23 ideas
| 14018 | Is Sufficient Reason self-refuting (no reason to accept it!), or is it a legitimate explanatory tool? [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Mackie (1983) dismisses the Principle of Sufficient Reason quickly, arguing that it is self-refuting: there is no sufficient reason to accept it. However, a principle is not invalidated by not applying to itself; it can be a powerful heuristic tool. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 6.VI) | |
| A reaction: If God was entirely rational, and created everything, that would be a sufficient reason to accept the principle. You would never, though, get to the reason why God was entirely rational. Something will always elude the principle. |
| 14008 | The redundancy theory conflates metalinguistic bivalence with object-language excluded middle [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: The problem with the redundancy theory of truth is that it conflates the metalinguistic notion of bivalence with a theorem of the object language, namely the law of excluded middle. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 3.III Pr3) |
| 14010 | All relations between spatio-temporal objects are either spatio-temporal, or causal [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: If there are any genuine relations at all between spatio-temporal objects, then they are all either spatio-temporal or causal. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 3.III Pr4) | |
| A reaction: This sounds too easy, but I have wracked my brains for counterexamples and failed to find any. How about qualitative relations? |
| 14009 | It is a necessary condition for the existence of relations that both of the relata exist [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: It is widely held, and I think correctly so, that a necessary condition for the existence of relations is that both of the relata exist. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 3.III Pr4) | |
| A reaction: This is either trivial or false. Relations in the actual world self-evidently relate components of it. But I seem able to revere Sherlock Holmes, and speculate about relations between possible entities. |
| 11984 | Asserting a possible property is to say it would have had the property if that world had been actual [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: To say than x has a property in a possible world is simply to say that x would have had the property if that world had been actual. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Transworld Identity or worldbound Individuals? [1973], I) | |
| A reaction: Plantinga tries to defuse all the problems with identity across possible worlds, by hanging on to subjunctive verbs and modal modifiers. The point, though, was to explain these, or at least to try to give their logical form. |
| 11980 | A possible world is a maximal possible state of affairs [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: A possible world is just a maximal possible state of affairs. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Transworld Identity or worldbound Individuals? [1973], I) | |
| A reaction: The key point here is that Plantinga includes the word 'possible' in his definition. Possibility defines the worlds, and so worlds cannot be used on their own to define possibility. |
| 11982 | If possible Socrates differs from actual Socrates, the Indiscernibility of Identicals says they are different [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: If the Socrates of the actual world has snubnosedness but Socrates-in-W does not, this is surely inconsistent with the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which none sounder can be conceived. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Transworld Identity or worldbound Individuals? [1973], I) | |
| A reaction: However, we allow Socrates to differ over time while remaining the same Socrates, so some similar approach should apply here. In both cases we need some notion of what is essential to Socrates. But what unites aged 3 with aged 70? |
| 11983 | It doesn't matter that we can't identify the possible Socrates; we can't identify adults from baby photos [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: We may say it makes no sense to say that Socrates exists at a world, if there is in principle no way of identifying him. ...But this is confused. To suppose Agnew was a precocious baby, we needn't be able to pick him from a gallery of babies. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Transworld Identity or worldbound Individuals? [1973], I) | |
| A reaction: This seems a good point, and yet we have a space-time line joining adult Agnew with baby Agnew, and no such causal link is available between persons in different possible worlds. What would be the criterion in each case? |
| 11985 | If individuals can only exist in one world, then they can never lack any of their properties [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: The Theory of Worldbound Individuals contends that no object exists in more than one possible world; this implies the outrageous view that - taking properties in the broadest sense - no object could have lacked any property that it in fact has. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Transworld Identity or worldbound Individuals? [1973], II) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz is the best known exponent of this 'outrageous view', though Plantinga shows that Lewis may be seen in the same light, since only counterparts are found in possible worlds, not the real thing. The Theory does seem wrong. |
| 11986 | The counterparts of Socrates have self-identity, but only the actual Socrates has identity-with-Socrates [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: While Socrates has no counterparts that lack self-identity, he does have counterparts that lack identity-with-Socrates. He alone has that - the property, that is, of being identical with the object that in fact instantiates Socrateity. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Transworld Identity or worldbound Individuals? [1973], II) | |
| A reaction: I am never persuaded by arguments which rest on such dubious pseudo-properties. Whether or not a counterpart of Socrates has any sort of identity with Socrates cannot be prejudged, as it would beg the question. |
| 11987 | Counterpart Theory absurdly says I would be someone else if things went differently [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: It makes no sense to say I could have been someone else, yet Counterpart Theory implies not merely that I could have been distinct from myself, but that I would have been distinct from myself had things gone differently in even the most miniscule detail. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Transworld Identity or worldbound Individuals? [1973], II) | |
| A reaction: A counterpart doesn't appear to be 'me being distinct from myself'. We have to combine counterparts over possible worlds with perdurance over time. I am a 'worm' of time-slices. Anything not in that worm is not strictly me. |
| 14016 | The idea of simultaneity in Special Relativity is full of verificationist assumptions [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Special Relativity, with its definition of simultaneity, is shot through with verificationist assumptions. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 6.IIc) | |
| A reaction: [He credits Sklar with this] I love hearing such points made, because all my instincts have rebelled against Einstein's story, even after I have been repeatedly told how stupid I am, and how I should study more maths etc. |
| 14019 | Relativity denies simultaneity, so it needs past, present and future (unlike Presentism) [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Special Relativity denies absolute simultaneity, and therefore requires a past and a future, as well as a present. The Presentist, however, only requires the present. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 6.VII) | |
| A reaction: It is nice to accuse Relativity of ontological extravagence. When it 'requires' past and future, that may not be a massive commitment, since the whole theory is fairly operationalist, according to Putnam. |
| 14013 | Special Relativity allows an absolute past, future, elsewhere and simultaneity [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: There is in special relativity a notion of 'absolute past', and of 'absolute future', and of 'absolute elsewhere', and of 'absolute simultaneity' (of events occurring at their space-time conjunction). | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 5.III) | |
| A reaction: [My summary of his paragraph] I am inclined to agree with Bourne that there is enough here to build some sort of notion of 'present' that will support the doctrine of Presentism. |
| 14015 | No-Futurists believe in past and present, but not future, and say the world grows as facts increase [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: 'No-Futurists' believe in the real existence of the past and present but not the future, and hold that the world grows as more and more facts come into existence. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 6.IIb) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Broad 1923 and Tooley 1997] My sympathies are with Presentism, but there seems not denying that past events fix truths in a way that future events don't. The unchangeability of past events seems to make them factual. |
| 14007 | How can presentists talk of 'earlier than', and distinguish past from future? [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Presentists have a difficulty with how they can help themselves to the notion of 'earlier than' without having to invoke real relata, and how presentism can distinguish the past from the future. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 2.IV) | |
| A reaction: The obvious response is to infer the past from the present (fossils), and infer the future from the present (ticking bomb). But what is it that is being inferred, if the past and future are denied a priori? Tricky! |
| 14011 | Presentism seems to deny causation, because the cause and the effect can never coexist [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: It seems that presentism cannot accommodate causation at all. In a true instance of 'c causes e', it seems to follow that both c and e exist, and it is widely accepted that c is earlier than e. But for presentists that means c and e can't coexist. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 4) | |
| A reaction: A nice problem. Obviously if the flying ball smashed the window, we are left with only the effect existing - otherwise we could intercept the ball and prevent the disaster. To say this cause and this effect coexist would be even dafter than the problem. |
| 14017 | Since presentists treat the presentness of events as basic, simultaneity should be define by that means [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Since for presentism there is an ontologically significant and basic sense in which events are present, we should expect a definition of simultaneity in terms of presentness, rather than the other way round. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], 6.IV) | |
| A reaction: Love it. I don't see how you can even articulate questions about simultaneity if you don't already have a notion of presentness. What are the relata you are enquiring about? |
| 14003 | Time is tensed or tenseless; the latter says all times and objects are real, and there is no passage of time [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Theories of time are in two broad categories, the tenseless and the tensed theories. In tenseless theories, all times are equally real, as are all objects located at them, and there is no passage of time from future to present to past. It's the B-series. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], Intro IIa) | |
| A reaction: It might solve a few of the problems, but is highly counterintuitive. Presumably it makes the passage of time an illusion, and gives no account of how events 'happen', or of their direction, and it leaves causation out on a limb. I'm afraid not. |
| 14005 | B-series objects relate to each other; A-series objects relate to the present [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Objects in the B-series are earlier than, later than, or simultaneous with each other, whereas objects in the A-series are earlier than, later than or simultaneous with the present. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], Intro IIb) | |
| A reaction: Must we choose? Two past events relate to each other, but there is a further relation when 'now' falls between the events. If I must choose, I suppose I go for the A-series view. The B-series is a subsequent feat of imagination. McTaggart agreed. |
| 14006 | Time flows, past is fixed, future is open, future is feared but not past, we remember past, we plan future [Bourne] |
| Full Idea: We say that time 'flows', that the past is 'fixed' but the future is 'open'; we only dread the future, but not the past; we remember the past but not the future; we plan for the future but not the past. | |
| From: Craig Bourne (A Future for Presentism [2006], Intro III) | |
| A reaction: These seem pretty overwhelming reasons for accepting an asymmetry between the past and the future. If you reject that, you seem to be mired in a multitude of contradictions. Your error theory is going to be massive. |
| 9111 | God is not wise, but more-than-wise; God is not good, but more-than-good [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: God is not wise, but more-than-wise; God is not good, but more-than-good. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Reportatio [1330], III Q viii) | |
| A reaction: [He is quoting 'Damascene'] I quote this for interest, but I very much doubt whether Damascene or William knew what it meant, and I certainly don't. There seems to have been a politically correct desire to invent super-powers for God. |
| 9112 | We could never form a concept of God's wisdom if we couldn't abstract it from creatures [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: What we abstract is said to belong to perfection in so far as it can be predicated of God and can stand for Him. For if such a concept could not be abstracted from a creature, then in this life we could not arrive at a cognition of God's wisdom. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Reportatio [1330], III Q viii) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the germ of an important argument. Without the ability to abstract from what is experienced, we would not be able to apply general concepts to things which are beyond experience. It is a key idea for empiricism. |