28 ideas
10405 | In the iterative conception of sets, they form a natural hierarchy [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: In the iterative conception of sets, they form a natural hierarchy. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.1) |
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. |
10407 | Logical Form explains differing logical behaviour of similar sentences [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: 'Logical Form' is a technical notion motivated by the observation that sentences with a similar surface structure may exhibit quite different logical behaviour. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
A reaction: [Swoyer goes on to give some nice examples] The tricky question is whether each sentence has ONE logical form. Pragmatics warns us of the dangers. One needs to check numerous inferences from a given sentences, not just one. |
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. |
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. |
9455 | Maybe proper names have the content of fixing a thing's category [Bealer] |
Full Idea: Some say that proper names have no descriptive content, but others think that although a name does not have the right sort of descriptive content which fixes a unique referent, it has a content which fixes the sort or category to which it belongs. | |
From: George Bealer (Propositions [1998], §7) | |
A reaction: Presumably 'Mary', and 'Felix', and 'Rover', and 'Smallville' are cases in point. There is a well known journalist called 'Manchester', a famous man called 'Hilary', a village in Hertfordshire called 'Matching Tie'... Interesting, though. |
9454 | The four leading theories of definite descriptions are Frege's, Russell's, Evans's, and Prior's [Bealer] |
Full Idea: The four leading theories of definite descriptions are Frege's, Russell's, Evans's, and Prior's, ...of which to many Frege's is the most intuitive of the four. Frege says they refer to the unique item (if it exists) which satisfies the predicate. | |
From: George Bealer (Propositions [1998], §5) | |
A reaction: He doesn't expound the other three, but I record this a corrective to the view that Russell has the only game in town. |
10421 | Supervenience is nowadays seen as between properties, rather than linguistic [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Supervenience is sometimes taken to be a relationship between two fragments of language, but it is increasingly taken to be a relationship between pairs of families of properties. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.17) | |
A reaction: If supervenience is a feature of the world, rather than of our descriptions, then it cries out for explanation, just as any other regularities do. Personally I would have thought the best explanation of the supervenience of mind and body was obvious. |
10410 | Anti-realists can't explain different methods to measure distance [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Anti-realists theories of measurement (like operationalism) cannot explain how we can use different methods to measure the same thing (e.g. lengths and distances in cosmology, geology, histology and atomic physics). | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
A reaction: Swoyer says that the explanation is that measurement aims at objective properties, the same in each of these areas. Quite good. |
10399 | If a property such as self-identity can only be in one thing, it can't be a universal [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Some properties may not be universals, if they can only be exemplified by one thing, such as 'being identical with Socrates'. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000]) | |
A reaction: I think it is absurd to think that self-identity is an intrinsic 'property', possessed by everything. That a=a is a convenience for logicians, meaning nothing in the world. And it is relational. The sharing of properties is indeed what needs explanation. |
10416 | Can properties have parts? [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Can properties have parts? | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 6.4) | |
A reaction: If powers are more fundamental than properties, with the latter often being complexes of the underlying powers, then yes they do. But powers don't. Presumably whatever is fundamental shouldn't have parts. Why? |
10417 | There are only first-order properties ('red'), and none of higher-order ('coloured') [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: 'Elementarism' is the view that there are first-order properties, but that there are no properties of any higher-order. There are first-order properties like various shades of red, but there is no higher-order property, like 'being a colour'. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.1) | |
A reaction: [He cites Bergmann 1968] Interesting. Presumably the programme is naturalistic (and hence congenial to me), and generalisations about properties are conceptual, while the properties themselves are natural. |
10413 | The best-known candidate for an identity condition for properties is necessary coextensiveness [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: The best-known candidate for an identity condition for properties is necessary coextensiveness. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 6) | |
A reaction: The necessity (in all possible worlds) covers renates and cordates. It is hard to see how one could assert the necessity without some deeper explanation. What makes us deny that actually coextensive renates and cordates have different properties? |
10402 | Various attempts are made to evade universals being wholly present in different places [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: The worry that a single thing could be wholly present in widely separated locations has led to trope theory, to the claim that properties are not located in their instances, or to the view that this treats universals as if they were individuals. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.2) | |
A reaction: I find it dispiriting to come to philosophy in the late twentieth century and have to inherit such a ridiculous view as that there are things that are 'wholly present' in many places. |
10400 | Conceptualism says words like 'honesty' refer to concepts, not to properties [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Conceptualists urge that words like 'honesty', which might seem to refer to properties, really refer to concepts. A few contemporary philosophers have defended conceptualism, and recent empirical work bears on it, but the view is no longer common. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 1.1) | |
A reaction: ..and that's all Swoyer says about this very interesting view! He only cites Cocchiarella 1986 Ch.3. The view leaves a lot of work to be done in explaining how nature is, and how our concepts connect to it, and arise in response to it. |
10403 | If properties are abstract objects, then their being abstract exemplifies being abstract [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: If properties are abstract objects, then the property of being abstract should itself exemplify the property of being abstract. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.2) | |
A reaction: Swoyer links this observation with Plato's views on self-predication, and his Third Man Argument (which I bet originated with Aristotle in the Academy!). Do we have a regress of objects, as well as a regress of properties? |
10406 | One might hope to reduce possible worlds to properties [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: One might hope to reduce possible worlds to properties. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.1) | |
A reaction: [He cites Zalta 1983 4.2, and Forrest 1986] I think we are dealing with nothing more than imagined possibilities, which are inferred from our understanding of the underlying 'powers' of the actual world (expressed as 'properties'). |
10404 | Extreme empiricists can hardly explain anything [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Extreme empiricists wind up unable to explain much of anything. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.3) | |
A reaction: This seems to be the major problem for empiricism, but I am not sure why inference to the best explanation should not be part of a sensible empirical approach. Thinking laws are just 'descriptions of regularities' illustrates the difficulty. |
10408 | Intensions are functions which map possible worlds to sets of things denoted by an expression [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Intensions are functions that assign a set to the expression at each possible world, ..so the semantic value of 'red' is the function that maps each possible world to the set of things in that world that are red. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
A reaction: I am suddenly deeply alienated from this mathematical logicians' way of talking about what 'red' means! We need more psychology, not less. We call things red if we imagine them as looking red. Is imagination a taboo in analytical philosophy? |
10409 | Research suggests that concepts rely on typical examples [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Recent empirical work on concepts says that many concepts have graded membership, and stress the importance of phenomena like typicality, prototypes, and exemplars. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
A reaction: [He cites Rorsch 1978 as the start of this] I say the mind is a database, exactly corresponding to tables, fields etc. Prototypes sound good as the way we identify a given category. Universals are the 'typical' examples labelling areas (e.g. goat). |
10401 | The F and G of logic cover a huge range of natural language combinations [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: All sorts of combinations of copulas ('is') with verbs, adverbs, adjectives, determiners, common nouns, noun phrases and prepositional phrases go over into the familiar Fs and Gs of standard logical notation. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 1.2) | |
A reaction: This is a nice warning of how misleading logic can be when trying to understand how we think about reality. Montague semantics is an attempt to tackle the problem. Numbers as adjectives are a clear symptom of the difficulties. |
9453 | Sentences saying the same with the same rigid designators may still express different propositions [Bealer] |
Full Idea: The propositions behind 'Cicero is emulated more than Tully' seems to differ somehow from 'Tully is emulated more than Cicero', despite the proper names being rigid designators. | |
From: George Bealer (Propositions [1998], §1) | |
A reaction: Interesting, because this isn't a directly propositional attitude situation like 'believes', though it depends on such things. Bealer says this is a key modern difficulty with propositions. |
9452 | Propositions might be reduced to functions (worlds to truth values), or ordered sets of properties and relations [Bealer] |
Full Idea: The reductionist view of propositions sees them as either extensional functions from possible worlds to truth values, or as ordered sets of properties, relations, and perhaps particulars. | |
From: George Bealer (Propositions [1998], §1) | |
A reaction: The usual problem of all functional accounts is 'what is it about x that enables it to have that function?' And if they are sets, where does the ordering come in? A proposition isn't just a list of items in some particular order. Both wrong. |
10420 | Maybe a proposition is just a property with all its places filled [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: Some say we can think of a proposition as a limiting case of a property, as when the two-place property '___ loves ___' can become the zero-placed property, or proposition 'that Sam loves Darla'. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.6) | |
A reaction: If you had a prior commitment to the idea that reality largely consists of bundles of properties, I suppose you might find this tempting. |
9451 | Modal logic and brain science have reaffirmed traditional belief in propositions [Bealer] |
Full Idea: Philosophers have been skeptical about abstract objects, and so have been skeptical about propositions,..but with the rise of modal logic and metaphysics, and cognitive science's realism about intentional states, traditional propositions are now dominant. | |
From: George Bealer (Propositions [1998], §1) | |
A reaction: I personally strongly favour belief in propositions as brain states, which don't need a bizarre ontological status, but are essential to explain language, reasoning and communication. |
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). |
10412 | If laws are mere regularities, they give no grounds for future prediction [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: If laws were mere regularities, then the fact that observed Fs have been Gs would give us no reason to conclude that those Fs we haven't encountered will also be Gs. | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
A reaction: I take this simple point to be very powerful. No amount of regularity gives grounds for asserting future patterns - one only has Humean habits. Causal mechanisms are what we are after. |
10411 | Two properties can have one power, and one property can have two powers [Swoyer] |
Full Idea: If properties are identical when they confer the same capacities on their instances, different properties seem able to bestow the same powers (e.g. force), and one property can bestow different powers (attraction or repulsion). | |
From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
A reaction: Interesting, but possibly a misunderstanding. Powers are basic, and properties are combinations of powers. A 'force' isn't a basic power, it is a consequence of various properties. Relational behaviours are also not basic powers, which are the source. |