Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Reply to Fourth Objections', 'Letters to Jourdain' and 'Concepts without Boundaries'

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10 ideas

5. Theory of Logic / F. Referring in Logic / 1. Naming / a. Names

8447	In 'Etna is higher than Vesuvius' the whole of Etna, including all the lava, can't be the reference [Frege]
	Full Idea: The reference of 'Etna' cannot be Mount Etna itself, because each piece of frozen lava which is part of Mount Etna would then also be part of the thought that Etna is higher than Vesuvius.
	From: Gottlob Frege (Letters to Jourdain [1910], p.43)
	A reaction: This seems to be a straight challenge to Kripke's baptismal account of reference. I think I side with Kripke. Frege is allergic to psychological accounts, but the mind only has the capacity to think of the aspect of Etna that is relevant.

5. Theory of Logic / F. Referring in Logic / 1. Naming / b. Names as descriptive

8448	Any object can have many different names, each with a distinct sense [Frege]
	Full Idea: An object can be determined in different ways, and every one of these ways of determining it can give rise to a special name, and these different names then have different senses.
	From: Gottlob Frege (Letters to Jourdain [1910], p.44)
	A reaction: This seems right. No name is an entirely neutral designator. Imagine asking a death-camp survivor their name, and they give you their prison number. Sense clearly intrudes into names. But picking out the object is what really matters.

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 10. Vagueness / b. Vagueness of reality

8983	If 'red' is vague, then membership of the set of red things is vague, so there is no set of red things [Sainsbury]
	Full Idea: Sets have sharp boundaries, or are sharp objects; an object either definitely belongs to a set, or it does not. But 'red' is vague; there objects which are neither definitely red nor definitely not red. Hence there is no set of red things.
	From: Mark Sainsbury (Concepts without Boundaries [1990], §2)
	A reaction: Presumably that will entail that there IS a set of things which can be described as 'definitely red'. If we describe something as 'definitely having a hint of red about it', will that put it in a set? In fact will the applicability of 'definitely' do?

7. Existence / E. Categories / 2. Categorisation

8986	We should abandon classifying by pigeon-holes, and classify around paradigms [Sainsbury]
	Full Idea: We must reject the classical picture of classification by pigeon-holes, and think in other terms: classifying can be, and often is, clustering round paradigms.
	From: Mark Sainsbury (Concepts without Boundaries [1990], §8)
	A reaction: His conclusion to a discussion of the problem of vagueness, where it is identified with concepts which have no boundaries. Pigeon-holes are a nice exemplar of the Enlightenment desire to get everything right. I prefer Aristotle's categories, Idea 3311.

9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / e. Vague objects

8982	Vague concepts are concepts without boundaries [Sainsbury]
	Full Idea: If a word is vague, there are or could be borderline cases, but non-vague expressions can also have borderline cases. The essence of vagueness is to be found in the idea vague concepts are concepts without boundaries.
	From: Mark Sainsbury (Concepts without Boundaries [1990], Intro)
	A reaction: He goes on to say that vague concepts are not embodied in clear cut sets, which is what gives us our notion of a boundary. So what is vague is 'membership'. You are either a member of a club or not, but when do you join the 'middle-aged'?

8984	If concepts are vague, people avoid boundaries, can't spot them, and don't want them [Sainsbury]
	Full Idea: Vague concepts are boundaryless, ...and the manifestations are an unwillingness to draw any such boundaries, the impossibility of identifying such boundaries, and needlessness and even disutility of such boundaries.
	From: Mark Sainsbury (Concepts without Boundaries [1990], §5)
	A reaction: People have a very fine-tuned notion of whether the sharp boundary of a concept is worth discussing. The interesting exception are legal people, who are often forced to find precision where everyone else hates it. Who deserves to inherit the big house?

8985	Boundaryless concepts tend to come in pairs, such as child/adult, hot/cold [Sainsbury]
	Full Idea: Boundaryless concepts tend to come in systems of contraries: opposed pairs like child/adult, hot/cold, weak/strong, true/false, and complex systems of colour terms. ..Only a contrast with 'adult' will show what 'child' excludes.
	From: Mark Sainsbury (Concepts without Boundaries [1990], §5)
	A reaction: This might be expected. It all comes down to the sorites problem, of when one thing turns into something else. If it won't merge into another category, then presumably the isolated concept stays applicable (until reality terminates it? End of sheep..).

17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 6. Conceptual Dualism

3643	The concept of mind excludes body, and vice versa [Descartes]
	Full Idea: The concept of body includes nothing at all which belongs to the mind, and the concept of mind includes nothing at all which belongs to the body.
	From: René Descartes (Reply to Fourth Objections [1641], 225)
	A reaction: A headache? Hunger? The mistake, I think, is to regard the mind as entirely conscious, thus creating a sharp boundary between two aspects of our lives. As shown by blindsight, I take many of my central mental operations to be pre- or non-conscious.

19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 7. Meaning Holism / a. Sentence meaning

8446	We understand new propositions by constructing their sense from the words [Frege]
	Full Idea: The possibility of our understanding propositions which we have never heard before rests on the fact that we construct the sense of a proposition out of parts that correspond to words.
	From: Gottlob Frege (Letters to Jourdain [1910], p.43)
	A reaction: This is the classic statement of the principle of compositionality, which seems to me so obviously correct that I cannot understand anyone opposing it. Which comes first, the thought or the word, may be a futile debate.

19. Language / B. Reference / 4. Descriptive Reference / a. Sense and reference

8449	Senses can't be subjective, because propositions would be private, and disagreement impossible [Frege]
	Full Idea: If the sense of a name was subjective, then the proposition and the thought would be subjective; the thought one man connects with this proposition would be different from that of another man. One man could not then contradict another.
	From: Gottlob Frege (Letters to Jourdain [1910], p.44)
	A reaction: This is an implicit argument for the identity of 'proposition' and 'thought'. This argument resembles Plato's argument for universals (Idea 223). See also Kant on existence as a predicate (Idea 4475). But people do misunderstand one another.