23 ideas
9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The incremental progress which I envisage for philosophy lacks the drama after which some philosophers still hanker, and that hankering is itself a symptom of the intellectual immaturity that helps hold philosophy back. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: This could stand as a motto for the whole current profession of analytical philosophy. It means that if anyone attempts to be dramatic they can make their own way out. They'll find Kripke out there, smoking behind the dustbins. |
9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Even if talk of truth as correspondence to the facts is metaphorical, it is a bad metaphor for analytic truth in a way that it is not for synthetic truth. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 3.1) | |
A reaction: A very simple and rather powerful point. Maybe the word 'truth' should be withheld from such cases. You might say that accepted analytic truths are 'conventional'. If that is wrong, then they correspond to natural facts at a high level of abstraction. |
9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The debate between realism and anti-realism has become notorious in the rest of philosophy for its obscurity, convolution, and lack of progress. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: I find this reassuring, because fairly early on I decided that this problem was not of great interest, and quietly tiptoed away. I take the central issue to be whether nature has 'joints', to which the answer appears to be 'yes'. End of story. |
9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
Full Idea: It is sometimes argued that if there is such a thing as a mountain it would be a vague object, but it is logically impossible for an object to be vague, so there is no such thing as a mountain. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 7.2) | |
A reaction: I don't take this to be a daft view. No one is denying the existence of the solid rock that is involved, but allowing such a vague object may be a slippery slope to the acceptance of almost anything as an 'object'. |
9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The constraints of common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
A reaction: Wiliamson has described himself (in my hearing) as a 'rottweiller realist', but presumably the problem of vagueness interests a lot of people precisely because it pushes us away from common sense and classical logic. |
11181 | Aristotelian essentialism involves a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of modal operators [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: Aristotelian essentialism may best be understood on a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of the modal operators. | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.189) | |
A reaction: I record this because I very much like the sound of it, though I have yet to fully understand it. |
11184 | Aristotelian essentialism is about shared properties, individuating essentialism about distinctive properties [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: An object must have some of its natural properties in this world. Some of those it has in common with objects of some proximate kind (Aristotelian essentialism), and others individuate it from objects of the same kind (individuating essentialism). | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.193) |
11180 | Essentialist sentences are not theorems of modal logic, and can even be false [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: In the range of modal systems for which Saul Kripke has provided a semantics, no essentialist sentence is a theorem. Furthermore, there are models for which such sentences are demonstrably false. | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.188) |
11186 | 'Essentially' won't replace 'necessarily' for vacuous properties like snub-nosed or self-identical [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: We would never use 'is essentially' for 'is necessarily' where vacuous properties are concerned, as in 'Socrates is essentially snub-nosed' or 'Socrates is essentially Socrates'. | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.193) | |
A reaction: This simple point does us a huge service in rescuing the word 'essential' from several hundred years of misguided philosophy. |
11185 | 'Is essentially' has a different meaning from 'is necessarily', as they often cannot be substituted [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: There seems to be surface synonymy between 'is essentially' and de re occurrences of 'is necessarily', but intersubstitution often fails to preserve sense (as in 'Winston is essentially a cyclist' and 'Winston is necessarily a cyclist'). | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.193) | |
A reaction: Clearly the two sentences have different meanings, with 'essentially' being a comment about the nature of Winston, and 'necessarily' probably being a comment about the circumstances in which he finds himself. Very nice. See also Idea 11186. |
11182 | If essences are objects with only essential properties, they are elusive in possible worlds [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: Some philosophers make a metaphysical shift, by inventing objects (individual concepts, forms, substances) called 'essences', which have only essential properties, and then worry when they can't locate them by rummaging around in possible worlds. | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.192) |
9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of metaphysical modality requires no dedicated faculty of intuition. It is simply a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking, a kind of thinking tightly integrated with our thinking about the spatio-temporal world. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.6) | |
A reaction: This seems to me to be spot-on, though it puts the focus increasingly on the faculty of imagination, as arguably an even more extraordinary feature of brains than the much-vaunted normal consciousness. |
16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
Full Idea: The psychological mechanism that Williamson proposes as the supposedly reliable source of our knowledge of necessities only seems applicable to counterfactuals that are distinctively causal, not metaphysical, in character. | |
From: comment on Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007]) by E.J. Lowe - What is the Source of Knowledge of Modal Truths? 5 | |
A reaction: My rough impression of Williamson's account is that it is correct but unilluminating. We have to assess necessities by counterfactual thinking, because nothing else is available (apart from evaluating the coherence of the findings). |
9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
Full Idea: The epistemology of modality often focuses on (and pours scorn on) imagination or conceivability as a test of possibility, while ignoring the role of the imagination in the assessment of mundane counterfactuals. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.4) | |
A reaction: Good point. I've been guilty of this easy scorn myself. Williamson gives our modal capacities an evolutionary context. What is needed is well-informed imagination, rather than wild fantasy. |
11183 | The use of possible worlds is to sort properties (not to individuate objects) [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: The usefulness of talk about possible worlds is not for purposes of individuating the object - that can be done in this world; such talk is a way of sorting its properties. | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.192) | |
A reaction: 'Possible worlds are a device for sorting properties' sounds to me like a promising slogan. Ruth Marcus originated rigid designation, before Kripke came up with the label. |
11187 | In possible worlds, names are just neutral unvarying pegs for truths and predicates [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: The strategem of talk about possible worlds is that truth assignments of sentences and extensions of predicates may vary, but individual names don't alter their reference (unless they don't refer). They are a neutral peg for descriptions. | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.194) |
9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
Full Idea: There is extensive 'armchair knowledge' in which experience plays no strictly evidential role, but it may not fit the stereotype of the a priori, because the contribution of experience was more than enabling, such as armchair truths about our environment. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.5) | |
A reaction: Once this point is conceded we have no idea where to draw the line. Does 'if it is red it can't be green' derive from experience? I think it might. |
9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Crude rationalists postulate a special knowledge-generating faculty of rational intuition. Crude empiricists regard intuition as an obscurantist term of folk psychology. Linguistic/conceptual philosophy says it reveals linguistic or conceptual competence. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
A reaction: Kripke seems to think that it is the basis of logical competence. I would use it as a blank term for any insight in which we have considerable confidence, and yet are unable to articulate its basis; roughly, for rational thought that evades logic. |
20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
Full Idea: 'Intuition' plays a major role in contemporary analytic philosophy's self-understanding. ...When contemporary analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they appeal to intuitions. ...Thus intuitions are presented as our evidence in philosophy. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], p.214-5), quoted by Herman Cappelen - Philosophy without Intuitions 01.1 | |
A reaction: Williamson says we must investigate this 'scandal', but Cappelen's book says analytic philosophy does not rely on intuition. |
9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Someone who acquires the word 'gob' just by being reliably told that it is synonymous with 'mouth' knows what 'gob' means without being fully competent to use it. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 4.7) | |
A reaction: Not exactly an argument against meaning-as-use, but a very nice cautionary example to show that 'knowing the meaning' of a word may be a rather limited, and dangerous, achievement. |
7667 | There are two sides to men - the pleasantly social, and the violent and creative [Diderot, by Berlin] |
Full Idea: Diderot is among the first to preach that there are two men: the artificial man, who belongs in society and seeks to please, and the violent, bold, criminal instinct of a man who wishes to break out (and, if controlled, is responsible for works of genius. | |
From: report of Denis Diderot (works [1769], Ch.3) by Isaiah Berlin - The Roots of Romanticism | |
A reaction: This has an obvious ancestor in Plato's picture (esp. in 'Phaedrus') of the two conflicting sides to the psuché, which seem to be reason and emotion. In Diderot, though, the suppressed man has virtues, which Plato would deny. |
9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
Full Idea: Given empirical evidence for the approximate intertranslatability of all human languages, and a universal innate basis of human cognition, we may wonder how 'other' any human culture really is. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 8.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to be a fairly accurate account of the situation. In recent centuries people seem to have been over-impressed by superficial differences in cultural behaviour, but we increasingly see the underlying identity. |
11189 | Dispositional essences are special, as if an object loses them they cease to exist [Marcus (Barcan)] |
Full Idea: Being gold or being a man is not accidental. ..Such essences are dispositional properties of a very special kind: if an object had such a property and ceased to have it, it would have ceased to exist or have changed (as if gold is transmuted to lead). | |
From: Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.202) | |
A reaction: Ruth Marcus is an important founder of modern scientific essentialism, by not only proposing the notion we call rigid designation, but by explicitly defending the essential identities that seem to emerge from modal logic. |