51 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. |
24032 | Clever scholars can obscure things which are obvious even to peasants [Descartes] |
Full Idea: Scholars are usually ingenious enough to find ways of spreading darkness even in things which are obvious by themselves, and which the peasants are not ignorant of. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 12) | |
A reaction: Wonderful! I see it everywhere in philosophy. It is usually the result of finding ingenious and surprising grounds for scepticism. The amazing thing is not their lovely arguments, but that fools then take their conclusions seriously. Modus tollens. |
24033 | Most scholastic disputes concern words, where agreeing on meanings would settle them [Descartes] |
Full Idea: The questions on which scholars argue are almost always questions of word. …If philosophers were agreed on the meaning of words, almost all their controversies would cease. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 13) | |
A reaction: He has a low opinion of 'scholars'! It isn't that difficult to agree on the meanings of key words, in a given context. The aim isn't to get rid of the problems, but to focus on the real problems. Some words contain problems. |
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. |
24024 | The secret of the method is to recognise which thing in a series is the simplest [Descartes] |
Full Idea: It is necessary, in a series of objects, to recognise which is the simplest thing, and how all the others depart from it. This rule contains the whole secret of the method. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 06) | |
A reaction: This is an appealing thought, though deciding the criteria for 'simplest' looks tough. Are electrons, for example, simple? Is a person a simple basic thing? |
24018 | One truth leads us to another [Descartes] |
Full Idea: One truth discovered helps us to discover another. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 01) | |
A reaction: I take this to be one of the key ingredients of objectivity. People who know very little have almost no chance of objectivity. A mind full of falsehoods also blocks it. |
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. |
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) |
24036 | I can only see the proportion of two to three if there is a common measure - their unity [Descartes] |
Full Idea: I do not recognise what the proportion of magnitude is between two and three, unless I consider a third term, namely unity, which is the common measure of the one and the other. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 14) | |
A reaction: A striking defence of the concept of the need for the unit in arithmetic. To say 'three is half as big again', you must be discussing the same size of 'half' in each instance. |
24035 | Unity is something shared by many things, so in that respect they are equals [Descartes] |
Full Idea: Unity is that common nature in which all things that are compared with each other must participate equally. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 14) | |
A reaction: A lovely explanation of the concept of 'units' for counting. Fregeans hate units, but we Grecian thinkers love them. |
24029 | Among the simples are the graspable negations, such as rest and instants [Descartes] |
Full Idea: Among the simple things, we must also place their negation and deprivation, insofar as they fall under out intelligence, because the idea of nothingness, of the instant, of rest, is no less true an idea than that of existence, of duration, of motion. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 12) | |
A reaction: He sees the 'simple' things as the foundation of all knowledge, because they are self-evident. Not sure about 'no less true', since the specific nothings are parasitic on the somethings. |
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. |
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'. |
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'. |
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. |
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. |
24030 | 3+4=7 is necessary because we cannot conceive of seven without including three and four [Descartes] |
Full Idea: When I say that four and three make seven, this connection is necessary, because one cannot conceive the number seven distinctly without including in it in a confused way the number four and the number three. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 12) | |
A reaction: This seems to make the truths of arithmetic conceptual, and hence analytic. |
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. |
24019 | If we accept mere probabilities as true we undermine our existing knowledge [Descartes] |
Full Idea: It is better never to study than to be unable to distinguish the true from the false, and be obliged to accept as certain what is doubtful. One risks losing the knowledge one already has. Hence we reject all those knowledges which are only probable. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 02) | |
A reaction: This is usually seen nowadays (and I agree) that this is a false dichotomy. Knowledge can't be all-or-nothing. We should accept probabilities as probable, not as knowledge. Probability became a science after Descartes. |
24031 | When Socrates doubts, he know he doubts, and that truth is possible [Descartes] |
Full Idea: If Socrates says he doubts everything, it necessarily follows that he at least understands that he doubts, and that he knows that something can be true or false: for these are notions that necessarily accompany doubt. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 12) | |
A reaction: An early commitment to the Cogito. But note that the inescapable commitment is not just to his existence, but also to his own reasoning, and his own commitment, and to the possibility of truth. Many, many things are undeniable. |
24020 | We all see intuitively that we exist, where intuition is attentive, clear and distinct rational understanding [Descartes] |
Full Idea: By intuition I mean the conception of an attentive mind, so distinct and clear that it has no doubt about what it understands, …a conception that is borne of the sole light of reason. Thus everyone can see intuitively that he exists. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 03) | |
A reaction: By 'intuition' he means self-evident certainty, whereas my concept is of a judgement of which I am reasonably confident, but without sufficient grounds for certainty. This is an early assertion of the Cogito, with a clear statement of its grounding. |
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. |
24025 | Clear and distinct truths must be known all at once (unlike deductions) [Descartes] |
Full Idea: We require two conditions for intuition, namely that the proposition appear clear and distinct, and then that it be understood all at once and not successively. Deduction, on the other hand, implies a certain movement of the mind. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 11) | |
A reaction: A nice distinction. Presumably with deduction you grasp each step clearly, and then the inference and conclusion, and you can then forget the previous steps because you have something secure. |
24022 | Our souls possess divine seeds of knowledge, which can bear spontaneous fruit [Descartes] |
Full Idea: The human soul possesses something divine in which are deposited the first seeds of useful knowledge, which, in spite of the negligence and embarrassment of poorly done studies, bear spontaneous fruit. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 04) | |
A reaction: This makes clear the religious underpinning which is required for his commitment to such useful innate ideas (such as basic geometry) |
24034 | If someone had only seen the basic colours, they could deduce the others from resemblance [Descartes] |
Full Idea: Let there be a man who has sometimes seen the fundamental colours, and never the intermediate and mixed colours; it may be that by a sort of deduction he will represent those he has not seen, by their resemblance to the others. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 14) | |
A reaction: Thus Descartes solved Hume's shade of blue problem, by means of 'a sort of deduction' from resemblance, where Hume was paralysed by his need to actually experience it. Dogmatic empiricism is a false doctrine! |
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. |
24021 | The method starts with clear intuitions, followed by a process of deduction [Descartes] |
Full Idea: If the method shows clearly how we must use intuition to avoid mistaking the false for the true, and how deduction must operate to lead us to the knowledge of all things, it will be complete in my opinion. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 04) | |
A reaction: A perfect statement of his foundationalist view. It needs a clear and distinct basis, and the steps of building must be strictly logical. Of course, most of our knowledge relies on induction, rather than deduction. |
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. |
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. |
24027 | Nerves and movement originate in the brain, where imagination moves them [Descartes] |
Full Idea: The motive power or the nerves themselves originate in the brain, which contains the imagination, which moves them in a thousand ways, as the common sense is moved by the external sense. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 12) | |
A reaction: This sounds a lot more physicalist than his later explicit dualism in Meditations. Even in that work the famous passage on the ship's pilot acknowledged tight integration of mind and brain. |
24026 | Our four knowledge faculties are intelligence, imagination, the senses, and memory [Descartes] |
Full Idea: There are four faculties in us which we can use to know: intelligence, imagination, the senses, and memory. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 12) | |
A reaction: Philosophers have to attribute faculties to the mind, even if the psychologists and neuroscientists won't accept them. We must infer the sources of our modes of understanding. He is cautious about imagination. |
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. |
24028 | The force by which we know things is spiritual, and quite distinct from the body [Descartes] |
Full Idea: This force by which we properly know objects is purely spiritual, and is no less distinct from the body than is the blood from the bones. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 12) | |
A reaction: This firmly contradicts any physicalism I thought I detected in Idea 24027! He uses the word 'spiritual' of the mind here, which I don't think he uses in later writings. |
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. |
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'? |
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. |
24023 | All the sciences searching for order and measure are related to mathematics [Descartes] |
Full Idea: I have discovered that all the sciences which have as their aim the search for order and measure are related to mathematics. | |
From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], 04) | |
A reaction: Note that he sound a more cautious note than Galileo's famous remark. It leaves room for biology to still be a science, even when it fails to be mathematical. |
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. |