6 ideas
23123 | Basic to human culture are binary oppositions, such as eating raw or cooked [Levi-Strauss, by Green,TH] |
Full Idea: Lévi-Strauss made canonic to French structuralism the idea that human culture could be understood through a series of binary oppositionsn - the difference between what could be eaten raw and what cooked being one of the most fundamental. | |
From: report of Claude Lévi-Strauss (works [1950]) by T.H. Green - Prolegomena to Ethics 1 | |
A reaction: My guess is that such oppositions can often be illuminating, but will always be eventually judged as too simplistic. |
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. |
6668 | If the present does not exist, then consciousness must be memory of the immediate past [Marshall] |
Full Idea: Given the paradoxical nature of the 'present' moment, maybe we should understand ALL consciousness as memory, with the split second of the 'specious present' being very vivid and very brief memory, with the rest of the mind remembering in lower degrees. | |
From: David Marshall (talk [2004]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas) | |
A reaction: This strikes me as a highly plausible, and very illuminating remark. For the time paradox, see Ideas 1904 and 5102. Anyone researching consciousness in the brain should think about this, because it will just be a special sort of memory neurons. |
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). |