7 ideas
6601 | Science rules the globe because of colonising power, not inherent rationality [Feyerabend] |
Full Idea: Science now reigns supreme all over the globe; but the reason was not insight in its 'inherent rationality' but power play (the colonising nations imposed their way of living) and the need for weapons. | |
From: Paul Feyerabend (Against Method [1975], 3), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.5 | |
A reaction: A nice clear statement of ridiculous relativism about science. What gave the colonisers their power if it was not more accurate knowledge of how to manipulate nature? |
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. |
2561 | For Feyerabend the meaning of a term depends on a whole theory [Feyerabend, by Rorty] |
Full Idea: For Feyerabend the meaning of a term depends on a whole theory containing the term. | |
From: report of Paul Feyerabend (Against Method [1975]) by Richard Rorty - Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 6.3 |
16002 | The self is a combination of pairs of attributes: freedom/necessity, infinite/finite, temporal/eternal [Kierkegaard] |
Full Idea: A human being is essentially spirit, but what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the Self? In short, it is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. | |
From: Søren Kierkegaard (Sickness unto Death [1849], p.59) | |
A reaction: The dense language of his first paragraph was to poke fun at fashionable Hegelian writing. The book gets very lucid afterwards! [SY] |
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). |