Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Propositional Objects', 'Sickness unto Death' and 'Presentation of Self in Everyday Life'

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6 ideas

11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 4. Belief / e. Belief holism
18969 How do you distinguish three beliefs from four beliefs or two beliefs? [Quine]
     Full Idea: Suppose I say that I have given up precisely three beliefs since lunch. An over-coarse individuation could reduce the number to two, and an over-fine one could raise it to four.
     From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.144)
     A reaction: Obviously if you ask how many beliefs I hold, it would be crazy to give a precise answer. But if I search for my cat, I give up my belief that it is in the kitchen, in the lounge and in the bathroom. That's precise enough to be three beliefs, I think.
16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 3. Self as Non-physical
16002 The self is a combination of pairs of attributes: freedom/necessity, infinite/finite, temporal/eternal [Kierkegaard]
     Full Idea: A human being is essentially spirit, but what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the Self? In short, it is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.
     From: Søren Kierkegaard (Sickness unto Death [1849], p.59)
     A reaction: The dense language of his first paragraph was to poke fun at fashionable Hegelian writing. The book gets very lucid afterwards! [SY]
16. Persons / E. Rejecting the Self / 2. Self as Social Construct
8044 Goffman sees the self as no more than a peg on which to hang roles we play [Goffman, by MacIntyre]
     Full Idea: Erving Goffman has liquidated the self into its role-playing, arguing that the self is no more than 'a peg' on which the clothes of the role are hung.
     From: report of Erving Goffman (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [1959]) by Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory Ch.3
     A reaction: A rather unsympathetic expression of his view, but it seems to be a widely held view among students of sociology. But then sociologists are almost committed a priori to a social and relativist view of truth, persons, knowledge, religion etc.
19. Language / D. Propositions / 2. Abstract Propositions / a. Propositions as sense
18967 A 'proposition' is said to be the timeless cognitive part of the meaning of a sentence [Quine]
     Full Idea: A 'proposition' is the meaning of a sentence. More precisely, since propositions are supposed to be true or false once and for all, it is the meaning of an eternal sentence. More precisely still, it is the 'cognitive' meaning, involving truth, not poetry.
     From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.139)
     A reaction: Quine defines this in order to attack it. I equate a proposition with a thought, and take a sentence to be an attempt to express a proposition. I have no idea why they are supposed to be 'timeless'. Philosophers have some very odd ideas.
19. Language / D. Propositions / 6. Propositions Critique
18968 The problem with propositions is their individuation. When do two sentences express one proposition? [Quine]
     Full Idea: The trouble with propositions, as cognitive meanings of eternal sentences, is individuation. Given two eternal sentences, themselves visibly different linguistically, it is not sufficiently clear under when to say that they mean the same proposition.
     From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.140)
     A reaction: If a group of people agree that two sentences mean the same thing, which happens all the time, I don't see what gives Quine the right to have a philosophical moan about some dubious activity called 'individuation'.
27. Natural Reality / C. Space / 3. Points in Space
18970 The concept of a 'point' makes no sense without the idea of absolute position [Quine]
     Full Idea: Unless we are prepared to believe that absolute position makes sense, the very idea of a point as an entity in its own right must be rejected as not merely mysterious but absurd.
     From: Willard Quine (Propositional Objects [1965], p.149)
     A reaction: The fact that without absolute position we can only think of 'points' as relative to a conceptual grid doesn't stop the grid from picking out actual locations in space, as shown by latitude and longitude.