87 ideas
| 20388 | 'Necessary' conditions are requirements, and 'sufficient' conditions are guarantees [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: A 'necessary' condition for something's being an X is condition that all Xs must satisfy. ...A 'sufficient' condition for something's being an X is a condition that, when satisfied, guarantees that what satisfies it is an X. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: By summarising this I arrive at the requirement/guarantee formulation, which I am rather pleased with. What is required for rain, and what guarantees rain? |
| 2463 | A standard naturalist view is realist, externalist, and computationalist, and believes in rationality [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be an emerging naturalist consensus that is Realist in ontology and epistemology, externalist in semantics, and computationalist in cognitive psychology, which nicely allows us to retain our understanding of ourselves as rational creatures. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 20389 | A definition of a thing gives all the requirements which add up to a guarantee of it [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: If we specify the 'necessary' conditions that are 'sufficient' for something's being an X, that is a combination of conditions such that all and only Xs meet them, which is the hallmark of a definition of X-hood. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: There are, of course, many other ways to define something, as shown in the 2.D Reason | Definition section of this database. This nicely summarises the classical view. |
| 20391 | Feminists warn that ideologies use timeless objective definitions as a tool of repression [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: According to the feminist critique, ideologies that operate as tools of political repression are falsely represented as definitions possessing a timeless, natural, asocial, universal objectivity. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: I suppose this does not just apply to definitions, but to all expressions of ideologically repressive strategy. I'm trying to think of an example of a specifically feminist problem case. Davies doesn't cite anyone. |
| 8187 | Frege was strongly in favour of taking truth to attach to propositions [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Frege was strongly in favour of taking truth to attach to propositions, which he called 'thoughts' and regarded as being expressed by sentences. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Michael Dummett - Truth and the Past 1 | |
| A reaction: Sometimes it is necessary to know the time, the place, and the speaker before one can evaluate the truth of a proposition. Not just indexical words, but the indexical aspect of, say, "the team played badly". |
| 2435 | Psychology has to include the idea that mental processes are typically truth-preserving [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A psychology that can't make sense of such facts as that mental processes are typically truth-preserving is ipso facto dead in the water. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) |
| 2442 | Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Inferences are surely part of the causal structure of the world. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §3) |
| 18772 | We can treat designation by a few words as a proper name [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The designation of a single object can also consist of several words or other signs. For brevity, let every such designation be called a proper name. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]), quoted by Bernard Linsky - Quantification and Descriptions 1 | |
| A reaction: Frege regards names and descriptions as in the same class. Russell, and then Kripke, had things to say about that. |
| 14075 | Proper name in modal contexts refer obliquely, to their usual sense [Frege, by Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: According to Frege, a proper name in a modal context refers obliquely; its reference there is its usual sense. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Allan Gibbard - Contingent Identity V | |
| A reaction: [he cites the fourth page of Frege's 'Sense and Reference'] One can foresee problems with the word 'usual' here. Frege might be offering something better than Kripke does here. |
| 10424 | A Fregean proper name has a sense determining an object, instead of a concept [Frege, by Sainsbury] |
| Full Idea: We could think of a referring expression in Fregean terms as what he calls a proper name (Eigenname): its Sinn (sense) is supposed to determine an object as opposed to a concept as its Bedeutung (referent). | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Mark Sainsbury - The Essence of Reference 18.1 | |
| A reaction: The problem would be that the same expression could precisely indicate an object on one occasion, nearly do so on another, and totally fail on a third. |
| 18773 | People may have different senses for 'Aristotle', like 'pupil of Plato' or 'teacher of Alexander' [Frege] |
| Full Idea: In the case of an actual proper name such as 'Aristotle' opinions as to the sense may differ. It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], note), quoted by Bernard Linsky - Quantification and Descriptions 1 | |
| A reaction: This note is 'notorious', and was a central target for Kripke's critique. Frege says people's senses may vary on this, and thinks the sense of 'Aristotle' can be accurately expressed. |
| 4978 | The meaning of a proper name is the designated object [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The meaning of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by using it. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.30) | |
| A reaction: I can't actually make sense of this. How can a physical object be identical with a meaning? What sort of thing is a 'meaning'? Meanings are just 'in the head', I suspect. |
| 10510 | Frege ascribes reference to incomplete expressions, as well as to singular terms [Frege, by Hale] |
| Full Idea: Frege ascribes reference not only to singular terms, but equally to expressions of other kinds (the various kinds of incomplete expressions). | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Bob Hale - Abstract Objects Ch.3 Intro | |
| A reaction: The incomplete expressions presumably make reference to concepts. Frege may not seem, therefore, to have a notion of reference as what plugs language into reality - except that he is presumably a platonist about concepts. |
| 18937 | If sentences have a 'sense', empty name sentences can be understood that way [Frege, by Sawyer] |
| Full Idea: Frege's theory of 'sense' showed how sentences with empty names can have meaning and be understood. One just has to grasp the sense of the sentence (the thought expressed), and this is available even in the absence of a referent for the name. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Sarah Sawyer - Empty Names 2 | |
| A reaction: My immediate reaction is that this provides a promising solution to the empty names problem, which certainly never bothered me before I started reading philosophy. Sawyer says co-reference and truth problems remain. |
| 18940 | It is a weakness of natural languages to contain non-denoting names [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Languages have the fault of containing expressions which fail to designate an object. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.40) | |
| A reaction: Wrong, Frege! This is a strength of natural languages! Names are tools. It isn't a failure of your hammer if you can't find any nails. |
| 18939 | In a logically perfect language every well-formed proper name designates an object [Frege] |
| Full Idea: A logically perfect language should satisfy the conditions that every expression grammatically well constructed as a proper name out of signs already introduced shall in fact designate an object. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.41) | |
| A reaction: This seems to cramp your powers of reasoning, if you must know the object to use the name ('Jack the Ripper'), and reasoning halts once you deny the object's existence ('Pegasus'), or you don't know if names co-refer ('Hesperus/Phosphorus'). |
| 9462 | Frege is intensionalist about reference, as it is determined by sense; identity of objects comes first [Frege, by Jacquette] |
| Full Idea: Intensionalism of reference is owing to Frege (in his otherwise extensionalist philosophy of language). Sense determines reference, so intension determines extension. An object must first satisfy identity requirements, and is thus in a set. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Dale Jacquette - Intro to 'Philosophy of Logic' §4 | |
| A reaction: The notion that identity of objects comes first sounds right - you can't just take objects as basic - they have to be individuated in order to be discussed. |
| 18936 | Frege moved from extensional to intensional semantics when he added the idea of 'sense' [Frege, by Sawyer] |
| Full Idea: Frege moved from an extensional semantic theory (that countenances only linguistic expressions and their referents) to an intensional theory that invokes in addition a notion of sense. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Sarah Sawyer - Empty Names 2 | |
| A reaction: This was because of Frege's famous 'puzzles', such as the morning/evening star. Quine loudly proclaimed himself an 'extensionalist', implying that he had extensional solutions for Frege's Puzzles. |
| 10533 | We can't get a semantics from nouns and predicates referring to the same thing [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Frege is denying that on a traditional basis we can construct a workable semantics for a language; we can't regard terms like 'wisdom' as standing for the very same thing as the predicate 'x is wise' stands for. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Michael Dummett - Frege Philosophy of Language (2nd ed) Ch.14 | |
| A reaction: This follows from Idea 10532, indicating how to deal with the problem of universals. So predicates refer to concepts, and singular terms to objects. But I see no authoritative way of deciding which is which, given that paraphrases are possible. |
| 4893 | Frege was asking how identities could be informative [Frege, by Perry] |
| Full Idea: A problem which Frege called to our attention is: how can identities be informative? | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by John Perry - Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness §5.2 | |
| A reaction: E.g. (in Russell's example) how is "Scott is the author of 'Waverley'" more informative than "Scott is Scott"? A simple answer might just be that informative identities also tell you of a thing's properties. "The red ball is the heavy ball". |
| 2462 | Control of belief is possible if you know truth conditions and what causes beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Premeditated cognitive management is possible if knowing the contents of one's thoughts would tell you what would make them true and what would cause you to have them. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I love the idea of 'cognitive management'. Since belief is fairly involuntary, I subject myself to the newspapers, books, TV and conversation which will create the style of beliefs to which I aspire. Why? |
| 2461 | An experiment is a deliberate version of what informal thinking does all the time [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Experimentation is an occasional and more or less self-conscious exercise in what informal thinking does all the time without thinking about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2454 | We can deliberately cause ourselves to have true thoughts - hence the value of experiments [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: A creature that knows what makes its thoughts true and what would cause it to have them, could therefore cause itself to have true thoughts. …This would explain why experimentation is so close to the heart of our cognitive style. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2455 | Interrogation and experiment submit us to having beliefs caused [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can put yourself into a situation where you may be caused to believe that P. Putting a question to someone who is in the know is one species of this behaviour, and putting a question to Nature (an experiment) is another. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2460 | Participation in an experiment requires agreement about what the outcome will mean [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: To be in the audience for an experiment you have to believe what the experimenter believes about what the outcome would mean, but not necessarily what the outcome will be. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2458 | Theories are links in the causal chain between the environment and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Theories function as links in the causal chains that run from environmental outcomes to the beliefs that they cause the inquirer to have. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) |
| 2443 | I say psychology is intentional, semantics is informational, and thinking is computation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I hold that psychological laws are intentional, that semantics is purely informational, and that thinking is computation (and that it is possible to hold all of these assumptions at once). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: When he puts it baldly like that, it doesn't sound terribly persuasive. Thinking is 'computation'? Raw experience is irrelevant? What is it 'like' to spot an interesting connection between two propositions or concepts? It's not like adding 7 and 5. |
| 2453 | We are probably the only creatures that can think about our own thoughts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I think it is likely that we are the only creatures that can think about the contents of our thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a major idea. If you ask me the traditional question - what is the essential difference between us and other animals? - this is my answer (not language, or reason). We are the metathinkers. |
| 2446 | Cartesians consider interaction to be a miracle [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The Cartesian view is that the interaction problem does arise, but is unsolvable because interaction is miraculous. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: A rather unsympathetic statement of the position. Cartesians might think that God could explain to us how interaction works. Cartesians are not mysterians, I think, but they see no sign of any theory of interaction. |
| 2445 | Semantics v syntax is the interaction problem all over again [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The question how mental representations could be both semantic, like propositions, and causal, like rocks, trees, and neural firings, is arguably just the interaction problem all over again. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Interesting way of presenting the problem. If you seem to be confronting the interaction problem, you have probably drifted into a bogus dualist way of thinking. Retreat, and reformulate you questions and conceptual apparatus, till the question vanishes. |
| 2464 | Type physicalism equates mental kinds with physical kinds [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Type physicalism is, roughly, the doctrine that psychological kinds are identical to neurological kinds. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App A n.1) | |
| A reaction: This gets my general support, leaving open the nature of 'kinds'. Presumably the identity is strict, as in 'Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus'. It seems unlikely that if you and I think the 'same' thought, that we have strictly identical brain states. |
| 2447 | Hume has no theory of the co-ordination of the mind [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: What Hume didn't see was that the causal and representational properties of mental symbols have somehow to be coordinated if the coherence of mental life is to be accounted for. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly the idea that it all somehow becomes magic at the point where the brain represents the world is incoherent - but it is a bit magical. How can the whole of my garden be in my brain? Weird. |
| 2440 | Propositional attitudes are propositions presented in a certain way [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Propositional attitudes are really three-place relations, between a creature, a proposition, and a mode of presentation (which are sentences of Mentalese). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'really'! Why do we need a creature? Isn't 'hoping it will rain' a propositional attitude which some creature may or may not have? Fodor wants it to be physical, but it's abstract? |
| 2450 | Rationality has mental properties - autonomy, productivity, experiment [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mentalism isn't gratuitous; you need it to explain rationality. Mental causation buys you behaviours that are unlike reflexes in at least three ways: they're autonomous, they're productive, and they're experimental. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: He makes his three ways sound all-or-nothing, which is (I believe) the single biggest danger when thinking about the mind. "Either you are conscious, or you are not..." |
| 2437 | XYZ (Twin Earth 'water') is an impossibility [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There isn't any XYZ, and there couldn't be any, and so we don't have to worry about it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: Jadeite and Nephrite are real enough, which are virtually indistinguishable variants of jade. You just need Twin Jewellers instead of Twin Earths. We could build them, and employ twins to work there. |
| 2441 | Truth conditions require a broad concept of content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We need the idea of broad content to make sense of the fact that thoughts have the truth-conditions that they do. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.II) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be (as Dummett points out) a potential circularity here, as you can hardly know the truth-conditions of something if you don't already know its content. |
| 3114 | Concepts aren't linked to stuff; they are what is caused by stuff [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the words of 'Swamp Man' (spontaneously created, with concepts) are about XYZ on Twin Earth, it is not because he's causally connected to the stuff, but because XYZ would cause his 'water' tokens (in the absence of H2O). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], App B) | |
| A reaction: The sight of the Eiffel tower causes my 'France' tokens, so is my word "France" about the Eiffel Tower? What would cause my 'nothing' tokens? |
| 2452 | Knowing the cause of a thought is almost knowing its content [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you know quite a lot about what would cause you to have it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where this fits into the great jigsaw of the mind, but it strikes me as an acute and important observation. The truth of a thought is not essential to make you have it. Ask Othello. |
| 2432 | Is content basically information, fixed externally? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I assume intentional content reduces (in some way) to information. …The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not the way that it is related to other thoughts. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2) | |
| A reaction: Does this make Fodor a 'weak' functionalist? The 'strong' version would say a thought is merely a location in a flow diagram, but Fodor's 'mentalism' includes a further 'content' in each diagram box. |
| 2438 | In the information view, concepts are potentials for making distinctions [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Semantics, according to the informational view, is mostly about counterfactuals; what counts for the identity of my concepts is not what I do distinguish but what I could distinguish if I cared to (even using instruments and experts). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: We all differ in our discriminations (and awareness of expertise), so our concepts would differ, which is bad news for communication (see Idea 223). The view has some plausibility, though. |
| 18752 | 'The concept "horse"' denotes a concept, yet seems also to denote an object [Frege, by McGee] |
| Full Idea: The phrase 'the concept "horse"' can be the subject of a sentence, and ought to denote an object. But it clearly denotes the concept "horse". Yet Fregean concepts are said to be 'incomplete' objects, which led to confusion. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Vann McGee - Logical Consequence 4 | |
| A reaction: This is the notorious 'concept "horse"' problem, which was bad news for Frege's idea of a concept. |
| 2439 | Semantic externalism says the concept 'elm' needs no further beliefs or inferences [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the essence of semantic externalism that there is nothing that you have to believe, there are no inferences that you have to accept, to have the concept 'elm'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §2.I) | |
| A reaction: [REMINDER: broad content is filed in 18.C.7, under 'Thought' rather than under language. That is because I am a philospher of thought, rather than of language. |
| 2457 | If meaning is information, that establishes the causal link between the state of the world and our beliefs [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: It is the causal connection between the state of the world and the contents of beliefs that the reduction of meaning to information is designed to insure. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear why characterising the contents of a belief in terms of its information has to amount to a 'reduction'. A cup of tea isn't reduced to tea. Connections imply duality. |
| 22318 | Frege failed to show when two sets of truth-conditions are equivalent [Frege, by Potter] |
| Full Idea: Frege's account suffered from a lack of precision about when two sets of truth-conditions should count as equivalent. (Wittgenstein aimed to rectify this defect). | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 50 Intro |
| 4980 | The meaning (reference) of a sentence is its truth value - the circumstance of it being true or false [Frege] |
| Full Idea: We are driven into accepting the truth-value of a sentence as constituting what it means (refers to). By the truth-value I understand the circumstance that it is true or false. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.34) | |
| A reaction: Sounds bizarre, but Black's translation doesn't help. The notion of what the whole sentence refers to (rather than its sense) is a very theoretical notion. 'All true sentences refer to the truth' sounds harmless enough. |
| 2451 | To know the content of a thought is to know what would make it true [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If you know the content of a thought, you thereby know what would make the thought true. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: The truthmaker might by physically impossible, and careful thought might show it to be contradictory - but that wouldn't destroy the meaning. |
| 9180 | Holism says all language use is also a change in the rules of language [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Frege thought of a language as a game played with fixed rules, there being all the difference in the world between a move in the game and an alteration of the rules; but, if holism is correct, every move in the game changes the rules. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Michael Dummett - Frege's Distinction of Sense and Reference p.248 | |
| A reaction: Rules do shift over time, so there must be some mechanism for that - the rules can't sit in sacrosanct isolation. People play games with the language itself, as well as using it to play other games. |
| 2433 | For holists no two thoughts are ever quite the same, which destroys faith in meaning [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If what you are thinking depends on all of what you believe, then nobody ever thinks the same thing twice. …That is why so many semantic holists (Quine, Putnam, Rorty, Churchland, probably Wittgenstein) end up being semantic eliminativists. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: If linguistic holism is nonsense, this is easily settled. What I say about breakfast is not changed by reading some Gibbon yesterday. |
| 4981 | The reference of a word should be understood as part of the reference of the sentence [Frege] |
| Full Idea: I have transferred the relation between the parts and the whole of the sentence to its reference, by calling the reference of the word part of the reference of the sentence, if the word itself is part of the sentence. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.35) | |
| A reaction: Since Frege says the reference of a true sentence is simply to truth, words have reference insofar as they make contributions to attempts at stating truths. |
| 15597 | Frege's Puzzle: from different semantics we infer different reference for two names with the same reference [Frege, by Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Frege's Puzzle: If two sentences convey different information, they have different semantic roles, so the names 'Cicero' and 'Tully' are semantically different, in which case they are referentially different - but they are not referentially different. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Kit Fine - Semantic Relationism 2.A | |
| A reaction: [this is my summary of Fine's summary] Given the paradox, the question is which of these premisses should be challenged. Fregeans reject their being referentially different. Referentialists reject the different semantic roles. |
| 17002 | Frege's 'sense' is ambiguous, between the meaning of a designator, and how it fixes reference [Kripke on Frege] |
| Full Idea: Frege should be criticised for using the term 'sense' in two senses. He takes the sense of a designator to be its meaning; and he also takes it to be the way its reference is determined. …They correspond to two ordinary uses of 'definition'. | |
| From: comment on Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Saul A. Kripke - Naming and Necessity lectures Lecture 1 | |
| A reaction: Stalnaker quotes this, but seems unconvinced that Frege is guilty. If the 'meaning' largely consists of a way of determining a reference, Frege would be in the clear. |
| 18778 | Every descriptive name has a sense, but may not have a reference [Frege] |
| Full Idea: It may perhaps be granted that every grammatically well-formed expression representing a proper name always has a sense. But this is not to say that to this sense there also corresponds a reference. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]), quoted by Bernard Linsky - Quantification and Descriptions 3.1 | |
| A reaction: Presumably this concerns fictional names such as 'Pegasus'. It seems to be good simple evidence for the distinction between sense and reference. |
| 7805 | Frege started as anti-realist, but the sense/reference distinction led him to realism [Frege, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: In the Grundlagen of 1884 Frege was an anti-realist, but in Grundgesetze of 1893 he is a realist, who has profited by his interim discovery of the sense/reference distinction. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by José A. Benardete - Logic and Ontology | |
| A reaction: This is the germ of the new realist philosophy which seems to be growing out of Kripke and co's causal theory of reference. The very notion of reference is realist (hence Russell's realism). |
| 4976 | The meaning (reference) of 'evening star' is the same as that of 'morning star', but not the sense [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The meaning (reference) of 'evening star' is the same as that of 'morning star', but not the sense. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.27) | |
| A reaction: Max Black translates 'bedeutung' as 'meaning', but nowadays everyone calls it 'reference'. This is Frege's crucial distinction, which greatly clarified analytical philosophy. Nevertheless, is it a sharp distinction? E.g. referring to a fictional name? |
| 4977 | In maths, there are phrases with a clear sense, but no actual reference [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The expression 'the least rapidly convergent series' has a sense but demonstrably there is no reference, since a less rapidly convergent series (for any given series) can always be found. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.28) | |
| A reaction: A nice example. 'The second Kennedy assassin' has a clear meaning, but does it have a reference? The meaning 'points at' a possible reference. We yet discover an identity. |
| 4979 | We are driven from sense to reference by our desire for truth [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The striving for truth drives us always to advance from the sense to the thing meant (the reference). | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], p.33) | |
| A reaction: As in, we want to know the reference of 'the person who shot Kennedy'. I always perk up if truth is mentioned in a discussion of language, because it reminds us of the point of the whole thing. In 'Is he the best man?' I have the reference, not the truth. |
| 2436 | It is claimed that reference doesn't fix sense (Jocasta), and sense doesn't fix reference (Twin Earth) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that Frege cases [knowing Jocasta but not mother] show that reference doesn't determine sense, and Twin cases [knowing water but not H2O] show that sense doesn't determine reference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: How about 'references don't contain much information', and 'descriptions may not fix what they are referring to'? Simple really. |
| 15155 | Expressions always give ways of thinking of referents, rather than the referents themselves [Frege, by Soames] |
| Full Idea: For Frege, expressions always contribute ways of thinking of their referents, rather than the referents themselves, to the thoughts expressed by sentences. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Scott Soames - Philosophy of Language 1.16 | |
| A reaction: I have some sympathy for Frege. It always strikes me as daft to think that if I say 'my dustbin is empty', the dustbin becomes 'part' of my sentence. Sentences don't contain large plastic objects. |
| 2434 | Broad semantics holds that the basic semantic properties are truth and denotation [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Broad semantic theories generally hold that the basic semantic properties of thoughts are truth and denotation. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §1.2b) | |
| A reaction: I think truth and denotation are the basic semantic properties, but I am dubious about whole-hearted broad semantic theories, so I seem to have gone horribly wrong somewhere. |
| 11126 | 'Sense' gives meaning to non-referring names, and to two expressions for one referent [Frege, by Margolis/Laurence] |
| Full Idea: Frege notes that an expression without a referent ('Pegasus') needn't lack a meaning, since it still has a sense, and the same referent (Eric Blair) can be associated with different expressions (George Orwell) because they convey different senses. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by E Margolis/S Laurence - Concepts 1.3 | |
| A reaction: A nice neat summary of the value of Frege's introduction of the sense/reference distinction, which seems to me to be virtually undeniable (a rare event in modern philosophy). |
| 8164 | Frege was the first to construct a plausible theory of meaning [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Frege was the first to construct a plausible theory of meaning, that is, a theory of how a human language functions. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 1 | |
| A reaction: Presumably Frege had an advantage because he was the first to distinguish sense from reference, and hence to identify the subject-matter of the theory. Essentially Frege's theory is that of truth-conditions. |
| 9817 | Earlier Frege focuses on content itself; later he became interested in understanding content [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Earlier Frege was interested solely in the content of our statements, not in our grasp of that content. His notion of 'sense' from 1891 onwards, has to do with understanding; the sense of an expression is something we grasp. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: The important point must be that the later theory depends on the earlier, so we can hardly give theories of understanding, if we don't have a view about what it is that is understood. |
| 8171 | Frege divided the meaning of a sentence into sense, force and tone [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Frege distinguished three components of the meaning of a sentence: sense, force and tone; he used no single term for 'linguistic meaning' in general. ...The sense is only what bears on the truth or falsity of what the sentence expresses. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 3 | |
| A reaction: Modern theories of meaning seem to assume that there is one item called 'meaning' which needs to be explained, but presumably this is 'strict and literal meaning', leaving the rest to pragmatics. |
| 4954 | Frege uses 'sense' to mean both a designator's meaning, and the way its reference is determined [Kripke on Frege] |
| Full Idea: Frege should be criticised for using the term 'sense' in two senses. For he takes the sense of a designator to be its meaning; and he also takes it to be the way its reference is determined. | |
| From: comment on Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892]) by Saul A. Kripke - Naming and Necessity lectures Lecture 1 | |
| A reaction: This criticism doesn't surprise me, as heroic pioneers like Frege seem to have been extremely unclear about what they were claiming. Kripke has helped, but we still need some great mind to step in and sort out the mess. |
| 7304 | Frege explained meaning as sense, semantic value, reference, force and tone [Frege, by Miller,A] |
| Full Idea: Frege analysed the intuitive notion of meaning in terms of the notions of sense, semantic value, reference, force and tone. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Sense and Reference [1892], Pref) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language Pref | |
| A reaction: This suggests that there are two approaches to the explanation of meaning: either a simple identity with some other mental fact, or an analysis (as here) into a range of components. I remain open-minded on that. |
| 2459 | Externalist semantics are necessary to connect the contents of beliefs with how the world is [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You need an externalist semantics to explain why the contents of beliefs should have anything to do with how the world is. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (The Elm and the Expert [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: Since externalist semantics only emerged in the 1970s, that implies that no previous theory had any notion that language had some connection to how the world is. Eh? |
| 20387 | Aesthetic experience involves perception, but also imagination and understanding [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: It was suggested that aesthetic experience isn't solely perceptual. It's infused by a cognitive but non-conceptual process described by Kant as involving the free play of the imagination and the understanding. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This fits literature very well, painting quite well, and music hardly at all. |
| 20385 | The faculty of 'taste' was posited to explain why only some people had aesthetic appreciation [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: To explain why not everyone who is prepared to encounter a thing's aesthetic properties can recognise them, ...eighteenth century theorists posited the existence of a special faculty of aesthetic perception, that of taste. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: But there seem to be two aspects to taste - first the capacity to enjoy some sorts of art, and second the ability to discriminate the good from the bad. The latter is 'standards' of taste (Hume's title). Do non-musical people lack taste? |
| 20386 | The sublime is negative in awareness of insignificance, and positive in showing understanding [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: An example of the sublime is the vastness of the night sky. ...It includes negative feelings of insignificance in the face of nature's indifference, power and magnitude, but is positive in that we are capable of comprehending such matters. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: The negative part seems to be a very intellectual experience, with close links to religion, and may be the experience that leads to deism (belief in God's indifference). |
| 20384 | The idea that art forms are linked into a single concept began in the 1740s [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: The first to link the art forms together explicitly and to separate them from other disciplines and activities were the authors of encyclopedias and books in the 1740s and 1750s. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing that no individual seems to get the credit (or blame). Presumably our modern Aesthetics (applied to art) couldn't exist before this move was made - and yet there is plenty of aesthetic discussion in early Greek philosophy. |
| 20390 | Defining art as representation or expression or form were all undermined by the avant-garde [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: The avant-garde art of the twentieth century played a significant role in defeating definitions that had prevailed in earlier times, such as ones maintaining that art is representation, expression or significant form | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: I really think the first rule of philosophical aesthetics is 'ignore Marcel Duchamp'. We wouldn't give up our idea of philosophy if someone managed to publish a long string of expletives in a philosophy journal. Would we?? |
| 20392 | 'Aesthetic functionalism' says art is what is intended to create aesthetic experiences [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: 'Aesthetic functionalism' maintains that something is an artwork if it is intended to provide the person who contemplates it for its own sake with an aesthetic experience of a significant magnitude on the basis of its aesthetic features. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: [Beardsley is cited as having this view] For this you need to know what an aesthetic 'feature' is, and you'd have to indepdently recognise aesthetic experience. |
| 20405 | Music may be expressive by being 'associated' with other emotional words or events [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: One view explains music's expressiveness as 'associative'. Through being regularly associated with emotionally charged words or events, particular musical ideas become associated with emotions or moods. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a more promising theory. I take the feeling in music to be parasitic on other feelings we have, and other triggers that evoke them. I'm particularly struck with story-telling (which Levinson and Robinson also like). |
| 20403 | It seems unlikely that sad music expresses a composer's sadness; it takes ages to write [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: The 'expression theory' holds that if music is sad that is because it expresses the composer's sadness, ...but composers take a long time composing sad works, and may even been gleeful at receiving payment for it. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Pretty conclusive. I see composing as like acting. Just as you can put on a happy or sad face, so a composer can discover music that feels sad or happy. Three movement sonatas don't fit expression at all. |
| 20393 | The 'institutional' theory says art is just something appropriately placed in the 'artworld' [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: The 'institutional' theory says to be an artwork, an artwork must be appropriately placed within a web of practices, roles and frameworks that comprise an informally organised institution, the artworld. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: [He cites George Dickie] This theory seems to entirely developed to cope with the defiant gesture of Marcel Duchamp. Once I am an established artist, I have the authority to label anything I like as a work of art. Silly. |
| 20402 | Music is too definite to be put into words (not too indefinite!) [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: Mendelssohn said that what music expresses is not too indefinite to put into words but, on the contrary, it is too definite. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: Not sure whether that is true, but it is a lovely remark. It certainly challenges the naive philosophical view that words are the most precise mode of expression. |
| 20395 | The title of a painting can be vital, and the artist decrees who the portrait represents [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: The title as given by the artist is something we might need to know (Brueghel's 'Icarus', for example), ...and if a painting depicts one of two twins, it will be the artist's intention that settles which one it is. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: Those two points strike me as conclusively in favour of the importance of an artist's perceived intentions. |
| 20396 | We must know what the work is meant to be, to evaluate the artist's achievement [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: Learning that a work is a copy of an earlier work, or is done in the style of some other artist, is relevant to an evaluation of what its creator has achieved. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: A simple but powerful point. We evaluate a forgery as an achievement, and the original plate of a great print as the focus of the achievement. We can assess the achievement of a poem in any printed copy. But what about perfect painting replicas? |
| 20399 | Intentionalism says either meaning just is intention, or ('moderate') meaning is successful intention [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: 'Actual intentionalism' holds that work's meaning is what its author intended, ...while 'moderate actual intentionalism' allows that the author's intention determines the work's meaning only if that intention is carried through successfully. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Noel Carroll for the moderate version] D.H. Lawrence, probably with a dose of Freud, said 'trust the work, not the artist' (of Moby Dick, I think). The thought is that authors only half know intentions, and works reveal them. |
| 20401 | The meaning is given by the audience's best guess at the author's intentions [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: According to the 'hypothetical intentionalist', the work's meaning is determined by the intentions the audience is best justified in attributing to the author, whether or not these are the ones the author actually had. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: [Nehamas, Levinson and Jenefer Robinson are cited] This opens the door for psychiatric interpretations of 'Hamlet', and so on. The experts disagree over the nature of the audience needed to do the job. |
| 20397 | If we could perfectly clone the Mona Lisa, the original would still be special [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: If we could duplicate 'Mona Lisa', we're likely to be concerned to track the original and keep it separate from its clones, even if we judge that the clone isn't inferior to the original when the goal is art appreciation. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: But why? Is it just a sentimental attachment to what Leonardo worked on? Does the original manuscript of a work of literature have the same importance? We treasure such things, but not for aesthetic reasons. |
| 20398 | Art that is multiply instanced may require at least one instance [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: Some multiply instanced artworks, such as novel and poems, must have at least one instance. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a comment on the idea that all artworks, even oil paintings and buildings are potentially multiply instanced (so the work is the type - Wollheim's view, not one of the tokens). |
| 20404 | Music isn't just sad because it makes the listener feel sad [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: The 'arousal' theory says music is sad because it moves the hearer to sadness, ...but this seems to get things back to front, because we normally think it is because the music is sad that it moves the listener to sadness. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: The objection is right. If Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' always makes me feel sad (because it is so hopelessly optimistic), then that makes the music sad. Is the theory saying that there are no feelings in the music? |
| 22705 | If the depiction of evil is glorified, that is an artistic flaw [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: One case when the depiction of immorality becomes an artistic flaw …is when it is presented in brutal detail in a way that glorifies it. The celebration of evil corrodes the work's artistic value. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't allow for the case where the evil is celebrated in one part of a novel, yet the novel as a whole does not endorse the evil. The Marquis de Sade seems to have fully celebrated what we take to be evil. |
| 22707 | It is an artistic defect if excessive moral outrage distorts the story, and narrows our sympathies [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: The positive moral stance of a story can be an artistic defect where it shapes the story in an inappropriate fashion. If it displays disproportionate moral outrage, …it reveals a lack of toleration, compassion, or insight into its subject-matter. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: There could be narrative irony in a story told by an angry and puritanical person, which continually condemns wickedness, with the reader expected to have a more tolerant attitude. Hard to think of any examples of this problem. |
| 22706 | A work which seeks approval for immorality, but alienates the audience, is a failure [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: A work that looks for the audience's sympathetic approval and alienates them instead, because it's both morally repulsive and incoherent in what it requires them to suppose, isn't an artistic success. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: The implication seems to be that works are only successful if they achieve what the creator consciously intended. Lawrence said trust the novel, not the novelist. Milton's Satan is a famous example of heroism not intended by the author. |
| 22704 | Immorality may or may not be an artistic defect [Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: Immorality in art is sometimes an artistic defect and sometimes not. | |
| From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 8.7) | |
| A reaction: Davies seems to avoid the 'immoralist' view, that immorality in a work of art can sometimes be a strength. A sharp distinction is needed, I think, between the morality of what is depicted, and the morality of the whole artwork. |