14 ideas
| 19044 | Saying truths fit experience adds nothing to truth; nothing makes sentences true [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: The notion of fitting the totality of experience ...adds nothing intelligible to the simple concept of being true. ....Nothing, ...no thing, makes sentences and theories true: not experience, not surface irritations, not the world. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme [1974], p.11), quoted by Willard Quine - On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma p.39 | |
| A reaction: If you don't have a concept of what normally makes a sentence true, I don't see how you go about distinguishing what is true from what is false. You can't just examine the sentence to see if it has the 'primitive' property of truth. Holism is involved.... |
| 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. |
| 2986 | Belief is the most important propositional attitude [Lyons] |
| Full Idea: Belief might be accorded the status of core or chief propositional attitude. | |
| From: William Lyons (Approaches to Intentionality [1995], p.126) |
| 6400 | Without the dualism of scheme and content, not much is left of empiricism [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: The third dogma of empiricism is the dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized, which cannot be made intelligible and defensible. If we give it up, it is not clear that any distinctive empiricism remains. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme [1974], p.189) | |
| A reaction: The first two dogmas were 'analyticity' and 'reductionism', as identified by Quine in 1953. Presumably Hume's Principles of Association (Idea 2189) would be an example of a scheme. A key issue is whether there is any 'pure' content. |
| 6398 | Different points of view make sense, but they must be plotted on a common background [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme [1974], p.184) | |
| A reaction: This seems right to me. I am very struck by the close similarities between people from wildly differing cultural backgrounds, as seen, for example, at the Olympic Games. |
| 2978 | Consciousness no longer seems essential to intentionality [Lyons] |
| Full Idea: In contrast with Brentano and Husserl, consciousness or attention are no longer seen as essential to intentionality. | |
| From: William Lyons (Approaches to Intentionality [1995], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being correct, although there seem to be plenty of current philosophers who do not accept it (e.g. Searle). I think philosophy of mind may be stuck in the dark ages if thinkers don't accept this proposal. |
| 2984 | Perceptions could give us information without symbolic representation [Lyons] |
| Full Idea: It is possible to give an account of concept-formation without a language of thought or representation, based on perception, which in the brain seems to involve information without representation. | |
| From: William Lyons (Approaches to Intentionality [1995], p.66) | |
| A reaction: This claim strikes me as being a little too confident. One might say that a concept IS a representation. However, the perception of several horses might 'blur' together to form a generalised horse. |
| 2979 | Propositional attitudes require representation [Lyons] |
| Full Idea: How else, other than via some form of representational system, could a human organism contain information as a content over which it could operate or 'attitudinise'? | |
| From: William Lyons (Approaches to Intentionality [1995], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Depends what you mean by 'representational'. In its vaguest sense, this is just a tautology - content must be held in the mind in some form or other, but that tells us nothing. |
| 2987 | Folk psychology works badly for alien cultures [Lyons] |
| Full Idea: It is not easy to employ our folk psychology in the understanding of persons in a very different culture. | |
| From: William Lyons (Approaches to Intentionality [1995], p.241) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a highly significant problem for the friends of folk psychology. It also breaks down in extreme situations, or with mental illness. It seems closer to culture than to brain structure. |
| 2977 | All thinking has content [Lyons] |
| Full Idea: I cannot say I am simply thinking but not thinking about anything. | |
| From: William Lyons (Approaches to Intentionality [1995], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Hard to disagree. However, I can plausibly reply to 'What are you thinking?' with 'Nothing', if my consciousness is freewheeling. Utterly disconnected content isn't really what we call 'thinking'. |
| 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). |
| 6399 | Criteria of translation give us the identity of conceptual schemes [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Studying the criteria of translation is a way of focusing on criteria of identity for conceptual schemes. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme [1974], p.184) | |
| A reaction: This is why it was an inspired idea of Quine's to make translation a central topic in philosophy. We must be cautious, though, about saying that the language is the conceptual scheme, as that leaves animals with no scheme at all. |