41 ideas
| 18915 | If facts are the truthmakers, they are not in the world [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: If there are such things as truthmakers (facts), they are not to be found in the world. As Strawson would say to Austin: there is the cat, there is the mat, but where in the world is the fact that the cat is on the mat? | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 4) | |
| A reaction: He cites Strawson, Quine and Davidson for this point. |
| 18919 | There are no 'falsifying' facts, only an absence of truthmakers [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: A false proposition is not made false by anything like a 'falsifying' fact. A false proposition simply fails to be made true by any fact. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 4) | |
| A reaction: Sounds good. In truthmaker theory, one truth-value (T) is 'made', but the other one is not, so there is no symmetry between the two. Better to talk of T and not-T? See ideas on Excluded Middle. |
| 18913 | Traditional term logic struggled to express relations [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: The greatest challenge for traditional term logicians was the proper formulation and treatment of relational expressions. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005]) | |
| A reaction: The modern term logic of Fred Sommers claims to have solved this problem. |
| 18907 | Term logic rests on negated terms or denial, and that propositions are tied pairs [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: That terms can be negated, that such negation is distinguishable from denial, and that propositions can be construed syntactically as predicationally tied pairs of terms, are important for the tree theory of predication, and for term logic. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 2) |
| 6548 | Physicalism requires the naturalisation or rejection of set theory [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Eventually set theory will have to be either naturalised or rejected, if a thoroughgoing physicalism is to be maintained. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I regard Platonism as a form of naturalism (though a rather bold and dramatic one). The central issue seems to be the ability of the human main/brain to form 'abstract' notions about the physical world in which it lives. |
| 18912 | Was logic a branch of mathematics, or mathematics a branch of logic? [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: Nineteenth century logicians debated whether logic should be treated simply as a branch of mathematics, and mathematics could be applied to it, or whether mathematics is a branch of logic, with no mathematics used in formulating logic. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 3) | |
| A reaction: He cites Boole, De Morgan and Peirce for the first view, and Frege and Russell (and their 'logicism') for the second. The logic for mathematics slowly emerged from doing it, long before it was formalised. Mathematics is the boss? |
| 18922 | Logical syntax is actually close to surface linguistic form [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: The underlying logical syntax of language is close to the surface syntax of ordinary language. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is the boast of the Term logicians, in opposition to the strained and unnatural logical forms of predicate logic, which therefore don't give a good account of the way ordinary speakers reason. An attractive programme. 'Terms' are the key. |
| 18905 | Propositions can be analysed as pairs of terms glued together by predication [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: Sommers's 'tree theory' of predication assumes that propositions can be analysed as pairs of terms joined by some kind of predicational glue. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: This is the basis of Sommers's upgraded Aristotelian logic, known as Term Logic. The idea of reasoning with 'terms', rather than with objects, predicates and quantifiers, seems to me very appealing. I think I reason more about facts than about objects. |
| 18908 | Standard logic only negates sentences, even via negated general terms or predicates [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: Standard logic recognises only one kind of negation: sentential negation. Consequently, negation of a general term/predicate always amounts to negation of the entire sentence. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 3) |
| 8203 | All the arithmetical entities can be reduced to classes of integers, and hence to sets [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The arithmetic of ratios and irrational and imaginary numbers can all be reduced by definition to the theory of classes of positive integers, and this can in turn be reduced to pure set theory. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Vagaries of Definition [1972], p.53) | |
| A reaction: This summarises Quine's ontology of mathematics, which tries to eliminate virtually everything, but has to affirm the existence of sets. Can you count sets and their members, if the sets are used to define the numbers? |
| 18917 | Existence and nonexistence are characteristics of the world, not of objects [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: Existence and nonexistence are not primarily properties of individual objects (dogs, unicorns), but of totalities. To say that some object exists is just to say that it is a constituent of the world, which is a characteristic of the world, not the object. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 4) | |
| A reaction: This has important implications for the problem of truthmakers for negative existential statements (like 'there are no unicorns'). It is obviously a relative of Armstrong's totality facts that do the job. Not sure about 'a characteristic of'. |
| 6531 | Institutions are not reducible as types, but they are as tokens [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Institutional types are irreducible, though I assume that institutional tokens are reducible in the sense of strict identity, all the way down to the subatomic level. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems a promising distinction, as the boundaries of 'institutions' disappear when you begin to reduce them to lower levels (cf. Idea 4601), and yet plenty of institutions are self-evidently no more than physics. Plants are invisible as physics. |
| 6532 | Types cannot be reduced, but levels of reduction are varied groupings of the same tokens [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: If types cannot be reduced to more physical levels, this is not an embarrassment, as long as our institutional categories, our physiological categories, and our physical categories are just alternative groupings of the same tokens. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a self-evident truth about a car engine, so I don't see why it wouldn't apply equally to a brain. Lycan's identification of the type as the thing which cannot be reduced seems a promising explanation of much confusion among philosophers. |
| 6534 | One location may contain molecules, a metal strip, a key, an opener of doors, and a human tragedy [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: One space-time slice may be occupied by a collection of molecules, a metal strip, a key, an allower of entry to hotel rooms, a facilitator of adultery, and a destroyer souls. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Desdemona's handkerchief is a nice example. This sort of remark seems to be felt by some philosophers to be heartless wickedness, and yet it so screamingly self-evident that it is impossible to deny. |
| 18916 | Facts are not in the world - they are properties of the world [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: Facts must be viewed as properties of the world - not as things in the world. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 4) | |
| A reaction: Not sure I'm happy with either of these. Do animals grasp facts? If not, are they (as Strawson said) just the truths expressed by true sentences? That is not a clear idea either, given that facts are not the sentences themselves. Facts overlap. |
| 6529 | I see the 'role'/'occupant' distinction as fundamental to metaphysics [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I see the 'role'/'occupant' distinction as fundamental to metaphysics. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.0) | |
| A reaction: A passing remark in a discussion of functionalism about the mind, but I find it appealing. Causation is basic to materialistic metaphysics, and it creates networks of regular causes. It leaves open the essentialist question of WHY it has that role. |
| 18921 | Individuals are arranged in inclusion categories that match our semantics [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: The natural categories of individuals are arranged in a hierarchy of inclusion relations that is isomorphic with the linguistic semantic structure. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is the conclusion of a summary of modern Term Logic. The claim is that Sommers discerned this structure in our semantics (via the study of 'terms'), and was pleasantly surprised to find that it matched a plausible structure of natural categories. |
| 6549 | I think greenness is a complex microphysical property of green objects [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Personally I favour direct realism regarding secondary qualities, and identify greenness with some complex microphysical property exemplified by green physical objects. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.4) | |
| A reaction: He cites D.M.Armstrong (1981) as his source. Personally I find this a bewildering proposal. Does he think there is greenness in grass AS WELL AS the emission of that wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation? Is greenness zooming through the air? |
| 6543 | Intentionality comes in degrees [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Intentionality comes in degrees. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I agree. A footprint is 'about' a foot, in the sense of containing concentrated information about it. Can we, though, envisage a higher degree than human thought? Is there a maximum degree? Everything is 'about' everything, in some respect. |
| 6537 | Teleological views allow for false intentional content, unlike causal and nomological theories [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: The teleological view begins to explain intentionality, and in particular allows brain states and events to have false intentional content; causal and nomological theories of intentionality tend to falter on this last task. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly if you say thought is 'caused' by the world, false thought become puzzling. I'm not sure I understand the rest of this, but it is an intriguing remark about a significant issue… |
| 6546 | Pain is composed of urges, desires, impulses etc, at different levels of abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Our phenomenal experience of pain has components - it is a complex, consisting (perhaps) of urges, desires, impulses, and beliefs, probably occurring at quite different levels of institutional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be true, and offers the reductionist a strategy for making inroads into the supposed irreducable and fundamental nature of qualia. What's it like to be a complex hierarchically structured multi-functional organism? |
| 6547 | The right 'level' for qualia is uncertain, though top (behaviourism) and bottom (particles) are false [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: It is just arbitrary to choose a level of nature a priori as the locus of qualia, even though we can agree that high levels (such as behaviourism) and low-levels (such as the subatomic) can be ruled out as totally improbable. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: Very good. People scream 'qualia!' whenever the behaviour level or the atomic level are proposed as the locations of the mind, but the suggestion that they are complex, and are spread across many functional levels in the middle sounds good. |
| 6527 | If energy in the brain disappears into thin air, this breaches physical conservation laws [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: By interacting causally, Cartesian dualism seems to violate the conservation laws of physics (concerning matter and energy). This seems testable, and afferent and efferent pathways disappearing into thin air would suggest energy is not conserved. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: It would seem to be no problem as long as outputs were identical in energy to inputs. If the experiment could actually be done, the result might astonish us. |
| 6528 | In lower animals, psychology is continuous with chemistry, and humans are continuous with animals [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Evolution has proceeded in all other known species by increasingly complex configurations of molecules and organs, which support primitive psychologies; our human psychologies are more advanced, but undeniably continuous with lower animals. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Personally I find the evolution objection to dualism highly persuasive. I don't see how anyone can take evolution seriously and be a dualist. If there is a dramatic ontological break at some point, a plausible reason would be needed for that. |
| 6554 | Two behaviourists meet. The first says,"You're fine; how am I?" [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Old joke: two Behaviourists meet in the street, and the first says,"You're fine; how am I?" | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], n1.6) | |
| A reaction: This invites the response that introspection is uniquely authoritative about 'how we are', but this has been challenged quite a lot recently, which pushes us to consider whether these stupid behaviourists might actually have a good point. |
| 6545 | If functionalism focuses on folk psychology, it ignores lower levels of function [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: 'Analytical functionalists', who hold that meanings of mental terms are determined by the causal roles associated with them by 'folk psychology', deny themselves appeals to lower levels of functional organisation. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably folk psychology can fit into the kind of empirical methodology favoured by behaviourists, whereas 'lower levels' are going to become rather speculative and unscientific. |
| 6541 | Functionalism must not be too abstract to allow inverted spectrum, or so structural that it becomes chauvinistic [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: The functionalist must find a level of characterisation of mental states that is not so abstract or behaviouristic as to rule out the possibility of inverted spectrum etc., nor so specific and structural as to fall into chauvinism. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: If too specific then animals and aliens won't be able to implement the necessary functions; if the theory becomes very behaviouristic, then it loses interest in the possibility of an inverted spectrum. He is certainly right to hunt for a middle ground. |
| 6539 | The distinction between software and hardware is not clear in computing [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Even the software/hardware distinction as it is literally applied within computer science is philosophically unclear. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: This is true, and very important for functionalist theories of the mind. Even very volatile software is realised in 'hard' physics, and rewritable discs etc blur the distinction between 'programmable' and 'hardwired'. |
| 6533 | Mental types are a subclass of teleological types at a high level of functional abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I am taking mental types to form a small subclass of teleological types occurring for the most part at a high level of functional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to say that he understand teleology in evolutionary terms. There is always a gap between how you characterise or individuate something, and what it actually is. To say spanners are 'a small subclass of tools' is not enough. |
| 6535 | Teleological characterisations shade off smoothly into brutely physical ones [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Highly teleological characterisations, unlike naïve and explicated mental characterisations, have the virtue of shading off fairly smoothly into (more) brutely physical ones. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: Thus the purpose of a car engine, and a spark plug, and the spark, and the temperature, and the vibration of molecules show a fading away of the overt purpose, disappearing into the pointless activity of electrons and quantum levels. |
| 6544 | Identity theory is functionalism, but located at the lowest level of abstraction [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: 'Neuron' may be understood as a physiological term or a functional term, so even the Identity Theorist is a Functionalist - one who locates mental entities at a very low level of abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a striking observation, and somewhat inclines me to switch from identity theory to functionalism. If you ask what is the correct level of abstraction, Lycan's teleological-homuncular version refers you to all the levels. |
| 6530 | We reduce the mind through homuncular groups, described abstractly by purpose [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: I am explicating the mental in a reductive way, by reducing mental characterizations to homuncular institutional ones, which are teleological characterizations at various levels of functional abstraction. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: I think this is the germ of a very good physicalist account of the mind. More is needed than a mere assertion about what the mind reduces to at the very lowest level; this offers a decent account of the descending stages of reduction. |
| 6536 | Teleological functionalism helps us to understand psycho-biological laws [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Teleological functionalism helps us to understand the nature of biological and psychological laws, particularly in the face of Davidsonian scepticism about the latter. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I doubt the existence of psycho-physical laws, but only because of the vast complexity. They would be like the laws of weather. 'Psycho-physical' laws seem to presuppose some sort of dualism. |
| 6542 | A Martian may exhibit human-like behaviour while having very different sensations [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Quite possibly a Martian's humanoid behaviour is prompted by his having sensations somewhat unlike ours, despite his superficial behavioural similarities to us. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I think this firmly refutes the multiple realisability objection to type-type physicalism. Mental events are individuated by their phenomenal features (known only to the user), and by their causal role (publicly available). These are separate. |
| 8202 | Meaning is essence divorced from things and wedded to words [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Meaning is essence divorced from the thing and wedded to the word. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Vagaries of Definition [1972], p.51) | |
| A reaction: Quine's strategy is that a demolition of essences will be a definition of meaning. Personally I would like to defend essences, though I admit to finding meaning tricky. That is because essences are external, but meanings are in minds. |
| 18918 | Terms denote objects with properties, and statements denote the world with that property [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: In term logic, what a term denotes are the objects having the property it signifies. What a statement denotes is the world, that which has the constitutive property it signifies. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 4) |
| 18920 | 'Socrates is wise' denotes a sentence; 'that Socrates is wise' denotes a proposition [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: Whereas 'Socrates is wise' denotes a sentence, 'that Socrates is wise' denotes a proposition. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 4) | |
| A reaction: In traditional parlance, 'reported speech' refers to the underlying proposition, because it does not commit to the actual words being used. As a lover of propositions (as mental events, not mysterious abstract objects), I like this. |
| 8201 | The distinction between meaning and further information is as vague as the essence/accident distinction [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The distinction between what belongs to the meaning of a word and what counts as further information is scarcely clearer than the distinction between the essence of a thing and its accidents. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Vagaries of Definition [1972], p.51) | |
| A reaction: In lots of cases the distinction between essence and accident strikes me as totally clear. Tricky borderline cases don't destroy a distinction. That bachelors are married is clearly not 'further information'. |
| 18906 | Negating a predicate term and denying its unnegated version are quite different [Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: There is a crucial distinction in term logic between affirming a negated predicate term of some subject and denying the unnegated version of that term of that same subject. We must distinguish 'X is non-P' from 'X is not P'. | |
| From: George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: The first one affirms something about X, but the second one just blocks off a possible description of X. 'X is non-harmful' and 'X is not harmful' - if X had ceased to exist, the second would be appropriate and the first wouldn't? I'm guessing. |
| 6538 | We need a notion of teleology that comes in degrees [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: We need a notion of teleology that comes in degrees. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: Anyone who says that key concepts, such as those concerning the mind, should come 'in degrees' wins my instant support. A whole car engine requires a very teleological explanation, the spark in the sparkplug far less so. |
| 6551 | 'Physical' means either figuring in physics descriptions, or just located in space-time [Lycan] |
| Full Idea: An object is specifically physical if it figures in explanations and descriptions of features of ordinary non-living matter, as in current physics; it is more generally physical if it is simply located in space-time. | |
| From: William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 8.5) | |
| A reaction: This gives a useful distinction when trying to formulate a 'physicalist' account of the mind, where type-type physicalism says only the 'postulates of physics' can be used, whereas 'naturalism' about the mind uses the more general concept. |