18 ideas
| 21943 | Since Kant, self-criticism has been part of philosophy [Gutting] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy after Kant has involved a continuing critique of its own project. | |
| From: Gary Gutting (Foucault: a very short introduction [2005], 6) | |
| A reaction: I'm struck by many modern philosophers in the analytic tradition who write as if Kant had never existed. I don't know if that is a conscious decision, but it may be a good one. |
| 9208 | Philosophers with a new concept are like children with a new toy [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers with a new concept are like children with a new toy; their world shrinks to one in which it takes centre stage. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p.10) | |
| A reaction: A wonderfully accurate observation, I'm afraid. You can trace the entire history of the subject as a wave of obsessions with exciting new ideas. Fine is referring to a posteriori necessities and possible worlds. |
| 21944 | Structuralism describes human phenomena in terms of unconscious structures [Gutting] |
| Full Idea: Structuralism in the 1960s was a set of theories which explained human phenomena in terms of underlying unconscious structures, rather than the lived experience described by Phenomenology. | |
| From: Gary Gutting (Foucault: a very short introduction [2005], 6) | |
| A reaction: Hence the interest in Freud and Marx, and Foucault's interest in history, each offering to unmask what is hidden in consciousness. The unmasking is a basically Kantian project. Cf. Frege's hatred of 'psychologism'. |
| 9210 | Possible objects are abstract; actual concrete objects are possible; so abstract/concrete are compatible [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: If it is in the nature of a possible object to be abstract, this is presumably a property it has in any possible circumstance in which it is actual. If it is actual it is also concrete. So the property of being abstract and concrete are not incompatible. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p.14) | |
| A reaction: A rather startling and powerful idea. What of the definition of an abstract object as one which is not in space-time, and lacks causal powers? Could it be that abstraction is a projection of our minds, onto concepts or objects? |
| 9211 | A non-standard realism, with no privileged standpoint, might challenge its absoluteness or coherence [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: By challenging the assumption that reality is 'absolute' (not relative to a standpoint), or that reality is 'coherent' (it is of a piece, from one standpoint), one accepts worldly facts without a privilege standpoint. I call this 'non-standard' realism. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p.15) | |
| A reaction: Fine's essay 'Tense and Reality' explores his proposal. I'm not drawn to either of his challenges. I have always taken as articles of faith that there could be a God's Eye view of all of reality, and that everything coheres, independent of our view. |
| 9202 | Objects, as well as sentences, can have logical form [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: We normally think of logical form as exclusively an attribute of sentences; however, the notion may also be taken to have application to objects. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p. 3) | |
| A reaction: A striking proposal which seems intuitively right. If one said that objects have 'powers', one might subsume abstract and physical objects under a single account. |
| 9206 | We must distinguish between the identity or essence of an object, and its necessary features [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: The failure to distinguish between the identity or essence of an object and its necessary features is an instance of what we may call 'modal mania'. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p. 9) | |
| A reaction: He blames Kripke's work for modal mania, a reaction to Quine's 'contempt' for modal notions. I don't actually understand Fine's remark (yet), but it strikes me as incredibly important! Explanations by email, please. |
| 9205 | The three basic types of necessity are metaphysical, natural and normative [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: There are three basic forms of necessity - the metaphysical (sourced in the identity of objects); natural necessity (in the 'fabric' of the universe); and normative necessity (in the realm of norms and values). | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p. 7) | |
| A reaction: Earlier he has allowed, as less 'basic', logical necessity (in logical forms), and analytic necessity (in meaning). Fine insists that the three kinds should be kept separate (so no metaphysical necessities about nature). I resent this. |
| 9209 | Metaphysical necessity may be 'whatever the circumstance', or 'regardless of circumstances' [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: There are two fundamental ways in which a property may be metaphysically necessary: it may be a worldly necessity, true whatever the circumstances; or it may be a transcendent necessity, true regardless of the circumstances. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p.10) | |
| A reaction: [See Fine's 'Necessity and Non-Existence' for further details] The distinction seems to be that the first sort needs some circumstances (e.g. a physical world?), whereas the second sort doesn't (logical relations?). He also applies it to existence. |
| 9200 | Empiricists suspect modal notions: either it happens or it doesn't; it is just regularities. [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Empiricists have always been suspicious of modal notions: the world is an on-or-off matter - either something happens or it does not. ..Empiricists, in so far as they have been able to make sense of modality, have tended to see it as a form of regularity. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p. 1) | |
| A reaction: Fine is discussing the two extreme views of Quine and Lewis. It is one thing to have views about what is possible, and another to include possibilities 'in your ontology'. Our imagination competes with our extrapolations from actuality. |
| 17488 | Empiricist theories are sets of laws, which give explanations and reductions [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: In the empiricist tradition theories were understood to be deductive closures of sets of laws, explanations were understood as arguments from covering laws, and reduction was understood as a deductive relationship between laws of different theories. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: A lovely crisp summary of the whole tradition of philosophy of science from Comte through to Hempel. Mechanism and essentialism are the new players in the game. |
| 17493 | Modern mechanism need parts with spatial, temporal and function facts, and diagrams [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: Modern champions of mechanisms say models should identify both the parts and their spatial, temporal and functional organisation, ...and the practical importance of diagrams in addition to or in place of linguistic representations of mechanisms. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Discover') | |
| A reaction: Apparently chemists obtain much more refined models by using mathematics than they did by diagrams or 3D models (let alone verbal descriptions). For that reason, I'm thinking that 'model' might be a better term than 'mechanism'. |
| 17487 | Mechanistic philosophy of science is an alternative to the empiricist law-based tradition [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: To a significant degree, a mechanistic philosophy of science can be seen as an alternative to an earlier logical empiricist tradition in philosophy of science that gave pride of place to laws of nature. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Lovely! Someone who actually spells out what's going on here. Most philosophers are far too coy about explaining what their real game is. Mechanism is fine in chemistry and biology. How about in 'mathematical' physics, or sociology? |
| 17489 | Mechanisms are either systems of parts or sequences of activities [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: There are two sorts of mechanisms: systems consist of collections of parts that interact to produce some behaviour, and processes are sequences of activities which produce some outcome. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The second one is important because it is more generic, and under that account all kinds the features of the world that need to be explained can be subsumed. E.g. hyperinflation in an economy is a 'mechanism'. |
| 17490 | 17th century mechanists explained everything by the kinetic physical fundamentals [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: 17th century mechanists said that interactions governed by chemical, electrical or gravitational forces would have to be explicable in terms of the operation of some atomistic (or corpuscular) kinetic mechanism. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Glennan says science has rejected this, so modern mechanists do not reduce mechanisms to anything in particular. |
| 17491 | Unlike the lawlike approach, mechanistic explanation can allow for exceptions [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: One of the advantages of the move from nomological to mechanistic modes of explanation is that the latter allows for explanations involving exception-ridden generalizations. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'regular') | |
| A reaction: The lawlike approach has endless problems with 'ceteris paribus' ('all things being equal') laws, where specifying all the other 'things' seems a bit tricky. |
| 9207 | If sentence content is all worlds where it is true, all necessary truths have the same content! [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: The content of a sentence is often identified with the set of possible worlds in which it is true, where the worlds are metaphysically possible. But this has the awkward consequence that all metaphysically necessary truths will have the same content. | |
| From: Kit Fine (Intro to 'Modality and Tense' [2005], p.10) | |
| A reaction: I've never understood how the content of a sentence could be a vast set of worlds, so I am delighted to see this proposal be torpedoed. That doesn't mean that truth conditions across possible worlds is not a promising notion. |
| 17494 | Since causal events are related by mechanisms, causation can be analysed in that way [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: Causation can be analyzed in terms of mechanisms because (except for fundamental causal interactions) causally related events will be connected by intervening mechanisms. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'causation') | |
| A reaction: This won't give us the metaphysics of causation (which concerns the fundamentals), but this strikes me as a very coherent and interesting proposal. He mentions electron interaction as non-mechanistic causation. |