12 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. |
9264 | Persons are distinguished by a capacity for second-order desires [Frankfurt] |
Full Idea: The essential difference between persons and other creatures is in the structure of the will, with their peculiar characteristic of being able to form 'second-order desires'. | |
From: Harry G. Frankfurt (Freedom of the Will and concept of a person [1971], Intro) | |
A reaction: There are problems with this - notably that all strategies of this kind just shift the problem up to the next order, without solving it - but this still strikes me as a very promising line of thinking when trying to understand ourselves. See Idea 9266. |
9266 | A person essentially has second-order volitions, and not just second-order desires [Frankfurt] |
Full Idea: It is having second-order volitions, and not having second-order desires generally, that I regard as essential to being a person. | |
From: Harry G. Frankfurt (Freedom of the Will and concept of a person [1971], §II) | |
A reaction: Watson criticises Frankfurt for just pushing the problem up to the the next level, but Frankfurt is not offering to explain the will. He merely notes that this structure produces the sort of behaviour which is characteristic of persons, and he is right. |
9267 | Free will is the capacity to choose what sort of will you have [Frankfurt] |
Full Idea: The statement that a person enjoys freedom of the will means that he is free to want what he wants to want. More precisely, he is free to will what he wants to will, or to have the will he wants. | |
From: Harry G. Frankfurt (Freedom of the Will and concept of a person [1971], §III) | |
A reaction: A good proposal. It covers kleptomaniacs and drug addicts quite well. Thieves have second-order desires (to steal) of which kleptomaniacs are incapable. There is actually no such thing as free will, but this sort of thing will do. |
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). |
9265 | The will is the effective desire which actually leads to an action [Frankfurt] |
Full Idea: A person's will is the effective desire which moves (or will or would move) a person all the way to action. The will is not coextensive with what an agent intends to do, since he may do something else instead. | |
From: Harry G. Frankfurt (Freedom of the Will and concept of a person [1971], §I) | |
A reaction: Essentially Hobbes's view, but with an arbitrary distinction added. If the desire is only definitely a 'will' if it really does lead to action, then it only becomes the will after the action starts. The error is thinking that will is all-or-nothing. |
20015 | Freedom of action needs the agent to identify with their reason for acting [Frankfurt, by Wilson/Schpall] |
Full Idea: Frankfurt says that basic issues concerning freedom of action presuppose and give weight to a concept of 'acting on a desire with which the agent identifies'. | |
From: report of Harry G. Frankfurt (Freedom of the Will and concept of a person [1971]) by Wilson,G/Schpall,S - Action 1 | |
A reaction: [the cite Frankfurt 1988 and 1999] I'm not sure how that works when performing a grim duty, but it sounds quite plausible. |
9270 | A 'wanton' is not a person, because they lack second-order volitions [Frankfurt] |
Full Idea: I use the term 'wanton' to refer to agents who have first-order desires but who are not persons because, whether or not they have desires of the second-order, they have no second-order volitions. | |
From: Harry G. Frankfurt (Freedom of the Will and concept of a person [1971], §II) | |
A reaction: He seems to be describing someone who behaves like an animal, performing actions without ever stopping to think about them. Presumably some persons occasionally become wantons, if, for example, they have an anger problem. |
9269 | A person may be morally responsible without free will [Frankfurt] |
Full Idea: It is not true that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if his will was free when he did it. He may be morally responsible for having done it even though his will was not free at all. | |
From: Harry G. Frankfurt (Freedom of the Will and concept of a person [1971], §IV) | |
A reaction: Frankfurt seems to be one of the first to assert this break with the traditional view. Good for him. I take moral responsibility to hinge on an action being caused by a person, but not with a mystical view of what a person is. |
20486 | Only liberty, equality and sympathy can stand up to anti-social people [Kropotkin] |
Full Idea: Liberty, equality and practical human sympathy are the only effective barriers we can oppose to the anti-social instincts of certain among us. | |
From: Peter (Pyotr) Kropotkin (Law and Authority [1886], 1 'Anarchism'), quoted by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) | |
A reaction: One might state it more succinctly as 'only the social can oppose the anti-social'. The dominance in society of essentially anti-social people seems to have become a major political fact in 2017, in the UK and the USA. |