24 ideas
| 1922 | Spiritual qualities only become advantageous with the growth of wisdom [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If virtue is a beneficial attribute of spirit, it must be wisdom; for spiritual qualities are not in themselves advantageous, but become so with wisdom…..Hence men cannot be good by nature. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 88c) | |
| A reaction: Personally I haven't got any 'spiritual qualities', so I don't really understand this. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 11259 | How can you seek knowledge of something if you don't know it? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 80d05) | |
| A reaction: Vasilis Politis cites this as a nice example of the 'aporiai' (puzzles) which Aristotle said were the foundation of enquiry. Nowadays the problem is called the 'paradox of enquiry'. |
| 3509 | Externalism may be the key idea in philosophical naturalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Some people view an externalist approach to epistemology as the essence of philosophical naturalism. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I suspect philosophers avoid psychology and mental events, simply because they are elusive. Externalism is a theory about justification, and independent of naturalism as a metaphysic. |
| 20219 | True opinions only become really valuable when they are tied down by reasons [Plato] |
| Full Idea: True opinions are a fine thing and all they do is good, …but they escape from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 98a3) | |
| A reaction: This gives justification the role of guarantee, stabilising and securing true beliefs (rather than triggering some new thing called 'knowledge'). |
| 5985 | Seeking and learning are just recollection [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 81d) | |
| A reaction: This is a prelude to the famous conversation with the slave boy about geometry. You don't have to follow Plato into the doctrine of reincarnation; this remark is a key slogan for all rationalists. As pupils in maths lessons, we pull knowledge from within. |
| 5986 | The slave boy learns geometry from questioning, not teaching, so it is recollection [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The slave boy's knowledge of geometry will not come from teaching but from questioning; he will recover it for himself, and the spontaneous recovery of knowledge that is in him is recollection. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 85d) | |
| A reaction: Of course, if maths and geometry are huge tautological axiom systems, we would expect to be able to derive them (with hints from a teacher) entirely from their axioms. It is not clear why we might be able to derive the truths of all nature a priori. |
| 1923 | As a guide to action, true opinion is as good as knowledge [Plato] |
| Full Idea: True opinion is as good a guide as knowledge for the purpose of acting rightly. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 97b) | |
| A reaction: This is the germ of Peirce's epistemology - that knowledge is an interesting theoretical concept, but opinion/belief is what matters, and most needs explanation. |
| 1919 | You don't need to learn what you know, and how do you seek for what you don't know? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: You could argue that a man cannot discover what he does know or what he doesn't. The first needs no discovery, and how do you begin looking for the second? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 80e) |
| 3513 | How does a dualist mind represent, exist outside space, and be transparent to itself? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Even dualists must explain how the mind represents things, but then their mind-stuff has so many special powers already (being outside space but in time, being transparent to itself etc.) that one more scarcely seems worth worrying about. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.1 n1) | |
| A reaction: I share the exasperation. It is hard to see how a dualist could even begin to formulate a theory about HOW the mind does so many different things. Could Descartes get a research grant for it? Would we understand God if he tried to explain it to us? |
| 3514 | Functionalism needs causation and intentionality to explain actions [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The functionalist approach to the mind needs to invoke assumptions about what desires are for and beliefs are about, in order to infer what agents will do. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Isn't the idea that you discover what desires are for and what beliefs are about by examining their function, and what the agent does? Which end should we start? |
| 3511 | Supervenience requires all mental events to have physical effects [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: The argument for supervenience rests on the principle that any mental difference must be capable of showing itself in differential physical consequences. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: With our current knowledge of the brain, to assume anything less than this sort of correlation would be crazy. |
| 3510 | Epiphenomenalism is supervenience without physicalism [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is a necessary condition for physicalism, but it is not sufficient. Epiphenomenalism rules out mental variation without physical variation, but says mental properties are quite distinct from physical properties. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: I take full epiphenomenalism about mind to be incoherent, and not worth even mentioning (see Idea 7379). Papineau seems to be thinking of so-called property dualism (which may also be incoherent!). |
| 3515 | Knowing what it is like to be something only involves being (physically) that thing [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Physicalism does not deny that there are conscious experiences, nor that 'it is like something to have them'. The claim is only that this is nothing different from what it is to be a physical system of the relevant kind. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: The implication is that no physicalist is an extreme eliminativist about consciousness, which seems to be correct. We all concede that weather exists, but have a reductive view of it. The key question is whether mind is reducible to physics. |
| 3512 | If a mental state is multiply realisable, why does it lead to similar behaviour? [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: If functionalism implies that there is nothing physically in common among the realisations of a given mental state, then there is no possibility of any uniform explanation of why they all give rise to a common physical result. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the well known interaction problem for dualism. The standard reply is to accept interaction as a given (with no apparent explanation). A miracle, if you like. |
| 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). |
| 3516 | The Private Language argument only means people may misjudge their experiences [Papineau] |
| Full Idea: I take the moral of the Private Language argument to be that there must be room for error in people's judgements about their experiences, not that those judgements must necessarily be expressed in a language used by a community. | |
| From: David Papineau (Philosophical Naturalism [1993], 4.4 n10) | |
| A reaction: These two readings don't seem to be in conflict, and the argument must have something to say about the communal nature of thought expressed in language. Language imposes introspection on us? |
| 1913 | Is virtue taught, or achieved by practice, or a natural aptitude, or what? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Is virtue something that can be taught, or does it come by practice, or is it a natural aptitude, or something else? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 70a) |
| 1921 | If virtue is a type of knowledge then it ought to be taught [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If virtue is some sort of knowledge, then clearly it could be taught. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 87c) |
| 1927 | It seems that virtue is neither natural nor taught, but is a divine gift [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If our discussion is right, virtue is acquired neither by nature nor by teaching. Whoever has it gets it by divine dispensation, without taking thought. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 99e) |
| 1916 | Even if virtues are many and various, they must have something in common to make them virtues [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Even if virtues are many and various, at least they all have some common character which makes them all virtues. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 72c) |
| 1918 | How can you know part of virtue without knowing the whole? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Does anyone know what a part of virtue is without knowing the whole? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 79c) |