10 ideas
15545 | Armstrong's analysis seeks truthmakers rather than definitions [Lewis] |
Full Idea: I suggest that Armstrong has an unfamiliar notion of analysis, as not primarily a quest for definitions, but as a quest for truth-makers. | |
From: David Lewis (Armstrong on combinatorial possibility [1992], 'The demand') | |
A reaction: This is not a dichotomy, I think, but a shift of emphasis. A definition will probably refer to truthmakers; a decent account of truthmakers would approximate a definition. |
15546 | Predications aren't true because of what exists, but of how it exists [Lewis] |
Full Idea: Predications seem, for the most part, to be true not because of whether things are, but because of how things are. | |
From: David Lewis (Armstrong on combinatorial possibility [1992], 'The demand') | |
A reaction: This simple point shows that you get into a tangle if you insist that truthmakers just consist of what exists. Lewis says Armstrong offers states of affairs as truthmakers for predications. |
15548 | Say 'truth is supervenient on being', but construe 'being' broadly [Lewis] |
Full Idea: I want to say that 'truth is supervenient on being', but as an Ostrich about universals I want to construe 'being' broadly. | |
From: David Lewis (Armstrong on combinatorial possibility [1992], 'Truth') | |
A reaction: [His slogan is borrowed from Bigelow 1988:132-,158-9] This seems much more promising that the more precise and restricted notion of truthmakers, as resting on the existence of particular things. Presentism is the big test case. |
14399 | Presentism says only the present exists, so there is nothing for tensed truths to supervene on [Lewis] |
Full Idea: Presentism says that although there is nothing outside the present, yet there are past-tensed and future-tensed truths that do not supervene on the present, and hence do not supervene on being. | |
From: David Lewis (Armstrong on combinatorial possibility [1992], p.207) | |
A reaction: Since I rather like both presentism and truth supervening on being, this observation comes as rather a devastating blow. I thought philosophy would be quite easy, but it's turning out to be rather tricky. Could tensed truths supervene on the present? |
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. |
15543 | How do things combine to make states of affairs? Constituents can repeat, and fail to combine [Lewis] |
Full Idea: To me it is mysterious how a state of affairs is made out of its particular and universal constituents. Different states of affairs may have the very same constituents, and the existence of constituents by no means entails the existence of the states. | |
From: David Lewis (Armstrong on combinatorial possibility [1992], 'What is there') | |
A reaction: He is rejecting the structure of states of affairs as wholes made of parts. But then mereology was never going to explain the structure of the world. |
12582 | The function of beliefs is to produce beliefs-that-p when p [Millikan] |
Full Idea: Presumably it is a proper function of the belief-manufacturing mechanisms in John to produce beliefs-that-p only if and when p. | |
From: Ruth Garrett Millikan (Thoughts without Laws [1986], p.69), quoted by Christopher Peacocke - A Study of Concepts 5.2 | |
A reaction: This is the 'teleological' account of belief, which is trying to fit belief into an evolutionary view of humans. It is doubtful whether you can say mental states are just their 'proper' function, because then piano-playing becomes a puzzle. |
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). |