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. |
| 7783 | Bodies, properties, relations, events, numbers, sets and propositions are 'things' if they exist [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Not only material bodies but also properties, relations, events, numbers, sets, and propositions are—if they are acknowledged as existing—to be accounted ‘things’. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Things [1995]) | |
| A reaction: There might be lots of borderline cases here. Is the sky a thing? Is air a thing? How is transparency a thing? Is minus-one a thing? Is an incomplete proposition a thing? Etc. |
| 19722 | We could know the evidence for our belief without knowing why it is such evidence [Mittag] |
| Full Idea: While one might understand the proposition entailed by one's evidence, one might have no idea how or why one's evidence entails it. This seems to imply one is not justified in believing the proposition on the basis of one's evidence. | |
| From: Daniel M. Mittag (Evidentialism [2011], 'Evidential') | |
| A reaction: An example might be seen if a layman tours a physics lab. This looks like a serious problem for evidentialism. Once you see why the evidence entails the proposition, you are getting closer to understanding than to knowledge. Explanation. |
| 19723 | Evidentialism can't explain that we accept knowledge claims if the evidence is forgotten [Mittag] |
| Full Idea: If one came to believe p with good evidence, but has since forgotten that evidence, we might think one can continue to believe justifiably, but evidentialism appears unable to account for this. | |
| From: Daniel M. Mittag (Evidentialism [2011], 'Forgotten') | |
| A reaction: We would still think that the evidence was important, and we would need to trust the knower's claim that the forgotten evidence was good. So it doesn't seem to destroy the evidentialist thesis. |
| 19720 | Evidentialism concerns the evidence for the proposition, not for someone to believe it [Mittag] |
| Full Idea: Evidentialism is not a theory about when one's believing is justified; it is a theory about what makes one justified in believing a proposition. It is a thesis regarding 'propositional justification', not 'doxastic justification'. | |
| From: Daniel M. Mittag (Evidentialism [2011], 'Preliminary') | |
| A reaction: Thus it is entirely about whether the evidence supports the proposition, and has no interest in who believes it or why. Knowledge is when you believe a true proposition which has good support. This could be internalist or externalist? |
| 19721 | Coherence theories struggle with the role of experience [Mittag] |
| Full Idea: Traditional coherence theories seem unable to account for the role experience plays in justification. | |
| From: Daniel M. Mittag (Evidentialism [2011], 'Evidence') | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to say that experience only becomes a justification when it has taken propositional (though not necessarily lingistic) form. That is, when you see it 'as' something. Uninterpreted shape and colour can justify virtually nothing. |
| 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). |