15 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. |
| 9038 | We must distinguish what the speaker denotes by a name, from what the name denotes [Evans] |
| Full Idea: There are two related but distinguishable questions concerning proper names: what the speaker denotes (upon an occasion), and what the name denotes. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §I) | |
| A reaction: I don't think any account of language makes sense without this sort of distinction, as in my favourite example: the password is 'swordfish'. So how does language gets its own meanings, independent of what speakers intend? |
| 5824 | How can an expression be a name, if names can change their denotation? [Evans] |
| Full Idea: We need an account of what makes an expression into a name for something that will allow names to change their denotations. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §II) | |
| A reaction: Presumably an example would be 'The Prime Minister is in the building'. Evans proposes to discuss communication, rather than strict meanings and descriptions. |
| 9042 | A private intention won't give a name a denotation; the practice needs it to be made public [Evans] |
| Full Idea: Intentions alone don't bring it about that a name gets a denotation; without the intention being manifest there cannot be the common knowledge required for the practice. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §II) | |
| A reaction: Well, I might have a private name for some hated colleague which I mutter to myself whenever I see her. The way names, and language generally, becomes ossified is by joining the great impersonal sea of the language. ..waves of bones, |
| 9041 | The Causal Theory of Names is wrong, since the name 'Madagascar' actually changed denotation [Evans] |
| Full Idea: Change of denotation is decisive against the Causal Theory of Names. Changes of denotation actually occur: a hearsay report misunderstood by Marco Polo transferred the name 'Madagascar' from a portion of the mainland to the African island. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §I) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't sound decisive, as you could give an intermediate causal account of Marco Polo's mistake. I might take the famous name Winston, and baptise my son with it. And I might have done it because I thought Winston was a German dictator. |
| 18088 | Intentionality is the mark of dispositions, not of the mental [Place] |
| Full Idea: My thesis is that intentionality is the mark, not of the mental, but of the dispositional. | |
| From: Ullin T. Place (Intentionality and the Physical: reply to Mumford [1999], 1) | |
| A reaction: An idea with few friends, but I really like it, because it offers the prospect of a unified account of physical nature and the mind/brain. It seems reasonable to say my mind is essentially a bunch of dispositions. Mind is representations + dispositions. |
| 5825 | Speakers intend to refer to items that are the source of their information [Evans] |
| Full Idea: In general, a speaker intends to refer to the item that is the dominant source of his associated body of information. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §II) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a theory of reference which fully preserves the spirit of traditional empiricism. Speakers refer to ideas which connect to the source of their underlying impressions. |
| 5823 | The intended referent of a name needs to be the cause of the speaker's information about it [Evans] |
| Full Idea: A necessary (but not sufficient) condition for x's being the intended referent of S's use of a name is that x should be the source of the causal origin of the body of information that S has associated with the name. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §I) | |
| A reaction: This is Evans's adaptation of Kripke's causal theory of names. This cries out for a counterexample. I say something about General Montgomery, having just listened to 'Monty's Double' give a talk, believing it was Montgomery? |
| 9039 | If descriptions are sufficient for reference, then I must accept a false reference if the descriptions fit [Evans] |
| Full Idea: The strong thesis (that descriptions are sufficient for reference) is outrageous. It would mean that if Mr X is wrongly introduced to me as Mr Y, then I truly say 'this is Mr Y' if X overwhelmingly satisfies descriptions of Y. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §I) | |
| A reaction: [I omit some qualifying phrases] Evans says that probably no one ever held this view. It seems right. In the case of an electron it would seem that all the descriptions could be the same, except space-time location. Same electron as yesterday? |
| 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). |
| 9043 | We use expressions 'deferentially', to conform to the use of other people [Evans] |
| Full Idea: Sometimes we use expressions with the overriding intention to conform to the use made of them by some other person or persons. I shall say we use the expression 'deferentially'; examples might be 'viol' or 'minuet'. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §II) | |
| A reaction: I presume Evans wasn't very musical. This label sounds useful, if you wish to connect Grice's account of meaning with Putnam's externalist account of concepts, where deference to experts is crucial. Is all linguistic usage deferential? |
| 9040 | Charity should minimize inexplicable error, rather than maximising true beliefs [Evans] |
| Full Idea: I think the Principle of Charity (maximise true beliefs) is unacceptable. The acceptable principle enjoins minimizing the attribution of inexplicable error and cannot be operated without a theory of the causation of belief for the creatures investigated. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §I) | |
| A reaction: The normal principle of charity certainly seems on shaky ground if you think you have encountered a fairly normal tribe, when they in fact are in possession of the weirdest belief system on the entire planet. |
| 18089 | Dispositions are not general laws, but laws of the natures of individual entities [Place] |
| Full Idea: Dispositions are the substantive laws, not, as for Armstrong, of nature in general, but of the nature of individual entities whose dispositional properties they are. | |
| From: Ullin T. Place (Intentionality and the Physical: reply to Mumford [1999], 6) | |
| A reaction: [He notes that Nancy Cartwright 1989 agrees with him] I like this a lot. I tend to denegrate 'laws', because of their dubious ontological status, but this restores laws to the picture, in the place where they belong, in the stuff of the world. |