7 ideas
22519 | Philosophers are revealed by their fears [Billington] |
Full Idea: To understand any philosopher, ask 'What are they afraid of?'. | |
From: Ray Billington (talk [2010]) | |
A reaction: Yes! So... Plato - disorder. Aristotle - ignorance. Augustine - sin. Descartes - uncertainty. Spinoza - fragmentation. Leibniz - superficiality. Hume - speculation. Bentham - egotism. Kant - self-deception. Nietzsche - nihilism. Russell - imprecision. |
18935 | Semantic theory should specify when an act of naming is successful [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: A semantic theory of names should deliver a specification of the conditions under which a name names an individual, and hence a specification of the conditions under which a name is empty. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 1) | |
A reaction: Naming can be private, like naming my car 'Bertrand', but never tell anyone. I like Plato's remark that names are 'tools'. Do we specify conditions for successful spanner-usage? The first step must be individuation, preparatory to naming. |
18945 | Millians say a name just means its object [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: The Millian view of direct reference says that the meaning of a name is the object named. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 4) | |
A reaction: Any theory that says meaning somehow is features of the physical world strikes me as totally misguided. Napoleon is a man, so he can't be part of a sentence. He delegates that job to words (such as 'Napoleon'). |
18934 | Sentences with empty names can be understood, be co-referential, and even be true [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: Some empty names sentences can be understood, so appear to be meaningful ('Pegasus was sired by Poseidon'), ...some appear to be co-referential ('Santa Claus'/'Father Christmas'), and some appear to be straightforwardly true ('Pegasus doesn't exist'). | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 1) | |
A reaction: Hang on to this, when the logicians arrive and start telling you that your talk of empty names is vacuous, because there is no object in the 'domain' to which a predicate can be attached. Meaning, reference and truth are the issues around empty names. |
18938 | Frege's compositional account of truth-vaues makes 'Pegasus doesn't exist' neither true nor false [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: In Frege's account sentences such as 'Pegasus does not exist' will be neither true nor false, since the truth-value of a sentence is its referent, and the referent of a complex expression is determined by the referent of its parts. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 2) | |
A reaction: We can keep the idea of 'sense', which is very useful for dealing with empty names, but tweak his account of truth-values to evade this problem. I'm thinking that meaning is compositional, but truth-value isn't. |
18947 | Definites descriptions don't solve the empty names problem, because the properties may not exist [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: If it were possible for a definite description to be empty - not in the sense of there being no object that satisfies it, but of there being no set of properties it refers to - the problem of empty names would not have been solved. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 5) | |
A reaction: Swoyer is thinking of properties like 'is a unicorn', which are clearly just as vulnerable to being empty as 'the unicorn' was. It seems unlikely that 'horse', 'white' and 'horn' would be empty. |
3284 | There is no one theory of how to act (or what to believe) [Nagel] |
Full Idea: To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe. | |
From: Thomas Nagel (The Fragmentation of Value [1977], p.135) | |
A reaction: Depends on your level of generality. Values and virtues are general guides which should be brought to every action, with 'higher' values guiding choice of what is relevant. |