11 ideas
| 16567 | Scientists know everything about nothing, philosophers nothing about everything [Sagan,D] |
| Full Idea: The scientist learns more and more about less and less, until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. | |
| From: Dorion Sagan (Cosmic Apprentice [2013]) | |
| A reaction: [Came via Twitter] Not sure if this is true, but it is too nice to miss. |
| 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. |
| 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). |
| 22465 | We see a moral distinction between doing and allowing to happen [Foot] |
| Full Idea: We have an intuition that there is a morally relevant distinction between what we do and what we allow to happen. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality, Action, and Outcome [1985], p.88) | |
| A reaction: She says many deny this distinction, but she defends it. Presumably consequentialists deny the distinction. What is bad if I do it, but OK if I allow it to happen? Neglecting a victim to save others, she suggests. |
| 22466 | We see a moral distinction between our aims and their foreseen consequences [Foot] |
| Full Idea: We have an intuition that there is a moral distinction between what we aim at and what we foresee as a result of what we do. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality, Action, and Outcome [1985], p.88) | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 22465. This seems to be the classic doctrine of double effect. It is hard to defend the claim that we are only responsible for what we aim at. A wide assessment of consequences is a moral duty. Well-meaning fools are bad. |
| 22467 | Acts and omissions only matter if they concern doing something versus allowing it [Foot] |
| Full Idea: The difference between acts and omissions is irrelevant to any moral issue except in so far as it corresponds to the distinction between allowing something to happen and being the agent to whom the happening can be ascribed. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality, Action, and Outcome [1985], p.89) | |
| A reaction: The list of anyone's omissions is presumably infinite, but what they 'allow' must be in some way within their power. But what of something I can't now prevent, only because I failed to do some relevant task yesterday? |
| 22470 | A good moral system benefits its participants, and so demands reciprocity [Foot] |
| Full Idea: It has been suggested that one criterion for a good moral system is that it should be possible to demand reciprocity from every individual because of the good the system renders to him. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality, Action, and Outcome [1985], p.104) | |
| A reaction: Money seems to have this feature, that we mostly conform to the rules for its use, because we value the whole system. Foot accepts this, but says there are also other criteria, such as leaving freedom to live well (ie. not too puritanical). |
| 22468 | Virtues can have aims, but good states of affairs are not among them [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Some virtues do give us aims, but nothing from within morality suggests the kind of good state of affairs which it would seem always to be our duty to promote. And why indeed should there be any such thing? | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality, Action, and Outcome [1985], p.101) | |
| A reaction: Isn't successful human functioning, such as heath, always to be desired? If honour is a worthy aim, doesn't that make being rightly honoured a desirable state of affairs? She is attacking consequentialism, but I'm not convinced here. |
| 22469 | Some virtues imply rules, and others concern attachment [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Virtues such as justice consist mainly in adherence to rules of conduct, while those such as benevolence we might call virtues of attachment. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality, Action, and Outcome [1985], p.101) | |
| A reaction: Not sure about 'attachment'. We should be benevolent towards people to whom we are not particularly attached. Courage doesn't fall into either group. |