8 ideas
| 15787 | Maybe Ockham's Razor is a purely aesthetic principle [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: It might be said that Ockham's Razor is a purely aesthetic principle. | |
| From: William Lycan (The Trouble with Possible Worlds [1979], 02) | |
| A reaction: I don't buy this, if it meant to be dismissive of the relevance of the principle to truth. A deep question might be, what is so aesthetically attractive about simplicity? I'm inclined to think that application of the Razor has delivered terrific results. |
| 15784 | The Razor seems irrelevant for Meinongians, who allow absolutely everything to exist [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: A Meinongian has already posited everything that could, or even could not, be; how, then, can any subsequent brandishing of Ockham's Razor be to the point? | |
| From: William Lycan (The Trouble with Possible Worlds [1979], 02) | |
| A reaction: See the ideas of Alexius Meinong. Presumably these crazy Meinongians must make some distinction between what actually exists in front of your nose, and the rest. So the Razor can use that distinction too. |
| 15792 | Maybe non-existent objects are sets of properties [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Meinong's Objects have sometimes been construed as sets of properties. | |
| From: William Lycan (The Trouble with Possible Worlds [1979], 09) | |
| A reaction: [Lycan cites Castaņeda and T.Parsons] You still seem to have the problem with any 'bundle' theory of anything. A non-existent object is as much intended to be an object as anything on my desk right now. It just fails to be. |
| 15795 | Treating possible worlds as mental needs more actual mental events [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: A mentalistic approach to possible worlds is daunted by the paucity of actual mental events. | |
| From: William Lycan (The Trouble with Possible Worlds [1979], 09) | |
| A reaction: Why do they have to be actual, any more than memories have to be conscious? The mental events just need to be available when you need them. They are never all required simultaneously. This isn't mathematical logic! |
| 15796 | Possible worlds must be made of intensional objects like propositions or properties [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I believe the only promising choice of actual entities to serve as 'worlds' is that of sets of intensional objects, such as propositions or properties with stipulated interrelations. | |
| From: William Lycan (The Trouble with Possible Worlds [1979], 12) | |
| A reaction: This is mainly in response to Lewis's construction of them out of actual concrete objects. It strikes me as a bogus problem. It is just a convenient way to think precisely about possibilities, and occasionally outruns our mental capacity. |
| 15794 | If 'worlds' are sentences, and possibility their consistency, consistency may rely on possibility [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: If a 'world' is understood as a set of sentences, then possibility may be understood as consistency, ...but this seems circular, in that 'consistency' of sentences cannot adequately be defined save in terms of possibility. | |
| From: William Lycan (The Trouble with Possible Worlds [1979], 09) | |
| A reaction: [Carnap and Hintikka propose the view, Lewis 'Counterfactuals' p.85 objects] Worlds as sentences is not, of course, the same as worlds as propositions. There is a lot of circularity around in 'possible' worlds. |
| 14349 | If there are no finks or antidotes at the fundamental level, the laws can't be ceteris paribus [Burge, by Corry] |
| Full Idea: Bird argues that there are no finks at the fundamental level, and unlikely to be any antidotes. It then follows that laws at the fundamental level will all be strict - not ceteris paribus - laws. | |
| From: report of Tyler Burge (Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind [1986]) by Richard Corry - Dispositional Essentialism Grounds Laws of Nature? 3 | |
| A reaction: [Bird's main target is Nancy Cartwright 1999] This is a nice line of argument. Isn't part of the ceteris paribus problem that two fundamental laws might interfere with one another? |
| 1468 | If meaning is use, then religious sentences have meaning because they are used to assert an intention about how to live [Braithwaite, by PG] |
| Full Idea: If the meaning of statements is their use (as Wittgenstein claims), then religious people use religious claims to assert an intention to follow a religious life and morality, and this intention gives their sentences meaning. | |
| From: report of R.B. Braithwaite (Empiricist View of Religion [1955]) by PG - Db (ideas) |