60 ideas
| 7950 | Philosophy tries to explain how the actual is possible, given that it seems impossible [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Philosophical problems are problems about how what is actual is possible, given that what is actual appears, because of some faulty argument, to be impossible. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: [She is discussing universals when she makes this comment] A very appealing remark, given that most people come into philosophy because of a mixture of wonder and puzzlement. It is a rather Wittgensteinian view, though, that we must cure our own ills. |
| 7923 | 'Did it for the sake of x' doesn't involve a sake, so how can ontological commitments be inferred? [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: In 'She did it for the sake of her country' no one thinks that the expression 'the sake' refers to an individual thing, a sake. But given that, how can we work out what the ontological commitments of a theory actually are? | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: For these sorts of reasons it rapidly became obvious that ordinary language analysis wasn't going to reveal much, but it is also a problem for a project like Quine's, which infers an ontology from the terms of a scientific theory. |
| 7933 | Don't assume that a thing has all the properties of its parts [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The fallacy of composition makes the erroneous assumption that every property of the things that constitute a thing is a property of the thing as well. But every large object is constituted by small parts, and every red object by colourless parts. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: There are nice questions here like 'If you add lots of smallness together, why don't you get extreme smallness?' Colours always make bad examples in such cases (see Idea 5456). Distinctions are needed here (e.g. Idea 7007). |
| 15879 | The Square of Opposition has two contradictory pairs, one contrary pair, and one sub-contrary pair [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Square of Opposition: 'all A are B' and 'no A are B' are contraries; 'some A are B' and 'some A are not B' are sub-contraries; the pairs 'all A are B'/'some A are B' and 'no A are B'/'some A are B' are contradictories. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: [the reader may construct his own diagram from this description!] The contraries are at the extremes of contradiction, but the sub-contraries are actual compatible. You could add possible worlds to this picture. |
| 15891 | Traditional quantifiers combine ordinary language generality and ontology assumptions [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The generalising function and the ontological function of discourse are elided in the traditional quantifier. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: This simple point strikes me as helping enormously to disentangle the mess created by over-emphasis on formal logic in ontology, and especially in the Quinean concept of 'ontological commitment'. |
| 15878 | Some quantifiers, such as 'any', rule out any notion of order within their range [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The quantifier 'any' unambiguously rules out any presupposition of order in the members of the range of individuals quantified. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: He contrasts this with 'all', 'each' and 'every', which are ambiguous in this respect. |
| 9117 | The smallest heap has four objects: three on the bottom, one on the top [Hart,WD, by Sorensen] |
| Full Idea: Hart argues that the smallest heap consists of four objects: three on the bottom, one on the top. | |
| From: report of William D. Hart (Hat-Tricks and Heaps [1992]) by Roy Sorensen - Vagueness and Contradiction Intro | |
| A reaction: If the objects were rough bolders, you could get away with two on the bottom. He's wrong. No one would accept as a 'heap' four minute grains barely visible to the naked eye. No one would describe such a group of items in a supermarket as a heap. |
| 7944 | Reduce by bridge laws (plus property identities?), by elimination, or by reducing talk [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: There are four kinds of reduction: the identifying of entities of two theories by means of bridge or correlation laws; the elimination of entities in favour of the other theory; reducing by bridge laws and property identities; and merely reducing talk. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3 n5) | |
| A reaction: [She gives references] The idea of 'bridge laws' I regard with caution. If bridge laws are ceteris paribus, they are not much help, and if they are strict, or necessary, then there must be an underlying reason for that, which is probably elimination. |
| 7938 | Relational properties are clearly not essential to substances [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: In statements attributing relational properties ('Felix is my favourite cat'), it seems clear that the property truly attributed to the substance is not essential to it. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: A fairly obvious point, but an important one when mapping out (cautiously) what we actually mean by 'property'. However, maybe the relational property is essential: the ceiling is ('is' of predication!) above the room. |
| 7967 | Being taller is an external relation, but properties and substances have internal relations [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The relation of being taller than is an external relation, since it relates two independent material substances, but the relation of instantiation or exemplification is internal, in that it relates a substance with a property. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: An interesting revival of internal relations. To be plausible it would need clear notions of 'property' and 'substance'. We are getting a long way from physics, and I sense Ockham stropping his Razor. How do you individuate a 'relation'? |
| 15874 | Scientific properties are not observed qualities, but the dispositions which create them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The properties of material things with which the sciences deal are not the qualities we observe them to have, but the dispositions of those things to engender the states and qualities we observe. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be the correct use of the word 'qualities', so that properties are not qualities (in the way Heil would like). |
| 7965 | Does the knowledge of each property require an infinity of accompanying knowledge? [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: An object's being two inches long seems to guarantee an infinite number of other properties, such as being less than three inches long. If we must understand the second property to understand the first, then there seems to be a vicious infinite regress. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: She dismisses this by saying that we don't need to know an infinity of numbers in order to count. I would say that we just need to distinguish between intrinsic and relational properties. You needn't know all a thing's relations to know the thing. |
| 7934 | Tropes are abstract (two can occupy the same place), but not universals (they have locations) [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Tropes are abstract entities, at least in the sense that more than one can be in the same place at the same time (e.g. redness and roundness). But they are not universals, because they have unique and particular locations. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I'm uneasy about the reification involved in this kind of talk. Does a coin possess a thing called 'roundness', which then has to be individuated, identified and located? I am drawn to the two extreme views, and suspicious of compromise. |
| 7958 | Properties are sets of exactly resembling property-particulars [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Trope Nominalism says properties are classes or sets of exactly similar or resembling tropes, where tropes are what we might called 'property-tokens' or 'particularized properties'. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: We still seem to have the problem of 'resembling' here, and we certainly have the perennial problem of why any given particular should be placed in any particular set. See Idea 7959. |
| 7972 | Tropes are abstract particulars, not concrete particulars, so the theory is not nominalist [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Trope 'Nominalism' is not a version of nominalism, because tropes are abstract particulars, rather than concrete particulars. Of course, a trope account of the relations between particulars and their properties has ramifications for concrete particulars. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6 n16) | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 7971. At this point the boundary between nominalist and realist theories seems to blur. Possibly that is bad news for tropes. Not many dilemmas can be solved by simply blurring the boundary. |
| 7959 | How do a group of resembling tropes all resemble one another in the same way? [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The problem is how a group of resembling tropes can be of the same type, that is, that they can resemble one another in the same way. This problem is not settled simply by positing tropes. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a fundamental fact that there is no resemblance unless the respect of resemblance is specified. Two identical objects could still said to be different because of their locations. Is resemblance natural or conventional? Consider atoms. |
| 7960 | Trope Nominalism is the only nominalism to introduce new entities, inviting Ockham's Razor [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Of all the nominalist solutions, Trope Nominalism is the only one that tries to solve the problem at issue by introducing entities; all the others try to get by with concrete particulars and sets of them. This might invite Ockham's Razor. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: We could reply that tropes are necessities. The issue seems to be a key one, which is whether our fundamental onotology should include properties (in some form or other). I am inclined to exclude them (Ideas 3322, 3906, 4029). |
| 7951 | Numerical sameness is explained by theories of identity, but what explains qualitative identity? [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: We can distinguish between numerical identity and qualitative identity. Numerical sameness is explained by a theory of identity, but what explains qualitative sameness? | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: The distinction is between type and token identity. Tokens are particulars, and types are sets, so her question comes down to the one of what entitles something to be a member of a set? Nothing, if sets are totally conventional, but they aren't. |
| 7964 | How can universals connect instances, if they are nothing like them? [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The 'one over many' problem is to explain how universals can unify their instances if they are wholly other than them. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: If universals are self-predicating (beauty is beautiful) then they have a massive amount in common, despite one being general. You then have the regress problem of explaining the beauty of the beautiful. Baffling regress, or baffling participation. |
| 7971 | Real Nominalism is only committed to concrete particulars, word-tokens, and (possibly) sets [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: All real forms of Nominalism should hold that the only objects relevant to the explanation of generality are concrete particulars, words (i.e. word-tokens, not word-types), and perhaps sets. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6 n16) | |
| A reaction: The addition of sets seems controversial (see Idea 7970). The context is her rejection of the use of tropes in nominalist theories. I would doubt whether a theory still counted as nominalist if it admitted sets (e.g. Quine). |
| 7955 | Resemblance Nominalism cannot explain either new resemblances, or absence of resemblances [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Resemblance Nominalism cannot explain the fact that we know when and in what way new objects resemble old ones, and that we know when and in what ways new objects do not resemble old ones. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: It is not clear what sort of theory would be needed to 'explain' such a thing. Unless there is an explanation of resemblance waiting in the wings (beyond asserting that resemblance is a universal), then this is not a strong objection. |
| 7961 | A 'thing' cannot be in two places at once, and two things cannot be in the same place at once [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The so-called 'laws of thinghood' govern particulars, saying that one thing cannot be wholly present at different places at the same time, and two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: Is this an empirical observation, or a tautology? Or might it even be a priori synthetic? What happens when two water drops or clouds merge? Or an amoeba fissions? In what sense is an image in two places at once? Se also Idea 2351. |
| 7926 | We 'individuate' kinds of object, and 'identify' particular specimens [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: We can usefully refer to 'individuation conditions', to distinguish objects of that kind from objects not of that kind, and to 'identity conditions', to distinguish objects within that kind from one another. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: So we individuate types or sets, and identify tokens or particulars. Sounds good. Should be in every philosopher's toolkit, and on every introductory philosophy course. |
| 7936 | Unlike bundles of properties, substances have an intrinsic unity [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Substances have a kind of unity that mere collocations of properties do not have, namely an instrinsic unity. So substances cannot be collocations - bundles - of properties. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: A team is a unity. Compare a similar thought, Idea 1395, about personal identity. How can something which is a pure unity have more than one property? What distinguishes substances? Why can't a substance have a certain property? |
| 7930 | The bundle theory of substance implies the identity of indiscernibles [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The bundle theory of substance requires unconditional commitment to the truth of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles: that things that are alike with respect to all of their properties are identical. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Since the identity of indiscernibles is very dubious (see Ideas 1365, 4476, 5746, 7928), this is bad news for the bundle theory. I suspect that all of these problems arise because no one seems to have a clear concept of a property. |
| 7932 | A phenomenalist cannot distinguish substance from attribute, so must accept the bundle view [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Commitment to the view that only what can be an object of possible sensory experience can exist eliminates the possibility of distinguishing between substance and attribute, leaving only one alternative, namely the bundle view. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Phenomenalism strikes me as a paradigm case of confusing ontology with epistemology. Presumably physicists (even empiricist ones) are committed to the 'interior' of quarks and electrons, but no one expects to experience them. |
| 7937 | When we ascribe a property to a substance, the bundle theory will make that a tautology [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The bundle theory makes all true statements ascribing properties to substances uninformative, by making them logical truths. The property of being a feline animal is literally a constituent of a cat. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: The solution would seem to a distinction between accidental and essential properties. Compare 'that plane is red' with 'that plane has wings'. 'Of course it does - it's a plane'. We might still survive without a plane-substance. |
| 7939 | Substances persist through change, but the bundle theory says they can't [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Substances are capable of persisting through change, where this involves change in properties; but the bundle theory has the consequence that substances cannot survive change. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Her example is an apple remaining an apple when it turns brown. It doesn't look, though, as if there is a precise moment when the apple-substance ceases. The end of an apple seems to be more a matter of a loss of crucial properties. |
| 7940 | A substance might be a sequence of bundles, rather than a single bundle [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Maybe a substance is not itself a bundle of properties, but a sum or sequence of bundles of properties, a bundle of bundles of properties (which 'perdures' rather than 'endures'). | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: There remains the problem of deciding when the bundle has drifted too far away from the original to perdure correctly. A caterpillar can turn into a butterfly (which is pretty bizarre!), but not into a cathedral. Why? She says this idea denies change. |
| 7948 | A statue and its matter have different persistence conditions, so they are not identical [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Because a statue and the lump of matter that constitute it have different persistence conditions, they are not identical. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: Maybe being a statue is a relational property? All the relational properties of a thing will have different persistence conditions. Suppose I see a face in a bowl of sugar, and you don't? |
| 7929 | A substance is either a bundle of properties, or a bare substratum, or an essence [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: The three main theories of substance are the bundle theory (Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Ayer), the bare substratum theory (Locke and Bergmann), and the essentialist theory. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Macdonald defends the essentialist theory. The essentialist view immediately appeals to me. Properties must be OF something, and the something must have the power to produce properties. So there. |
| 7941 | Each substance contains a non-property, which is its substratum or bare particular [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: A rival to the bundle theory says that, for each substance, there is a constituent of it that is not a property but is both essential and unique to it, this constituent being referred to as a 'bare particular' or 'substratum'. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't sound promising. It is unclear what existence devoid of all properties could be like. How could it 'have' its properties if it was devoid of features (it seems to need property-hooks)? It is an ontological black hole. How do you prove it? |
| 7942 | The substratum theory explains the unity of substances, and their survival through change [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: If there is a substratum or bare particular within a substance, this gives an explanation of the unity of substances, and it is something which can survive intact when a substance changes. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: [v. compressed wording] Many problems here. The one that strikes me is that when things change they sometimes lose their unity and identity, and that seems to be decided entirely from observation of properties, not from assessing the substratum. |
| 7943 | A substratum has the quality of being bare, and they are useless because indiscernible [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be no way of identifying a substratum as the bearer of qualities without qualifiying it as bare (having the property of being bare?), ..and they cannot be used to individuate things, because they are necessarily indiscernible. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: The defence would probably be a priori, claiming an axiomatic necessity for substrata in our thinking about the world, along with a denial that bareness is a property (any more than not being a contemporary of Napoleon is a property). |
| 7927 | At different times Leibniz articulated three different versions of his so-called Law [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: There are three distinct versions of Leibniz's Law, all traced to remarks made by Leibniz: the Identity of Indiscernibles (same properties, same thing), the Indiscernibility of Identicals (same thing, same properties), and the Substitution Principle. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: The best view seems to be to treat the second one as Leibniz's Law (and uncontroversially true), and the first one as being an interesting but dubious claim. |
| 7928 | The Identity of Indiscernibles is false, because it is not necessarily true [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: One common argument to the conclusion that the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is false is that it is not necessarily true. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.2 n32) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a good argument. If you test the Principle with an example ('this butler is the murderer') then total identity does not seem to necessitate identity, though it strongly implies it (the butler may have a twin etc). |
| 15884 | Laws of nature remain the same through any conditions, if the underlying mechanisms are unchanged [Harré] |
| Full Idea: A statement is a law of nature if it is true in all those worlds which differ only as to their initial conditions, that is in which the underlying mechanisms of nature are the same. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 4) | |
| A reaction: Harré takes it that laws of nature have to be necessary, by definition. I like this way of expressing natural necessity, in terms of 'mechanisms' rather than of 'laws'. Where do the mechanisms get their necessity? |
| 15880 | In physical sciences particular observations are ordered, but in biology only the classes are ordered [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In the physical sciences the particular observations and experimental results are usually orderable, while in the biological sciences it is the classes of organism which are ordered, not the particular organisms. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: Harré is interesting on the role of ordering in science. Functions can be defined by an order. Maths feeds on orderings. Physics, he notes, focuses on things which vary together. |
| 15869 | Reports of experiments eliminate the experimenter, and present results as the behaviour of nature [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In accounts of experiments, by Faraday and others, the role of the guiding hand of the actual experimenter is written out in successive accounts. The effect is to display the phenomenon as a natural occurrence, existing independently of the experiments. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: He records three stages in Faraday's reports. The move from active to passive voice is obviously part of it. The claim of universality is thus implicit rather than explicit. |
| 15881 | We can save laws from counter-instances by treating the latter as analytic definitions [Harré] |
| Full Idea: When we come upon a counter-instance to a generalisation we can save the putative law, by treating it as potentially analytic and claiming it as a definition. ...Thus magnetism doesn't hold for phosphorus, so we say phosphorus is not a magnetic substance. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: He notes this as being particularly true when the laws concern the dispositions of substances, rather than patterns of events. |
| 15882 | Since there are three different dimensions for generalising laws, no one system of logic can cover them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Since there are three different dimensions of generality into which every law of nature is generalised, there can be no one system of logic which will govern inference to or from every law of every kind. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at the covering-law approach, which actually aims to output observations as logical inferences from laws. Wrong. |
| 15888 | The grue problem shows that natural kinds are central to science [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The grue problem illustrates the enormous importance that the concept of a natural-kind plays in real science. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: The point is that we took emeralds to be a natural kind, but 'grue' proposes that they aren't, since stability is the hallmark of a natural kind. |
| 15887 | 'Grue' introduces a new causal hypothesis - that emeralds can change colour [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In introducing the predicate 'grue' we also introduce an additional causal hypothesis into our chemistry and physics; namely, that when observed grue emeralds change from blue to green. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: [The 'when observered' is a Harré addition] I hate 'grue'. Only people who think our predicates have very little to do with reality are impressed by it. Grue is a behaviour, not a colour. |
| 15889 | It is because ravens are birds that their species and their colour might be connected [Harré] |
| Full Idea: It is because ravens are birds that it makes sense to contemplate the possibility of a lawful relation between their species and their colour. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: Compare the 'laws' concerning leaf colour in autumn, and the 'laws' concerning packaging colour in supermarkets. Harré's underlying point is that raven colour concerns mechanism. |
| 15890 | Non-black non-ravens just aren't part of the presuppositions of 'all ravens are black' [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Non-black non-ravens have no role to play in assessing the plausibility of 'All ravens are black' because their existence is not among the existential presuppositions of that statement. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Strawson for the 'presupposition' approach] |
| 15885 | The necessity of Newton's First Law derives from the nature of material things, not from a mechanism [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The 'must' of Newton's First Law is different. There is no deeper level relative to the processes described to give a mechanism which generates uniform motion. There is no such mechanism. ..It specifies what it is for something to be a material thing. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 4) | |
| A reaction: Harré says the law can only exist as part of a network of other ideas. |
| 15868 | Idealisation idealises all of a thing's properties, but abstraction leaves some of them out [Harré] |
| Full Idea: An 'idealisation' preserves all the properties of the source but it possesses these properties in some ideal or perfect form. ...An 'abstraction', on the other hand, lacks certain features of its source. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: Yet another example in contemporary philosophy of a clear understanding of the sort of abstraction which Geach and others have poured scorn on. |
| 7947 | In continuity, what matters is not just the beginning and end states, but the process itself [Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: What matters to continuity is not just the beginning and end states of the process by which a thing persists, perhaps through change, but the process itself. | |
| From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a really important insight. Compare Idea 4931. If this is the key to understanding mind and personal identity, it means that the concept of a 'process' must be a central issue in ontology. How do you individuate a process? |
| 15886 | Science rests on the principle that nature is a hierarchy of natural kinds [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The animating principle behind the material and discursive practices of science is the thesis that nature exemplifies multiple hierarchies of natural kinds. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: I agree. I take it to be a brute fact that there seem to be lots of stable natural kinds, which are worth investigating as long as they stay stable. If they are unstable, there needs to be something stable to measure that by - or we give up. |
| 15864 | Classification is just as important as laws in natural science [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Classification systems, or taxonomies, are as important a part of the natural sciences as are the laws of nature. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This illustrates how our view of science is radically shifted if we give biology equal prominence with physics. |
| 15865 | Newton's First Law cannot be demonstrated experimentally, as that needs absence of external forces [Harré] |
| Full Idea: We can never devise an experimental situation in which there are no external forces to act on a body. It follows that Newton's First Law could never be demonstrated by means of experiment or observation. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: It can't be wholly demonstrated, but certain observations conform to it, such as the movement of low friction bodies, or the movements of planetary bodies. |
| 15862 | Laws can come from data, from theory, from imagination and concepts, or from procedures [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Boyle's Law generalises a mass of messy data culled from an apparatus; Snell's Law is an experimentally derived law deducible from theory; Newton's First Law derives from concepts and thought experiments; Mendel's Law used an experimental procedure. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: Nice examples, especially since Boyle's and Newton's laws are divided by a huge gulf, and arrived at about the same time. On p.35 Harré says these come down to two: abstraction from experiment, and derivation from deep assumptions. |
| 15870 | Are laws of nature about events, or types and universals, or dispositions, or all three? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: What is Newton's First Law about? Is it about events? Is it about types or universals? Is it about dispositions? Or is it, in some peculiar way, about all three? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: If laws merely chart regularities, then I suppose they are about events (which exhibit the regular patterns). If laws explain, which would be nice, then they are only about universals if you are a platonist. Hence laws are about dispositions. |
| 15871 | Are laws about what has or might happen, or do they also cover all the possibilities? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Is Newton's First Law about what has actually happened or is it about what might, or could possibly happen? Is it about the actual events and states of the world, or possible events and states? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I presume the first sentence distinguishes between what 'might (well)' happen, and what 'could (just) possibly happen'. I take it for granted that laws predict the actual future. The question is are they true of situations which will never occur? |
| 15876 | Maybe laws of nature are just relations between properties? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The idea of the Dretske-Armstrong-Tooley view is very simple: the laws of nature relate properties to properties. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the relations are necessary ones. I don't see why we need to mention these wretched 'universals' in order to expound this theory. It sounds much more plausible if you just say a property is defined by the way it relates to other properties. |
| 15860 | We take it that only necessary happenings could be laws [Harré] |
| Full Idea: We do not take laws to be recordings of what happens perchance or for the most part, but specifications of what happens necessarily | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a plausible necessary condition for a law, but it may not be a sufficient one. Are trivial necessities laws? On this view if there are no necessities then there are no laws. |
| 15872 | Must laws of nature be universal, or could they be local? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Is a law of nature about everything in the universe or just about a restricted group of things? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I presume the answer is that while a law may only refer to a small group of things, the law would still have to apply if that group moved or spread or enlarged, so it would have to be universals. A laws confined to one time or place? Maybe. |
| 15867 | Laws describe abstract idealisations, not the actual mess of nature [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature are not simple descriptions of what can be seen to happen. They are descriptions of abstractions and idealisations from a somewhat messy reality. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This view seems to have increasingly gripped modern philosophers, so that the old view of God decreeing a few simple equations to run the world has faded away. |
| 15892 | Laws of nature state necessary connections of things, events and properties, based on models of mechanisms [Harré] |
| Full Idea: A law of nature tells us what kinds of things, events and properties (all else being equal) go along with what. The 'must' of natural necessity has its place here because it is bound up with a model or analogy representing generative mechanisms. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is Harré's final page summary of laws. I agree with it. I would say that the laws are therefore descriptive, of the patterns of behaviour that arise when generative mechanisms meet. Maybe laws concern 'transformations'. |
| 15875 | In counterfactuals we keep substances constant, and imagine new situations for them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In drawing 'countefactual' conclusions we can be thought imaginatively to vary the conditions under which the substance, set-up etc. is manipulated or stimulated, while maintaining constant our conception of the nature of the being in question. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably you could vary the substance and keep the situation fixed, but then the counterfactual seems to be 'about' something different. Either that or the 'situation' is a actually a set of substances to be tested. |