16 ideas
12442 | 'Mickey Mouse is a fictional mouse' is true without a truthmaker [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: 'Mickey Mouse is a fictional mouse' can be taken as true without have any truthmaker. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: There might be an equivocation over 'true' here. 'What, really really true that he IS a fictional mouse?' |
12439 | Truth is dispensable, by replacing truth claims with the sentence itself [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: No truth predicate is ever indispensable, because Tarski biconditionals, the equivalences between sentences and explicit truth ascriptions to those sentences, allow us to replace explicit truth ascriptions with the sentences themselves. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: Holding a sentence to be true isn't the same as saying that it is true, and it isn't the same as saying the sentence, because one might say it in an ironic tone of voice. |
12437 | Truth lets us assent to sentences we can't explicitly exhibit [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: My take on truth is a fairly deflationary one: The role of the truth predicate is to enable us to assent to sentences we can't explicitly exhibit. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Intro) | |
A reaction: Clearly this is a role for truth, as in 'I forget what he said, but I know it was true', but it isn't remotely what most people understand by true. We use 'true' about totally explicit sentences all the time. |
12446 | Names function the same way, even if there is no object [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: Names function the same way (semantically and grammatically) regardless of whether or not there's an object that they refer to. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.3 n55) | |
A reaction: I take this to be a fairly clear rebuttal of the 'Fido'-Fido view of names (that the meaning of the name IS the dog), which never seems to quite go away. A name is a peg on which description may be hung, seems a good slogan to me. |
12447 | That all existents have causal powers is unknowable; the claim is simply an epistemic one [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: If the argument isn't that, metaphysically speaking, anything that exists must have causal powers - how on earth would we show that? - rather, the claim is an epistemic one. Any thing we're in a position to know about we must causally interact with. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.4) | |
A reaction: A very good point. I am attracted to causal power as a criterion for existence, but Azzouni's distinction is vital. Maybe there is just no point in even talking about things which exist but have no causal powers. |
12445 | If fictional objects really don't exist, then they aren't abstract objects [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: It's robustly part of common sense that fictional objects don't exist in any sense at all, and this means they aren't abstracta either. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: Nice. It is so easy to have some philosopher dilute and equivocate over the word 'object' until you find yourself committed to all sorts of daft things as somehow having objectual existence. We can discuss things which don't exist in any way at all. |
12449 | Modern metaphysics often derives ontology from the logical forms of sentences [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: It is widespread in contemporary metaphysics to extract commitments to various types of object on the basis of the logical form of certain sentences. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.7) | |
A reaction: I'm with Azzouni in thinking that this procedure is a very bad idea. I'm increasingly inclined towards the wild view that people are only ontologically committed to things if they explicitly say that they are so committed. |
12440 | If objectual quantifiers ontologically commit, so does the metalanguage for its semantics [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: The argument that objectual quantifiers are ontologically committing has the crucial and unnoticed presupposition that the language in which the semantics for the objectual quantifiers is couched (the 'metalanguage') also has quantifiers with commitment. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: That is, presumably we find ourselves ontologically committed to the existence of quantifiers, and are also looking at an infinite regress. See Idea 12439. |
12438 | In the vernacular there is no unequivocal ontological commitment [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: There are no linguistic devices, no idioms (not 'there is', not 'exists') that unequivocally indicate ontological commitment in the vernacular. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Intro) | |
A reaction: This seems right, since people talk in such ways about soap opera, while understanding the ontological situation perfectly well. Presumably Quine is seeking higher standards than the vernacular, if we are doing science. |
12441 | We only get ontology from semantics if we have already smuggled it in [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: A slogan: One can't read ontological commitments from semantic conditions unless one has already smuggled into those semantic conditions the ontology one would like to read off. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: The arguments supporting this are subtle, but it's good enough for me, as I never thought anyone was ontologically committed just because they used the vagueries of language to try to say what's going on around here. |
3291 | Emergent properties appear at high levels of complexity, but aren't explainable by the lower levels [Nagel] |
Full Idea: The supposition that a diamond or organism should truly have emergent properties is that they appear at certain complex levels of organisation, but are not explainable (even in principle) in terms of any more fundamental properties of the system. | |
From: Thomas Nagel (Panpsychism [1979], p.186) |
12448 | Things that don't exist don't have any properties [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: Things that don't exist don't have any properties. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.4) | |
A reaction: Sounds reasonable! I totally agree, but that is because my notion of properties is sparse and naturalistic. If you identify properties with predicates (which some weird people seem to), then non-existents can have properties like 'absence' or 'nullity'. |
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. |
3290 | Given the nature of heat and of water, it is literally impossible for water not to boil at the right heat [Nagel] |
Full Idea: Given what heat is and what water is, it is literally impossible for water to be heated beyond a certain point at normal atmospheric pressure without boiling. | |
From: Thomas Nagel (Panpsychism [1979], p.186) |
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. |
12450 | The periodic table not only defines the elements, but also excludes other possible elements [Azzouni] |
Full Idea: The periodic table not only governs what elements there can be, with their properties, but also explicitly excludes others sorts of elements, because the elements are individuated by the number of discrete protons in their nuclei. | |
From: Jody Azzouni (Deflating Existential Consequence [2004], Ch.7) | |
A reaction: It has to be central to the thesis of scientific essentialism that the possibilities in nature are far more restricted than is normally thought, and this observation illustrates the view nicely. He makes a similar point about subatomic particles. |