40 ideas
| 2352 | The job of the philosopher is to distinguish facts about the world from conventions [Putnam] |
| 21959 | Metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things [Moore,AW] |
| 4465 | Note that "is" can assert existence, or predication, or identity, or classification [PG] |
| 4686 | Fallacies are errors in reasoning, 'formal' if a clear rule is breached, and 'informal' if more general [PG] |
| 7415 | Question-begging assumes the proposition which is being challenged [PG] |
| 7414 | What is true of a set is also true of its members [PG] |
| 6696 | The Ad Hominem Fallacy criticises the speaker rather than the argument [PG] |
| 2345 | Semantic notions do not occur in Tarski's definitions, but assessing their correctness involves translation [Putnam] |
| 2347 | Asserting the truth of an indexical statement is not the same as uttering the statement [Putnam] |
| 4687 | Minimal theories of truth avoid ontological commitment to such things as 'facts' or 'reality' [PG] |
| 6516 | Monty Hall Dilemma: do you abandon your preference after Monty eliminates one of the rivals? [PG] |
| 2349 | Realists believe truth is correspondence, independent of humans, is bivalent, and is unique [Putnam] |
| 2351 | Aristotle says an object (e.g. a lamp) has identity if its parts stay together when it is moved [Putnam] |
| 24054 | Everything has a probability, something will happen, and probabilities add up [PG] |
| 3875 | If reality is just what we perceive, we would have no need for a sixth sense [PG] |
| 21958 | Appearances are nothing beyond representations, which is transcendental ideality [Moore,AW] |
| 3876 | If my team is losing 3-1, I have synthetic a priori knowledge that they need two goals for a draw [PG] |
| 2331 | Functionalism says robots and people are the same at one level of abstraction [Putnam] |
| 2071 | If concepts have external meaning, computational states won't explain psychology [Putnam] |
| 2332 | Functionalism can't explain reference and truth, which are needed for logic [Putnam] |
| 2348 | Is there just one computational state for each specific belief? [Putnam] |
| 2344 | If we are going to eliminate folk psychology, we must also eliminate folk logic [Putnam] |
| 7734 | Maybe a mollusc's brain events for pain ARE of the same type (broadly) as a human's [PG] |
| 7735 | Maybe a frog's brain events for fear are functionally like ours, but not phenomenally [PG] |
| 2074 | Can we give a scientific, computational account of folk psychology? [Putnam] |
| 2343 | Reference may be different while mental representation is the same [Putnam] |
| 2346 | Meaning and translation (which are needed to define truth) both presuppose the notion of reference [Putnam] |
| 2354 | "Meaning is use" is not a definition of meaning [Putnam] |
| 2336 | Holism seems to make fixed definition more or less impossible [Putnam] |
| 2334 | Meaning holism tried to show that you can't get fixed meanings built out of observation terms [Putnam] |
| 2335 | Understanding a sentence involves background knowledge and can't be done in isolation [Putnam] |
| 2340 | We should separate how the reference of 'gold' is fixed from its conceptual content [Putnam] |
| 2341 | Like names, natural kind terms have their meaning fixed by extension and reference [Putnam] |
| 2339 | Aristotle implies that we have the complete concepts of a language in our heads, but we don't [Putnam] |
| 2338 | Reference (say to 'elms') is a social phenomenon which we can leave to experts [Putnam] |
| 3877 | Utilitarianism seems to justify the discreet murder of unhappy people [PG] |
| 2342 | "Water" is a natural kind term, but "H2O" is a description [Putnam] |
| 6126 | Life is Movement, Respiration, Sensation, Nutrition, Excretion, Reproduction, Growth (MRS NERG) [PG] |
| 3873 | An omniscient being couldn't know it was omniscient, as that requires information from beyond its scope of knowledge [PG] |
| 3874 | How could God know there wasn't an unknown force controlling his 'free' will? [PG] |