9 ideas
| 13737 | The empiricist says that metaphysics is meaningless, rather than false [Schlick] |
| Full Idea: The empiricist does not say to the metaphysician 'what you say is false', but 'what you say asserts nothing at all!' He does not contradict him, but says 'I don't understand you'. | |
| From: Moritz Schlick (Positivism and Realism [1934], p.107), quoted by Jonathan Schaffer - On What Grounds What 1.1 | |
| A reaction: I take metaphysics to be meaningful, but at such a high level of abstraction that it is easy to drift into vague nonsense, and incredibly hard to assess what is meant, and whether it is correct. The truths of metaphysics are not recursive. |
| 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. |
| 19520 | Evidentialism is not axiomatic; the evidence itself inclines us towards evidentialism [Conee] |
| Full Idea: Evidentialism does not support beginning epistemology by taking for granted that evidentialism is true. ...Rather, what potentially justifies belief in intial epistemic data and initial procedures of inquiry is the evidence itself. | |
| From: Earl Conee (First Things First [2004], 'Getting') | |
| A reaction: This sounds good. I much prefer talk of 'evidence' to talk of 'perceptions', because evidence has been licked into shape, and its significance has been clarified. That is the first step towards the coherence we seek. |
| 19521 | If pure guesses were reliable, reliabilists would have to endorse them [Conee] |
| Full Idea: Reliabilism would count pure guesses as good reasons if guessing were properly reliable. | |
| From: Earl Conee (First Things First [2004], 'Getting') | |
| A reaction: See D.H. Lawrence's short story 'The Rocking Horse Winner'. This objection strikes me as being so devastating that it is almost conclusive. Except that pure guesses are never ever reliable, over a decent period of time. |
| 19522 | More than actual reliability is needed, since I may mistakenly doubt what is reliable [Conee] |
| Full Idea: Sheer reliability does not justify belief. ...It may be, for instance, that we have strong though misleading reason to deny the method's reliability. | |
| From: Earl Conee (First Things First [2004], 'Circles') | |
| A reaction: That is, we accept a justification if we judge the method to be reliable, not if it IS reliable. I can disbelieve all the reliable information that arrives in my mind. People do that all the time! Hatred of experts! Support for internalism? |
| 19523 | Reliabilism is poor on reflective judgements about hypothetical cases [Conee] |
| Full Idea: An unrefined reliability theory does a poor job at capturing reflective judgements about hypothetical cases | |
| From: Earl Conee (First Things First [2004], 'Stroud's') | |
| A reaction: Reliability can only be a test for tried and tested ways. No one can say whether imagining a range of possibilities is reliable or not. Is prediction a reliable route to knowledge? |
| 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). |