Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'The Gettier Problem', 'Testability and Meaning' and 'Commentary on Sentences'

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4 ideas

8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 8. Properties as Modes
16643 Accidents always remain suited to a subject [Bonaventura]
     Full Idea: An accident's aptitudinal relationship to a subject is essential, and this is never taken away from accidents….for it is true to say that they are suited to a subject.
     From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], IV.12.1.1.1c)
     A reaction: This is the compromise view that allows accidents to be separated, for Transubstantiation, while acknowledging that we identify them with their subjects.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 6. Successive Things
16696 Successive things reduce to permanent things [Bonaventura]
     Full Idea: Everything successive reduces to something permanent.
     From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], II.2.1.1.3 ad 5), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.2
     A reaction: Avicenna first took successive entities seriously, but Bonaventure and Aquinas seem to have rejected them, or given reductive accounts of them. It resembles modern actualists versus modal realists.
10. Modality / B. Possibility / 8. Conditionals / c. Truth-function conditionals
14305 In the truth-functional account a burnt-up match was soluble because it never entered water [Carnap]
     Full Idea: If a wooden match was completely burned up yesterday, and never placed in water at any time, is it not the case, therefore, that the match is soluble (in the truth-functional view). This follows just from the antecedent being false.
     From: Rudolph Carnap (Testability and Meaning [1937], I.440), quoted by Stephen Mumford - Dispositions
     A reaction: This, along with Edgington's nice example of the conditional command (Idea ) seems conclusive against the truth-functional account. The only defence possible is some sort of pragmatic account about implicature.
13. Knowledge Criteria / A. Justification Problems / 2. Justification Challenges / b. Gettier problem
19699 A Gettier case is a belief which is true, and its fallible justification involves some luck [Hetherington]
     Full Idea: A Gettier case contains a belief which is true and well justified without being knowledge. Its justificatory support is also fallible, ...and there is considerable luck in how the belief combnes being true with being justified.
     From: Stephen Hetherington (The Gettier Problem [2011], 5)
     A reaction: This makes luck the key factor. 'Luck' is a rather vague concept, and so the sort of luck involved must first be spelled out. Or the varieties of luck that can produce this outcome.