45 ideas
| 16943 | Philosophy is continuous with science, and has no external vantage point [Quine] |
| Full Idea: I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat. …There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.126) | |
| A reaction: Philosophy is generalisation. Science holds the upper hand, because it settles the subject-matter to be generalised. |
| 16949 | Klein summarised geometry as grouped together by transformations [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Felix Klein's so-called 'Erlangerprogramm' in geometry involved characterizing the various branches of geometry by what transformations were irrelevant to each. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.137) |
| 16939 | Mass terms just concern spread, but other terms involve both spread and individuation [Quine] |
| Full Idea: 'Yellow' and 'water' are mass terms, concerned only with spread; 'apple' and 'square' are terms of divided reference, concerned with both spread and individuation. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.124) | |
| A reaction: Would you like some apple? Pass me that water. It is helpful to see that it is a requirement of 'individuation' that is missing from terms for stuff. |
| 16948 | Once we know the mechanism of a disposition, we can eliminate 'similarity' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Once we can legitimize a disposition term by defining the relevant similarity standard, we are apt to know the mechanism of the disposition, and so by-pass the similarity. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.135) | |
| A reaction: I love mechanisms, but can we characterise mechanisms without mentioning powers and dispositions? Quine's dream is to eliminate 'similarity'. |
| 14308 | We can bring dispositions into existence, as in creating an identifier [Dennett, by Mumford] |
| Full Idea: We can bring a real disposition into existence, as in Dennett's case of a piece of cardboard torn in half, so that two strangers can infallibly identify one another. | |
| From: report of Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], p.376) by Stephen Mumford - Dispositions 03.7 n37 | |
| A reaction: Presumably human artefacts in general qualify as sets of dispositions which we have created. |
| 16945 | We judge things to be soluble if they are the same kind as, or similar to, things that do dissolve [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Intuitively, what qualifies a thing as soluble though it never gets into water is that it is of the same kind as the things that actually did or will dissolve; it is similar to them. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.130) | |
| A reaction: If you can judge that the similar things 'will' dissolve, you can cut to the chase and judge that this thing will dissolve. |
| 7384 | Words are fixed by being attached to similarity clusters, without mention of 'essences' [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: We don't need 'essences' or 'criteria' to keep the meaning of our word from sliding all over the place; our words will stay put, quite firmly attached as if by gravity to the nearest similarity cluster. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: Plausible, but essentialism (which may have been rejuventated by a modern theory of reference in language) is not about language. It is offering an explanation of why there are 'similarity clusters. Organisms are too complex to have pure essences. |
| 7374 | Light wavelengths entering the eye are only indirectly related to object colours [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The wavelengths of the light entering the eye are only indirectly related to the colours we see objects to be. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.2) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously bad news for naïve realism, but I also take it as good support for the primary/secondary distinction. I just can't make sense of anyone claiming that colour exists anywhere else except in the brain. |
| 16944 | Science is common sense, with a sophisticated method [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Sciences differ from common sense only in the degree of methodological sophistication. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.129) | |
| A reaction: Science is normal thinking about the world, but it is teamwork, with the bar set very high. |
| 7369 | Brains are essentially anticipation machines [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All brains are, in essence, anticipation machines. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: This would necessarily, I take it, make them induction machines. So brains will only evolve in a world where induction is possible, which is one where there a lot of immediately apprehensible regularities. |
| 16941 | Induction relies on similar effects following from each cause [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Induction expresses our hopes that similar causes will have similar effects. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.125) | |
| A reaction: Some top philosophers are also top teachers, and Quine was one of them, in his writings. He boils it down for the layman. Once again, he is pointing to the fundamental role of the similarity relation. |
| 16940 | Induction is just more of the same: animal expectations [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Induction is essentially only more of the same: animal expectation or habit formation. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.125) | |
| A reaction: My working definition of induction is 'learning from experience', but that doesn't disagree with Quine. Lipton has a richer account of different types of induction. Quine's point is that it rests on resemblance. |
| 16933 | Grue is a puzzle because the notions of similarity and kind are dubious in science [Quine] |
| Full Idea: What makes Goodman's example a puzzle is the dubious scientific standing of a general notion of similarity, or of kind. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.116) | |
| A reaction: Illuminating. It might be best expressed as revealing a problem with sortal terms, as employed by Geach, or by Wiggins. Grue is a bit silly, but sortals are subject to convention and culture. 'Natural' properties seem needed. |
| 7393 | We can't draw a clear line between conscious and unconscious [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Even in our own case, we cannot draw the line separating our conscious mental states from our unconscious mental states. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.2) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a simple and self-evident truth, which anyone working on the brain takes for granted, but an awful lot of philosophers (stuck somewhere in the seventeenth century) can't seem to grasp. |
| 7367 | Perhaps the brain doesn't 'fill in' gaps in consciousness if no one is looking. [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps the brain doesn't actually have to go to the trouble of "filling in" anything with "construction" - for no one is looking. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This a very nice point, because claims that the mind fills in in various psychological visual tests always has the presupposition of a person (or homunculus?) which is overseeing the visual experiences. |
| 7394 | Conscious events can only be explained in terms of unconscious events [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.4) | |
| A reaction: This sounds undeniable, so it seems to force a choice between reductive physicalism and mysterianism. Personally I think there must be an explanation in terms of non-conscious events, even if humans are too thick to understand it. |
| 7391 | We can know a lot of what it is like to be a bat, and nothing important is unknown [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: There is at least a lot that we can know about what it is like to be a bat, and Nagel has not given us a reason to believe there is anything interesting or theoretically important that is inaccessible to us. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.2) | |
| A reaction: I agree. If you really wanted to identify with the phenomenology of bathood, you could spend a lot of time in underground caves whistling with your torch turned off. I can't, of course, be a bat, but then I can't be my self of yesterday. |
| 7387 | "Qualia" can be replaced by complex dispositional brain states [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: "Qualia" can be replaced by complex dispositional states of the brain. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.1) | |
| A reaction: 'Dispositional' reveals Dennett's behaviourist roots (he was a pupil of Ryle). Fodor is right that physicalism cannot just hide behind the word "complexity". That said, the combination of complexity and speed might add up to physical 'qualia'. |
| 7376 | We can't assume that dispositions will remain normal when qualia have been inverted [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The goal of the experiment was to describe a case in which it was obvious that the qualia would be inverted while the reactive dispositions would be normalized. But the assumption that one could just tell is question-begging. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.4) | |
| A reaction: It certainly seems simple and plausible that if we inverted our experience of traffic light colours, no difference in driver behaviour would be seen. However, my example, of a conversation in a gallery of abstract art, seems more problematic. |
| 7372 | In peripheral vision we see objects without their details, so blindsight is not that special [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: If a playing card is held in peripheral vision, we can see the card without being able to identify its colours or its shapes. That's normal sight, not blindsight, so we should be reluctant on those grounds to deny visual experience to blindsight subjects. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 11.4) | |
| A reaction: This is an important point in Dennett's war against the traditional all-or-nothing view of mental events. Nevertheless, blindsight subjects deny all mental experience, while picking up information, and peripheral vision never seems like that. |
| 7373 | Blindsight subjects glean very paltry information [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Discussions of blindsight have tended to ignore just how paltry the information is that blindsight subjects glean from their blind fields. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 11.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a bit unfair, because blindsight has mainly pointed to interesting speculations (e.g. Idea 2953). Nevertheless, if blindsight with very high information content is actually totally impossible, the speculations ought to be curtailed. |
| 16934 | General terms depend on similarities among things [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The usual general term, whether a common noun or a verb or an adjective, owes its generality to some resemblance among the things referred to. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.116) | |
| A reaction: Quine has a nice analysis of the basic role of similarity in a huge amount of supposedly strict scientific thought. |
| 16938 | To learn yellow by observation, must we be told to look at the colour? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: According to the 'respects' view, our learning of yellow by ostension would have depended on our first having been told or somehow apprised that it was going to be a question of color. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.122) | |
| A reaction: Quine suggests there is just one notion of similarity, and respects can be 'abstracted' afterwards. Even the ontologically ruthless Quine admits psychological abstraction! |
| 8486 | Standards of similarity are innate, and the spacing of qualities such as colours can be mapped [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A standard of similarity is in some sense innate. The spacing of qualities (such as red, pink and blue) can be explored and mapped in the laboratory by experiments. They are needed for all learning. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.123) | |
| A reaction: This reasserts Hume's original point in more scientific terms. It is one of the undeniable facts about our perceptions of qualities and properties, no matter how platonist your view of universals may be. |
| 16947 | Similarity is just interchangeability in the cosmic machine [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Things are similar to the extent that they are interchangeable parts of the cosmic machine. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.134) | |
| A reaction: This is a major idea for Quine, because it is a means to gradually eliminate the fuzzy ideas of 'resemblance' or 'similarity' or 'natural kind' from science. I love it! Two tigers are same insofar as they are substitutable. |
| 7385 | People accept blurred boundaries in many things, but insist self is All or Nothing [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Many people are comfortable taking the pragmatic approach to night/day, living/nonliving and mammal/premammal, but get anxious about the same attitude to having a self and not having a self. It must be All or Nothing, and One to a Customer. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think I believe in the existence of the self, but I also agree with Dennett. I greatly admire his campaign against All or Nothing thinking, which is a relic from an earlier age. A partial self could result from infancy or brain damage. |
| 7383 | The psychological self is an abstraction, not a thing in the brain [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Like the biological self, the psychological or narrative self is an abstraction, not a thing in the brain. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: Does Dennett have empirical evidence for this claim? It seems to me perfectly possible that there is a real thing called the 'self', and it is the central controller of the brain (involving propriotreptic awareness, understanding, and will). |
| 7386 | Selves are not soul-pearls, but artefacts of social processes [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Selves are not independently existing soul-pearls, but artefacts of the social processes that create us, and, like other such artefacts, subject to sudden shifts in status. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: "Soul-pearls" is a nice phrase for the Cartesian view, but there can something between soul-pearls and social constructs. Personally I think the self is a development of the propriotreptic (body) awareness that even the smallest animals must possess. |
| 7381 | We tell stories about ourselves, to protect, control and define who we are [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition is telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to suggest that there is someone who wants to protect themselves, and who wants to tell the stories, and does tell the stories. No one can deny the existence of this autobiographical element in our own identity. |
| 7382 | We spin narratives about ourselves, and the audience posits a centre of gravity for them [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The effect of our string of personal narratives is to encourage the audience to (try to) posit a unified agent whose words they are, about whom they are: in short, to posit a centre of narrative gravity. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: What would be the evolutionary advantage of getting the audience to posit a non-existent self, instead of a complex brain? It might be simpler than that, since we say of a bird "it wants to do x". What is "it"? Some simple thing, like a will. |
| 7370 | The brain is controlled by shifting coalitions, guided by good purposeful habits [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Who's in charge of the brain? First one coalition and then another, shifting in ways that are not chaotic thanks to good meta-habits that tend to entrain coherent, purposeful sequences rather than an interminable helter-skelter power grab. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 8.1) | |
| A reaction: This is probably the best anti-ego account available. Dennett offers our sense of self as a fictional autobiography, but the sense of a single real controller is very powerful. If I jump at a noise, I feel that 'I' have lost control of myself. |
| 7379 | If an epiphenomenon has no physical effects, it has to be undetectable [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Psychologists mean a by-product by an 'epiphenomenon', ...but the philosophical meaning is too strong: it yields a concept of no utility whatsoever. Since x has no physical effects (according to the definition), no instrument can detect it. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.5) | |
| A reaction: Well said! This has always been my half-formulated intuition about the claim that the mind (or anything) might be totally epiphenomenal. All a thing such as the reflection on a lake can be is irrelevant to the functioning of that specified system. |
| 7365 | Dualism wallows in mystery, and to accept it is to give up [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: Some things, of course, might be inherently mysterious to us, and we might as well give up. The big dualist mystery is the explanation of how such different substances can interact. How do two physical substances manage to interact? |
| 7371 | All functionalism is 'homuncular', of one grain size or another [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All varieties of functionalism can be viewed as 'homuncular' functionalism of one grain size or another. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 9.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, as any huge and complex mechanism (like a moon rocket) will be made up of some main systems, then sub-systems, then sub-sub-sub.... This assumes that there are one or two overarching purposes, which there are in people. |
| 7366 | It is arbitrary to say which moment of brain processing is conscious [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: If one wants to settle on some moment of processing in the brain as the moment of consciousness, this has to be arbitrary. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Seems eliminativist, as it implies that all that is really going on is 'processing'. But there are two senses of 'arbitrary' - that calling it consciousness is arbitrary (wrong), or thinking that mind doesn't move abruptly into consciousness (right). |
| 7380 | Visual experience is composed of neural activity, which we find pleasing [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All visual experience is composed of activities of neural circuits whose very activity is innately pleasing to us. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.6) | |
| A reaction: This is the nearest I can find to Dennett saying something eliminativist. It seems to beg the question of who 'us' refers to, and what is being pleased, and how it is 'pleased' by these neural circuits. The Hard Question? |
| 16932 | Projectible predicates can be universalised about the kind to which they refer [Quine] |
| Full Idea: 'Projectible' predicates are predicates F and G whose shared instances all do count, for whatever reason, towards confirmation of 'All F are G'. ….A projectible predicate is one that is true of all and only the things of a kind. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.115-6) | |
| A reaction: Both Quine and Goodman are infuriatingly brief about the introduction of this concept. 'Red' is true of all ripe tomatoes, but not 'only' of them. Hardly any predicates are true only of one kind. Is that a scholastic 'proprium'? |
| 22381 | Being a good father seems to depend on intentions, rather than actual abilities [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Being a good father, or daughter, or friend seems to depend on one's intentions, rather than on such things as cleverness and strength. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Goodness and Choice [1961], p.138) | |
| A reaction: Not sure about that. In wartime a good father might need to be actually brave, and in times of hardship be actually economically successful. 'He meant well, but he was a hopeless father'? |
| 7368 | Originally there were no reasons, purposes or functions; since there were no interests, there were only causes [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: In the beginning there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing had so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all. The explanation is simple: there was nothing that had interests. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: It seems reasonable to talk of functions even if the fledgling 'interests' are unconscious, as in a leaf. Is a process leading to an end an 'interest'? What are the 'interests' of a person who is about to commit suicide? |
| 22380 | Some words, such as 'knife', have a meaning which involves its function [Foot] |
| Full Idea: The word 'knife' names an object in respect of its function. That is not to say (simply) that it names an object which has a function, but also that the function is involved in the meaning of the word. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Goodness and Choice [1961], p.134) | |
| A reaction: It seems faintly possible that someone (a child, perhaps) could know the word and recognise the object, but not know what the object is for. Ditto with other things which have functional names. |
| 7375 | Quine probably regrets natural kinds now being treated as essences [Quine, by Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The concept of natural kinds was reintroduced by Quine, who may now regret the way it has become a stand-in for the dubious but covertly popular concept of essences. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969]) by Daniel C. Dennett - Consciousness Explained 12.2 n2 | |
| A reaction: He is right that Quine would regret it, and he is right that we can't assume that there are necessary essences just because there seem to be stable natural kinds, but personally I am an essentialist, so I'm not that bothered. |
| 16935 | If similarity has no degrees, kinds cannot be contained within one another [Quine] |
| Full Idea: If similarity has no degrees there is no containing of kinds within broader kinds. If colored things are a kind, they are similar, but red things are too narrow for a kind. If red things are a kind, colored things are not similar, and it's too broad. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.118) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I'm on Quine's side with this. We glibly talk of 'kinds', but the criteria for sorting things into kinds seems to be a mess. Quine goes on to offer a better account than the (diadic, yes-no) one rejected here. |
| 16936 | Comparative similarity allows the kind 'colored' to contain the kind 'red' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: With the triadic relation of comparative similarity, kinds can contain one another, as well as overlapping. Red and colored things can both count as kinds. Colored things all resemble one another, even though less than red things do. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.119) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Quine claims that comparative similarity is necessary for kinds - that there be some 'foil' in a similarity - that A is more like C than B is. |
| 16937 | You can't base kinds just on resemblance, because chains of resemblance are a muddle [Quine] |
| Full Idea: If kinds are based on similarity, this has the Imperfect Community problem. Red round, red wooden and round wooden things all resemble one another somehow. There may be nothing outside the set resembling them, so it meets the definition of kind. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.120) | |
| A reaction: [ref. to Goodman 'Structure' 2nd 163- , which attacks Carnap on this] This suggests an invocation of Wittgenstein's family resemblance, which won't be much help for natural kinds. |
| 16942 | It is hard to see how regularities could be explained [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Why there have been regularities is an obscure question, for it is hard to see what would count as an answer. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Natural Kinds [1969], p.126) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard pessimism of the 20th century Humeans, but it strikes me as comparable to the pessimism about science found in Locke and Hume. Regularities are explained all the time by scientists, though the lowest level may be hopeless. |