20 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. |
| 1635 | Mathematics reduces to set theory (which is a bit vague and unobvious), but not to logic proper [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Mathematics reduces only to set theory, and not to logic proper… but set theory cannot claim the same firmness and obviousness as logic. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968], p.69-70) |
| 7627 | You can't reduce epistemology to psychology, because that presupposes epistemology [Maund on Quine] |
| Full Idea: There is something seriously misguided about Quine's project of reducing epistemology to psychology, since psychology, like any of the natural sciences, presupposes an epistemology. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968]) by Barry Maund - Perception Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: I wonder if epistemology presupposes psychology? Belief, for example, is a category of folk psychology, which could be challenged. There is a quiet battle going on between philosophy and science. |
| 8871 | We should abandon a search for justification or foundations, and focus on how knowledge is acquired [Quine, by Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Quine is suggesting that philosophy should abandon the attempt to provide a foundation for knowledge, or otherwise justify it, and should instead give an account of how knowledge is acquired. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968]) by Donald Davidson - Epistemology Externalized p.193 | |
| A reaction: If you are going to explain how 'knowledge' is acquired, you'd better know what knowledge is. My suspicion is that Quine would be quite happy (in the pragmatist tradition) to just focus on belief, and forget about knowledge entirely. |
| 8826 | If we abandon justification and normativity in epistemology, we must also abandon knowledge [Kim on Quine] |
| Full Idea: Quine asks us to set aside the entire framework of justification-centered epistemology, ..and repudiate normativity. ..But then knowledge itself drops out of epistemology, for our concept of knowledge is inseparably tied to that of justification. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968]) by Jaegwon Kim - What is 'naturalized epistemology'? p.305 | |
| A reaction: Presumably this would not bother Quine, who wants to hand so-called 'epistemology' over to the psychologists. A psychological account of belief seems plausible. Presumably false beliefs could only be pragmatically characterised. |
| 8827 | Without normativity, naturalized epistemology isn't even about beliefs [Kim on Quine] |
| Full Idea: If normativity is wholly excluded from naturalized epistemology it cannot even be thought of as being about beliefs. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968]) by Jaegwon Kim - What is 'naturalized epistemology'? p.306 | |
| A reaction: And if it doesn't refer to beliefs, it certainly doesn't refer to knowledge. One might try to subsume normativity under evolutionary pragmatic 'drives', or something. Quine's project would then become wildly speculative, and hence boring. |
| 8899 | Epistemology is a part of psychology, studying how our theories relate to our evidence [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Epistemology falls into place as a chapter of psychology, and hence of natural science. ..We study meagre input and torrential output, to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968], p.83) | |
| A reaction: It depends what you are interested in. If you just want to know what makes humans tick, then Quine is your man, but if you want to know things in general, and want to know how to get it right, then the normative side of epistemology is unavoidable. |
| 2590 | Dispositions need mental terms to define them [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The chief difficulty with the behaviour-disposition account is the virtual impossibility of specifying a disposition except as a 'disposition of x to behave as though x were in pain'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.57) | |
| A reaction: This has become the best-known objection to behaviourism - that you can't specify a piece of behaviour clearly unless you mention the mental state which it is expressing. The defence is to go on endlessly mentioning further behaviour. |
| 2591 | Total paralysis would mean that there were mental states but no behaviour at all [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Two animals with all motor nerves cut will have the same actual and potential behaviour (i.e. none), but if only one has uncut pain fibres, it will feel pain where the other won't. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.57) | |
| A reaction: This is a splendidly literal and practical argument against behaviourism - if you prevent all the behaviour, you don't thereby prevent the experience. Clearly we have to say something about what is inside the 'black box' of the mind. |
| 2588 | Is pain a functional state of a complete organism? [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I propose the hypothesis that pain, or the state of being in pain, is a functional state of a whole organism. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.54) | |
| A reaction: This sounds wrong right from the start. Pain hurts. The fact that it leads to avoidance behaviour etc. seems much more like a by-product of pain than its essence. |
| 2589 | Functionalism is compatible with dualism, as pure mind could perform the functions [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The functional-state hypothesis is not incompatible with dualism, as a system consisting of a body and a soul could meet the required conditions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.55) | |
| A reaction: He doesn't really believe this, of course. This claim led to all the weak objections to functionalism involving silly implementations of minds. A brain is the only plausible way to implement our mental functions. |
| 2592 | Functional states correlate with AND explain pain behaviour [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The presence of a certain functional state is not merely 'correlated with' but actually explains the pain behaviour on the part of the organism. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.58) | |
| A reaction: Does it offer any further explanation beyond saying that it is the brain state that causes the behaviour? The pain is just a link between damage and avoidance. I wish that is all that pain was. |
| 2587 | Temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy, but they are two different concepts [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The concept of temperature is not the same as the concept of mean molecular kinetic energy. But temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.52) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard analogy for mind-brain identity, and it seems fair enough to me. The mind is the activity of the brain. It is rather unhelpful to think of weather in terms of chemistry, but it is actions of chemicals. |
| 6376 | Neuroscience does not support multiple realisability, and tends to support identity [Polger on Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Putnam was too quick to assert neuroscientific support for multiple realizability; current evidence does not reveal it, and there is some reason to think the enterprises of neuroscience are premised on the hypothesis of brain-state identity. | |
| From: comment on Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968]) by Thomas W. Polger - Natural Minds Ch.1.4 | |
| A reaction: I have always been suspicious of the glib claim that mental states were multiply realisable. I see no reason to think that octupi see colours as we do, or experience fear as we do, even though their behaviour has to be similar, for survival. |
| 2330 | If humans and molluscs both feel pain, it can't be a single biological state [Putnam, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Mental states have vastly diverse physical/biological realizations in different species and structures (e.g. pain in humans and in molluscs), so no mental state can be identified with any single physical/biological state. | |
| From: report of Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968]) by Jaegwon Kim - Mind in a Physical World n p.120 | |
| A reaction: But maybe mollusc and human nervous systems ARE the same in the respects that matter. We don't know enough about pain to deny that possibility. |
| 8898 | Inculcations of meanings of words rests ultimately on sensory evidence [Quine] |
| Full Idea: All inculcation of meanings of words must rest ultimately on sensory evidence. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968], p.75) | |
| A reaction: This betrays Quine's behaviourist tendencies, and rules out introspection, definitions and inferences. Quine's conclusion is fairly total scepticism about meaning, but that is not surprising, given his external and meaningless starting point. |
| 8900 | In observation sentences, we could substitute community acceptance for analyticity [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps the controversial notion of analyticity can be dispensed with, in our definition of observation sentences, in favour of the straightforward attitude of community-wide acceptance. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Epistemology Naturalized [1968], p.86) | |
| A reaction: That might be a reasonable account of 'bachelors'. If the whole community accepts 'God exists', does that make it analytic? If a whole (small!) community claims to actually observe a ghost or a flying saucer, is that then analytic? |
| 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). |