29 ideas
19275 | You cannot understand what exists without understanding possibility and necessity [Hale] |
Full Idea: I defend the thesis that questions about what kinds of things there are cannot be properly understood or adequately answered without recourse to considerations about possibility and necessity. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], Intro) | |
A reaction: Good. I would say that this is a growing realisation in contemporary philosophy. The issue is focused when we ask what are the limitations of Quine's approach to metaphysics. If you don't see possibilities around you, you are a fool. |
19291 | A canonical defintion specifies the type of thing, and what distinguish this specimen [Hale] |
Full Idea: One might think of a full dress, or canonical, definition as specifying what type of thing it is, and what distinguishes it from everything else within its type. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 06.4) | |
A reaction: Good! At last someone embraces the Aristotelian ideas that definitions are a) quite extensive and detailed (unlike lexicography), and b) they aim to get right down to the individual. In that sense, an essence is captured by a definition. |
19301 | With a negative free logic, we can dispense with the Barcan formulae [Hale] |
Full Idea: I reject both Barcan and Converse Barcan by adopting a negative free logic. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.3) | |
A reaction: See section 9.2 of Hale's book, where he makes his case. I can't evaluate this bold move, though I don't like the Barcan Formulae. We can anticipate objections to Hale: are you prepared to embrace the unexpected consequences of your new logic? |
19297 | The two Barcan principles are easily proved in fairly basic modal logic [Hale] |
Full Idea: If the Brouwersche principle, p ⊃ □◊p is adjoined to a standard quantified vesion of the weakest modal logic K, then one can prove both the Barcan principle, and its converse. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 09.2) | |
A reaction: The Brouwersche principle (that p implies that p must be possible) sounds reasonable, but the Barcan principles strike me as false, so something has to give. They are theorems of S5. Hale proposes giving up classical logic. |
19296 | If second-order variables range over sets, those are just objects; properties and relations aren't sets [Hale] |
Full Idea: Contrary to what Quine supposes, it is neither necessary nor desirable to interpret bound higher-order variables as ranging over sets. Sets are a species of object. They should range over entities of a completely different type: properties and relations. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 08.2) | |
A reaction: This helpfully clarifies something which was confusing me. If sets are objects, then 'second-order' logic just seems to be the same as first-order logic (rather than being 'set theory in disguise'). I quantify over properties, but deny their existence! |
12394 | If the result is bad, we change the rule; if we like the rule, we reject the result [Goodman] |
Full Idea: A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.64) | |
A reaction: This is clearly in tune with Quine's assertion that logic is potentially revisable, and the idea is pragmatist in spirit. It is hard to deny that intuitions about what makes a good argument control our logic. I say the world controls our intuitions. |
19289 | Maybe conventionalism applies to meaning, but not to the truth of propositions expressed [Hale] |
Full Idea: An old objection to conventionalism claims that it confuses sentences with propositions, confusing what makes sentences mean what they do with what makes them (as propositions) true. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 05.2) | |
A reaction: The conventions would presumably apply to the sentences, but not to the propositions. Since I think that focusing on propositions solves a lot of misunderstandings in modern philosophy, I like the sound of this. |
19298 | Unlike axiom proofs, natural deduction proofs needn't focus on logical truths and theorems [Hale] |
Full Idea: In contrast with axiomatic systems, in natural deductions systems of logic neither the premises nor the conclusions of steps in a derivation need themselves be logical truths or theorems of logic. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 09.2 n7) | |
A reaction: Not sure I get that. It can't be that everything in an axiomatic proof has to be a logical truth. How would you prove anything about the world that way? I'm obviously missing something. |
19295 | Add Hume's principle to logic, to get numbers; arithmetic truths rest on the nature of the numbers [Hale] |
Full Idea: The existence of the natural numbers is not a matter of pure logic - it cannot be proved in pure logic. It can be proved in second-order logic plus Hume's principle. Truths of arithmetic are not logic - they depend on the nature of natural numbers. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 07.4) | |
A reaction: Hume's principles needs entities which can be matched to one another, so a certain ontology is needed to get neo-logicism off the ground. |
19281 | Interesting supervenience must characterise the base quite differently from what supervenes on it [Hale] |
Full Idea: Any intereresting supervenience thesis requires that the class of facts on which the allegedly supervening facts supervene be characterizable independently, without use or presupposition of the notions involved in stating the supervening facts. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.4.1) | |
A reaction: There might be intermediate cases here, since having descriptions which are utterly unconnected (at any level) might be rather challenging. |
19278 | There is no gap between a fact that p, and it is true that p; so we only have the truth-condtions for p [Hale] |
Full Idea: There is no clear gap between its being a fact that p and its being true that p, no obvious way to individuate the fact a true statement records other than via that statement's truth-conditions. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.2) | |
A reaction: Typical of philosophers of language. The concept of a fact is of something mind-independent; the concept of a truth is of something mind-dependent. They can't therefore be the same thing (by the contrapositive of the indiscernability of identicals!). |
14292 | Dispositions seem more ethereal than behaviour; a non-occult account of them would be nice [Goodman] |
Full Idea: Dispositions of a thing are as important to us as overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. So we are moved to enquire whether we can bring them down to earth, and explain disposition terms without reference to occult powers. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], II.3) | |
A reaction: Mumford quotes this at the start of his book on dispositions, as his agenda. I suspect that the 'occult' aspect crept in because dispositions were based on powers, and the dominant view was that these were the immediate work of God. |
19302 | If a chair could be made of slightly different material, that could lead to big changes [Hale] |
Full Idea: How shall we prevent a sorites taking us to the conclusion that a chair might have originated in a completely disjoint lot of wood, or even in some other material altogether? | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.3.7) | |
A reaction: This seems a good criticism of Kripke's implausible claim that his lectern is necessarily (or essentially) made of the piece of wood it is made of. Could his lectern have had a small piece of plastic inserted in it? |
19290 | Absolute necessities are necessarily necessary [Hale] |
Full Idea: I argue that any absolute necessity is necessarily necessary. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 05.5.2) | |
A reaction: This requires the principle of S4 modal logic, that necessity implies necessary necessity. He argues that S5 is the logical of absolute necessity. |
19286 | 'Absolute necessity' is when there is no restriction on the things which necessitate p [Hale] |
Full Idea: The strength of the claim that p is 'absolutely necessary' derives from the fact that in its expression as a universally quantified counterfactual ('everything will necessitate p'), the quantifier ranges over all propositions whatever. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.1) | |
A reaction: Other philosophers don't seem to use the term 'absolute necessity', but it seems a useful concept, in contrast to conditional or local necessities. You can't buy chocolate on the sun. |
19288 | Logical and metaphysical necessities differ in their vocabulary, and their underlying entities [Hale] |
Full Idea: The difference between logical and metaphysical necessities lies, not in the range of possibilities for which they hold, but - at the linguistic level - in the kind of vocabulary essential to their expression, and the kinds of entities that explain them. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.5) | |
A reaction: I don't think much of the idea that the difference is just linguistic, and I don't like the idea of 'entities' as grounding them. I see logical necessities as arising from natural deduction rules, and metaphysical ones coming from the nature of reality. |
19285 | Logical necessity is something which is true, no matter what else is the case [Hale] |
Full Idea: We can identify the belief that the proposition that p is logically necessary, where p may be of any logical form, with the belief that, no matter what else was the case, it would be true that p. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.1) | |
A reaction: I find this surprising. I take it that logical necessity must be the consequence of logic. That all squares have corners doesn't seem to be a matter of logic. But then he seems to expand logical necessity to include conceptual necessity. Why? |
19287 | Maybe each type of logic has its own necessity, gradually becoming broader [Hale] |
Full Idea: We can distinguish between narrower and broader kinds of logical necessity. There are, for example, the logical necessities of propostional logic, those of first-order logic, and so on. Maybe they are necessities expressed using logical vocabulary. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.5) | |
A reaction: Hale goes on to prefer a view that embraces conceptual necessities. I think in philosophy we should designate the necessities according to their sources. This might clarify a currently rather confused situation. First-order includes propositional logic. |
19282 | It seems that we cannot show that modal facts depend on non-modal facts [Hale] |
Full Idea: I think we may conclude that there is no significant version of modal supervenience which both commands acceptance and implies that all modal facts depend asymmetrically on non-modal ones. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.4.3) | |
A reaction: This is the conclusion of a sustained and careful discussion, recorded here for interest. I'm inclined to think that there are very few, if any, non-modal facts in the world, if those facts are accurately characterised. |
19276 | The big challenge for essentialist views of modality is things having necessary existence [Hale] |
Full Idea: Whether the essentialist theory can account for all absolute necessities depends in part on whether the theory can explain the necessities of existence (of certain objects, properties and entities). | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], Intro) | |
A reaction: Hale has a Fregean commitment to all sorts of abstract objects, and then finds difficulty in explaining them from his essentialist viewpoint. His book didn't convince me. I'm more of a nominalist, me, so I sleep better at nights. |
19293 | Essentialism doesn't explain necessity reductively; it explains all necessities in terms of a few basic natures [Hale] |
Full Idea: The point of the essentialist theory is not to provide a reductive explanation of necessities. It is, rather, to locate a base class of necessities - those which directly reflect the natures of things - in terms of which the remainder may be explained. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 06.6) | |
A reaction: My picture is of most of the necessities being directly explained by the natures of things, rather than a small core of natures generating all the derived ones. All the necessities of squares derive from the nature of the square. |
19294 | If necessity derives from essences, how do we explain the necessary existence of essences? [Hale] |
Full Idea: If the essentialist theory of necessity is to be adequate, it must be able to explain how the existence of certain objects - such as the natural numbers - can itself be absolutely necessary. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 07.1) | |
A reaction: Hale and his neo-logicist pals think that numbers are 'objects', and they necessarily exist, so he obviously has a problem. I don't see any alternative for essentialists to treating the existing (and possible) natures as brute facts. |
19279 | What are these worlds, that being true in all of them makes something necessary? [Hale] |
Full Idea: We need an explanation of what worlds are that makes clear why being true at all of them should be necessary and sufficient for being necessary (and true at one of them suffices for being possible). | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.3.2) | |
A reaction: Hale is introducing combinatorial accounts of worlds, as one possible answer to this. Hale observes that all the worlds might be identical to our world. It is always assumed that the worlds are hugely varied. But maybe worlds are constrained. |
19299 | Possible worlds make every proposition true or false, which endorses classical logic [Hale] |
Full Idea: The standard conception of worlds incorporates the assumption of bivalence - every proposition is either true or false. But it is infelicitous to build into one's basic semantic machinery a principle endorsing classical logic against its rivals. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 10.3) | |
A reaction: No wonder Dummett (with his intuitionist logic) immediately spurned possible worlds. This objection must be central to many recent thinkers who have begun to doubt possible worlds. I heard Kit Fine say 'always kick possible worlds where you can'. |
18749 | Goodman argued that the confirmation relation can never be formalised [Goodman, by Horsten/Pettigrew] |
Full Idea: Goodman constructed arguments that purported to show that a satisfactory syntactic analysis of the confirmation relation can never be found. In response, philosophers of science tried to model it in probabilistic terms. | |
From: report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R - Mathematical Methods in Philosophy 4 | |
A reaction: I take this idea to say that Bayesianism was developed in response to the grue problem. This is an interesting light on 'grue', which never bothered me much. The point is it scuppered formal attempts to model induction. |
17646 | Goodman showed that every sound inductive argument has an unsound one of the same form [Goodman, by Putnam] |
Full Idea: Goodman has shown that no purely formal criterion can distinguish arguments that are intuitively sound inductive arguments for unsound ones: for every sound one there is an unsound one of the same form. The predicates in the argument make the difference. | |
From: report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Hilary Putnam - Why there isn't a ready-made world 'Causation' | |
A reaction: This is to swallow grue whole. I think a bit more chewing is called for. By this date Putnam strikes me as a crazy relativist who has lost his grip on the world. Note the word 'formal' - but Putnam seems to think the argument is important. |
16383 | Puzzled Pierre has two mental files about the same object [Recanati on Kripke] |
Full Idea: In Kripke's puzzle about belief, the subject has two distinct mental files about one and the same object. | |
From: comment on Saul A. Kripke (A Puzzle about Belief [1979]) by François Recanati - Mental Files 17.1 | |
A reaction: [Pierre distinguishes 'London' from 'Londres'] The Kripkean puzzle is presented as very deep, but I have always felt there was a simple explanation, and I suspect that this is it (though I will leave the reader to think it through, as I'm very busy…). |
19300 | The molecules may explain the water, but they are not what 'water' means [Hale] |
Full Idea: What it is to be (pure) water is to be explained in terms of being composed of H2O molecules, but this is not what the word 'water' means. | |
From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.2) | |
A reaction: Hale says when the real and verbal definitions match, we can know the essence a priori. If they come apart, presumably we need a posteriori research. Interesting. It is certainly dubious to say a stuff-word means its chemical composition. |
4794 | We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them [Goodman] |
Full Idea: Rather than a sentence being used for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.21), quoted by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §5.4 | |
A reaction: This smacks of dodgy pragmatism, and sounds deeply wrong. The perception of a law has to be prior to making the prediction. Why do we make the prediction, if we haven't spotted a law. Goodman is mesmerised by language instead of reality. |