19 ideas
9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The incremental progress which I envisage for philosophy lacks the drama after which some philosophers still hanker, and that hankering is itself a symptom of the intellectual immaturity that helps hold philosophy back. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: This could stand as a motto for the whole current profession of analytical philosophy. It means that if anyone attempts to be dramatic they can make their own way out. They'll find Kripke out there, smoking behind the dustbins. |
9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Even if talk of truth as correspondence to the facts is metaphorical, it is a bad metaphor for analytic truth in a way that it is not for synthetic truth. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 3.1) | |
A reaction: A very simple and rather powerful point. Maybe the word 'truth' should be withheld from such cases. You might say that accepted analytic truths are 'conventional'. If that is wrong, then they correspond to natural facts at a high level of abstraction. |
9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The debate between realism and anti-realism has become notorious in the rest of philosophy for its obscurity, convolution, and lack of progress. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: I find this reassuring, because fairly early on I decided that this problem was not of great interest, and quietly tiptoed away. I take the central issue to be whether nature has 'joints', to which the answer appears to be 'yes'. End of story. |
9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
Full Idea: It is sometimes argued that if there is such a thing as a mountain it would be a vague object, but it is logically impossible for an object to be vague, so there is no such thing as a mountain. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 7.2) | |
A reaction: I don't take this to be a daft view. No one is denying the existence of the solid rock that is involved, but allowing such a vague object may be a slippery slope to the acceptance of almost anything as an 'object'. |
18439 | Because things can share attributes, we cannot individuate attributes clearly [Quine] |
Full Idea: No two classes have exactly the same members, but two different attributes may be attributes of exactly the same things. Classes are identical when their members are identical. ...On the other hand, attributes have no clear principle of individuation. | |
From: Willard Quine (On the Individuation of Attributes [1975], p.100) |
18442 | You only know an attribute if you know what things have it [Quine] |
Full Idea: May we not say that you know an attribute only insofar as you know what things have it? | |
From: Willard Quine (On the Individuation of Attributes [1975], p.106) | |
A reaction: Simple, and the best defence of class nominalism (a very implausible theory) which I have encountered. Do I have to know all the things? Do I not know 'red' if I don't know tomatoes have it? |
18441 | No entity without identity (which requires a principle of individuation) [Quine] |
Full Idea: We have an acceptable notion of class, or physical object, or attribute, or any other sort of object, only insofar as we have an acceptable principle of individuation for that sort of object. There is no entity without identity. | |
From: Willard Quine (On the Individuation of Attributes [1975], p.102) | |
A reaction: Note that this is his criterion for an 'acceptable' notion. Presumably that is for science. It permits less acceptable notions which don't come up to the standard. And presumably true things can be said about the less acceptable entities. |
9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The constraints of common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: Wiliamson has described himself (in my hearing) as a 'rottweiller realist', but presumably the problem of vagueness interests a lot of people precisely because it pushes us away from common sense and classical logic. |
18440 | Identity of physical objects is just being coextensive [Quine] |
Full Idea: Physical objects are identical if and only if coextensive. | |
From: Willard Quine (On the Individuation of Attributes [1975], p.101) | |
A reaction: The supposed counterexample to this is the statue and the clay it is made of, which are said to have different modal properties (destroying the statue doesn't destroy the clay). |
9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of metaphysical modality requires no dedicated faculty of intuition. It is simply a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking, a kind of thinking tightly integrated with our thinking about the spatio-temporal world. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.6) | |
A reaction: This seems to me to be spot-on, though it puts the focus increasingly on the faculty of imagination, as arguably an even more extraordinary feature of brains than the much-vaunted normal consciousness. |
16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
Full Idea: The psychological mechanism that Williamson proposes as the supposedly reliable source of our knowledge of necessities only seems applicable to counterfactuals that are distinctively causal, not metaphysical, in character. | |
From: comment on Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007]) by E.J. Lowe - What is the Source of Knowledge of Modal Truths? 5 | |
A reaction: My rough impression of Williamson's account is that it is correct but unilluminating. We have to assess necessities by counterfactual thinking, because nothing else is available (apart from evaluating the coherence of the findings). |
9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of modality often focuses on (and pours scorn on) imagination or conceivability as a test of possibility, while ignoring the role of the imagination in the assessment of mundane counterfactuals. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.4) | |
A reaction: Good point. I've been guilty of this easy scorn myself. Williamson gives our modal capacities an evolutionary context. What is needed is well-informed imagination, rather than wild fantasy. |
9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
Full Idea: There is extensive 'armchair knowledge' in which experience plays no strictly evidential role, but it may not fit the stereotype of the a priori, because the contribution of experience was more than enabling, such as armchair truths about our environment. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.5) | |
A reaction: Once this point is conceded we have no idea where to draw the line. Does 'if it is red it can't be green' derive from experience? I think it might. |
9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Crude rationalists postulate a special knowledge-generating faculty of rational intuition. Crude empiricists regard intuition as an obscurantist term of folk psychology. Linguistic/conceptual philosophy says it reveals linguistic or conceptual competence. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: Kripke seems to think that it is the basis of logical competence. I would use it as a blank term for any insight in which we have considerable confidence, and yet are unable to articulate its basis; roughly, for rational thought that evades logic. |
20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: 'Intuition' plays a major role in contemporary analytic philosophy's self-understanding. ...When contemporary analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they appeal to intuitions. ...Thus intuitions are presented as our evidence in philosophy. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], p.214-5), quoted by Herman Cappelen - Philosophy without Intuitions 01.1 | |
A reaction: Williamson says we must investigate this 'scandal', but Cappelen's book says analytic philosophy does not rely on intuition. |
9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Someone who acquires the word 'gob' just by being reliably told that it is synonymous with 'mouth' knows what 'gob' means without being fully competent to use it. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 4.7) | |
A reaction: Not exactly an argument against meaning-as-use, but a very nice cautionary example to show that 'knowing the meaning' of a word may be a rather limited, and dangerous, achievement. |
9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Given empirical evidence for the approximate intertranslatability of all human languages, and a universal innate basis of human cognition, we may wonder how 'other' any human culture really is. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 8.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to be a fairly accurate account of the situation. In recent centuries people seem to have been over-impressed by superficial differences in cultural behaviour, but we increasingly see the underlying identity. |
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. |