9 ideas
| 11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If a designated conclusion follows from the premisses, but the argument involves two howlers which cancel each other out, then the moral is that the path an argument takes from premisses to conclusion does matter to its logical evaluation. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], II) | |
| A reaction: The drift of this is that our view of logic should be a little closer to the reasoning of ordinary language, and we should rely a little less on purely formal accounts. |
| 11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If 'and' and 'but' really are alike in sense, in what might that likeness consist? Some philosophers of classical logic will reply that they share a sense by virtue of sharing a truth table. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000]) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard view which Rumfitt sets out to challenge. |
| 11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: A connective will possess the sense that it has by virtue of its competent users' finding certain rules of inference involving it to be primitively obvious. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], III) | |
| A reaction: Rumfitt cites Peacocke as endorsing this view, which characterises the logical connectives by their rules of usage rather than by their pure semantic value. |
| 17527 | Causation seems to be an innate concept (or acquired very early) [Bird] |
| Full Idea: There is evidence that the concept of causation is innate, or that we are primed to acquire it very early in life, within months at most. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Causation and the Manifestation of Powers [2010], p.167) | |
| A reaction: Bird doesn't give any references. This is important for our understanding of induction. Creatures seem to learn from a single instance, rather than waiting for habit to be ingrained by many instances. They must infer a cause. |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |
| 20168 | Blame usually has no effect if the recipient thinks it unjustified [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: One of the most obvious facts about blame is that in many cases it is effective only if the recipient thinks that it is justified. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (How free does the will need to be? [1985], 5) | |
| A reaction: The point of the blame might not be reform of the agent, but a public justification for punishment as deterrence, in which case who cares what the agent thinks? Is blame attribution of causes, or reasons to punish? |
| 20167 | Blame partly rests on the fiction that blamed agents always know their obligations [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: Blame rests, in part, on a fiction; the idea that ethical reasons, in particular the special kind of ethical reasons that are obligations, must, really, be available to the blamed agent. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (How free does the will need to be? [1985], 5) | |
| A reaction: In blaming someone, you may be telling them that they should know their obligations, rather than assuming that they do know them. How else can we give children a moral education? |
| 17528 | The dispositional account explains causation, as stimulation and manifestation of dispositions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The analysis of causation in terms of dispositions provides no conceptual reduction, but it does provide insight into the metaphysics of causation. We then know what causation is - it is the stimulation and manifestation of a disposition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Causation and the Manifestation of Powers [2010], p.167) | |
| A reaction: I would say that it offers the essence of causation, by giving a basic explanation of it. See Mumford/Lill Anjum on this. |
| 17526 | The counterfactual approach makes no distinction between cause and pre-condition [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The counterfactual approach makes no distinction between cause and condition, ...but when the smoke sets off the fire alarm, the smoke is the cause, whereas the presence of the alarm is just the condition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Causation and the Manifestation of Powers [2010], p.162) | |
| A reaction: Bird defends the idea that causes are what stimulate dispositions to act. |