14 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. |
10558 | Abstract objects are actually constituted by the properties by which we conceive them [Zalta] |
Full Idea: Where for ordinary objects one can discover the properties they exemplify, abstract objects are actually constituted or determined by the properties by which we conceive them. I use the technical term 'x encodes F' for this idea. | |
From: Edward N. Zalta (Deriving Kripkean Claims with Abstract Objects [2006], 2 n2) | |
A reaction: One might say that whereas concrete objects can be dubbed (in the Kripke manner), abstract objects can only be referred to by descriptions. See 10557 for more technicalities about Zalta's idea. |
22167 | Our images of bodies are not produced by the bodies, but by our own minds [Augustine, by Aquinas] |
Full Idea: Augustine says bodies don't form images in our spirit; our spirit does that itself with amazing quickness. ...So the appearances under which mind knows things aren't drawn from the things themselves. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Thomas Aquinas - Quodlibeta 8.2.1 | |
A reaction: This is Augustine's theory of 'illumination' - that God creates experience within us. His theory was soon discarded by the early scholastics. |
22117 | Our minds grasp reality by direct illumination (rather than abstraction from experience) [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: Instead of supposing that what we know can be abstracted from sensible particulars that instantiate such knowledge, Augustine insists that our mind is so constituted as to see 'intelligible realities' directly by inner illumination. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
A reaction: His 'theory of illumination'. This seems to be a sort of super-rationalism. This doesn't make clear the role of sensations. Surely he doesn't thing that we just bypass them? |
10557 | Abstract objects are captured by second-order modal logic, plus 'encoding' formulas [Zalta] |
Full Idea: My object theory is formulated in a 'syntactically second-order' modal predicate calculus modified only so as to admit a second kind of atomic formula ('xF'), which asserts that object x 'encodes' property F. | |
From: Edward N. Zalta (Deriving Kripkean Claims with Abstract Objects [2006], p.2) | |
A reaction: This is summarising Zalta's 1983 theory of abstract objects. See Idea 10558 for Zalta's idea in plain English. |
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). |
22118 | Augustine created the modern concept of the will [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: The modern concept of the will is often said to originate with Augustine. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
A reaction: I'm beginning to think that this is the source of the trouble. How can a thing be intrinsically free? Surely freedom is always a contextual concept? |
4348 | Love, and do what you will [Augustine] |
Full Idea: Love, and do what you will. | |
From: Augustine (works [c.415]) | |
A reaction: This sounds libertarian, but Augustine had a stern concept of what love required. It nicely captures one of the essential ideas of virtue ethics. |
7821 | Pagans produced three hundred definitions of the highest good [Augustine, by Grayling] |
Full Idea: Augustine claimed that the pagan schools between them had produced nearly three hundred different definitions of the highest good. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by A.C. Grayling - What is Good? Ch.5 | |
A reaction: I would expect the right definition to be in there somewhere, but no doubt Augustine's definition made it 301. Perhaps the biggest problem of human life is that (as with the Kennedy assassination) proliferating stories obscure the true story. |
22119 | Augustine said (unusually) that 'ought' does not imply 'can' [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: Augustine insisted that 'ought' does not, in any straightforward way, imply 'can' - which distinguishes him from most modern ethicists. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
A reaction: Not unreasonable. I ought to help my ailing friend who lives abroad, but I haven't the time or money to do it. We can experience impossibilities as duties. Impossibilities are just excuses. Augustine is opposing the Pelagian heresy. |
22116 | Augustine identified Donatism, Pelagianism and Manicheism as the main heresies [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: Augustine did the most to define Christian heresy. The three most prominent were Donatism, Pelagianism (that humans are perfectible), and Manicheism (that good and evil are equally basic metaphysical realities). | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.73 | |
A reaction: Manicheans had presumably been studying Empedocles. (I suppose it's too late to identify Christianity as a heresy?). |
19338 | Augustine said evil does not really exist, and evil is a limitation in goodness [Augustine, by Perkins] |
Full Idea: Augustine solution to the problem of evil was to say that, strictly speaking, evil does not exist. Human beings are not part evil and part good, but rather just a limited amount of goodness. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.III | |
A reaction: Augustine was rebelling against Manicheanism, which he espoused when young, which proposed a good and an evil force. An apathetic slob seems devoid of goodness, but is not evil. It takes extra effort to perform active evil. |