Laws of Nature? [2010], 2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Bird 1997] Thus the disposition of the poison at least begins to manifest, but its disposition to kill is blocked. So what was the disposition of the poison? |
| 14347 | A 'finkish' disposition is one that is lost immediately after the appropriate stimulus [Corry] |
| Full Idea: An object's disposition is said to be 'finkish' if the object loses the disposition after the occurrence of the appropriate stimulus, but before the manifestation has had time to come about. | |
| From: Richard Corry (Dispositional Essentialism Grounds Laws of Nature? [2010], 2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Lewis 1997] An example would be some sort of safety device which only cuts in if the disposition seems about to operate (e.g. turns off electricity). It seems to block analyses of dispositions simply in terms of their outcomes. |
| 14350 | If a disposition is never instantiated, it shouldn't be part of our theory of nature [Corry] |
| Full Idea: If we have no good reason to believe that a disposition is instantiated, then the disposition should play no role in our theorizing about the world. | |
| From: Richard Corry (Dispositional Essentialism Grounds Laws of Nature? [2010], 3) | |
| A reaction: It is part of our theory that a substantial lump of uranium will explode, but also that a galaxy-sized lump of uranium would explode. Surely we are committed to the latter, even though it never happens? |
| 14351 | Maybe an experiment unmasks an essential disposition, and reveals its regularities [Corry] |
| Full Idea: The dispositional essentialist can argue that what happens in laboratory conditions is that, by controlling external influences, we effectively 'unmask' the relevant dispositions, and thus observe the regularities to which those dispositions give rise. | |
| From: Richard Corry (Dispositional Essentialism Grounds Laws of Nature? [2010], 5) | |
| A reaction: That seems to me to be exactly right, though Corry dislikes it, and even suggests that dispositional essentialist might not like it. |
| 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. |
| 15562 | Causation is a general relation derived from instances of causal dependence [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Causation is the ancestral of causal dependence: event c causes event e iff either e depends on c, or e depends on an intermediate event which in turn depends on c, or.... | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], I) | |
| A reaction: This is Lewis making sure that we don't postulate some huge bogus thing called 'Causation' which is supposed to be in charge of Nature. Good point. |
| 14346 | Dispositional essentialism says fundamental laws of nature are strict, not ceteris paribus [Corry] |
| Full Idea: Dispositional essentialism implies that the fundamental laws of nature must be strict, not ceteris paribus. | |
| From: Richard Corry (Dispositional Essentialism Grounds Laws of Nature? [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: I am not keen on the 'laws' of nature, but since essentialism seems to make them necessary, you can't get stricter than that. |
| 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. |