8 ideas
10496 | Monothetic categories have fixed defining features, and polythetic categories do not [Ellen] |
Full Idea: Many categories are 'monothetic' (the defining set of features is always unique), and others are 'polythetic' (single features being neither essential to group membership nor sufficient to allocate an item to a group). | |
From: Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.33) | |
A reaction: This seems a rather important distinction which hasn't made its way into philosophy, where there is a horrible tendency to oversimplify, with the dream of a neat and unified picture. But see Goodman's 'Imperfect Community' problem (Idea 7957). |
10497 | In symbolic classification, the categories are linked to rules [Ellen] |
Full Idea: Symbolic classification occurs when we use some things as a means of saying something about other things. ..They enhance the significance of some categories, so that categories imply rules and rules imply categories. | |
From: Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.35) | |
A reaction: I'm afraid the anthropologists seem to have more of interest to say about categories than philosophers do. Though maybe we couldn't do anthropology if philosophers had made us more self-conscious about categories. Teamwork! |
10495 | Continuous experience sometimes needs imposition of boundaries to create categories [Ellen] |
Full Idea: Because parts of our experience of the world are complexly continuous, it is occasionally necessary to impose boundaries to produce categories at all. | |
From: Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.33) | |
A reaction: I like it. Ellen says that people tend to universally cut nature somewhere around the joints, but we can't cope with large things, so the sea tends to be labelled in sections, even though most of the world's seas are continuous. |
10498 | Classification is no longer held to be rooted in social institutions [Ellen] |
Full Idea: The view that all classification finds its roots in social institutions is now generally considered untenable. | |
From: Roy Ellen (Anthropological Studies of Classification [1996], p.36) | |
A reaction: And about time too. Ellen (an anthropologist) inevitably emphasises the complexity of the situation, but endorses the idea that people everywhere largely cut nature at the joints. |
18052 | An assertion aims to add to the content of a context [Stalnaker, by Magidor] |
Full Idea: Stalnaker starts with the general thesis that the role of a successful assertion of s is to update the context by adding to it the content of s. | |
From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 5.3.2 | |
A reaction: This is to be compared with criteria of meaningfulness, such as verificationism, and with Grice's rules of conversational implicature. Presumably if you assert what the context presupposes, you fail to assert, without being meaningless. |
14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
Full Idea: Stalnaker's guiding idea is that in making an assertion the speaker is trying to get the audience to rule out certain possibilities. ....If all goes well, further planning will proceed on the basis of a smaller and more accurate range of possibilities. | |
From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics | |
A reaction: This sounds intuitively rather plausible, and is a nice original thought. This is what we pay clever chaps like Stalnaker to come up with. It seems to imply some notion of verisimilitude (qv. under 'truth'), depending on how much narrowing happens. |
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. |