39 ideas
| 22438 | Philosophy is largely concerned with finding the minimum that science could get by with [Quine] |
| 22436 | Logicians don't paraphrase logic into language, because they think in the symbolic language [Quine] |
| 6123 | Empirical investigation can't discover if holes exist, or if two things share a colour [Merricks] |
| 22431 | Good algorithms and theories need many occurrences of just a few elements [Quine] |
| 22435 | The logician's '→' does not mean the English if-then [Quine] |
| 22433 | It is important that the quantification over temporal entities is timeless [Quine] |
| 22437 | Logical languages are rooted in ordinary language, and that connection must be kept [Quine] |
| 22434 | Reduction to logical forms first simplifies idioms and grammar, then finds a single reading of it [Quine] |
| 6143 | Prolonged events don't seem to endure or exist at any particular time [Merricks] |
| 6135 | A crumbling statue can't become vague, because vagueness is incoherent [Merricks] |
| 6145 | Intrinsic properties are those an object still has even if only that object exists [Merricks] |
| 6124 | I say that most of the objects of folk ontology do not exist [Merricks] |
| 6134 | Is swimming pool water an object, composed of its mass or parts? [Merricks] |
| 6125 | We can eliminate objects without a commitment to simples [Merricks] |
| 14229 | Merricks agrees that there are no composite objects, but offers a different semantics [Merricks, by Liggins] |
| 6142 | The 'folk' way of carving up the world is not intrinsically better than quite arbitrary ways [Merricks] |
| 14472 | If atoms 'arranged baseballwise' break a window, that analytically entails that a baseball did it [Merricks, by Thomasson] |
| 14469 | Overdetermination: the atoms do all the causing, so the baseball causes no breakage [Merricks] |
| 6137 | Clay does not 'constitute' a statue, as they have different persistence conditions (flaking, squashing) [Merricks] |
| 6127 | 'Unrestricted composition' says any two things can make up a third thing [Merricks] |
| 6131 | Composition as identity is false, as identity is never between a single thing and many things [Merricks] |
| 6132 | Composition as identity is false, as it implies that things never change their parts [Merricks] |
| 6141 | There is no visible difference between statues, and atoms arranged statuewise [Merricks] |
| 6130 | 'Composition' says things are their parts; 'constitution' says a whole substance is an object [Merricks] |
| 6138 | It seems wrong that constitution entails that two objects are wholly co-located [Merricks] |
| 6128 | Objects decompose (it seems) into non-overlapping parts that fill its whole region [Merricks] |
| 6136 | Eliminativism about objects gives the best understanding of the Sorites paradox [Merricks] |
| 22432 | Normally conditionals have no truth value; it is the consequent which has a conditional truth value [Quine] |
| 6133 | If my counterpart is happy, that is irrelevant to whether I 'could' have been happy [Merricks] |
| 6150 | The 'warrant' for a belief is what turns a true belief into knowledge [Merricks] |
| 6144 | You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks] |
| 6140 | Maybe the word 'I' can only refer to persons [Merricks] |
| 6149 | Free will and determinism are incompatible, since determinism destroys human choice [Merricks] |
| 6148 | Human organisms can exercise downward causation [Merricks] |
| 6146 | Before Creation it is assumed that God still had many many mental properties [Merricks] |
| 6147 | The hypothesis of solipsism doesn't seem to be made incoherent by the nature of mental properties [Merricks] |
| 22430 | If we understand a statement, we know the circumstances of its truth [Quine] |
| 18671 | The ground for an attitude is not a thing's 'goodness', but its concrete characteristics [Ewing] |
| 13713 | Quine holds time to be 'space-like': past objects are as real as spatially remote ones [Quine, by Sider] |