36 ideas
| 2352 | The job of the philosopher is to distinguish facts about the world from conventions [Putnam] |
| 14231 | We should always apply someone's theory of meaning to their own utterances [Liggins] |
| 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] |
| 10653 | Maybe set theory need not be well-founded [Varzi] |
| 10648 | Mereology need not be nominalist, though it is often taken to be so [Varzi] |
| 10655 | Are there mereological atoms, and are all objects made of them? [Varzi] |
| 10659 | There is something of which everything is part, but no null-thing which is part of everything [Varzi] |
| 14232 | We normally formalise 'There are Fs' with singular quantification and predication, but this may be wrong [Liggins] |
| 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] |
| 10661 | 'Composition is identity' says multitudes are the reality, loosely composing single things [Varzi] |
| 10647 | Parts may or may not be attached, demarcated, arbitrary, material, extended, spatial or temporal [Varzi] |
| 10651 | If 'part' is reflexive, then identity is a limit case of parthood [Varzi] |
| 10649 | 'Part' stands for a reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive relation [Varzi] |
| 14233 | Nihilists needn't deny parts - they can just say that some of the xs are among the ys [Liggins] |
| 10654 | The parthood relation will help to define at least seven basic predicates [Varzi] |
| 10658 | Sameness of parts won't guarantee identity if their arrangement matters [Varzi] |
| 10652 | Conceivability may indicate possibility, but literary fantasy does not [Varzi] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 2342 | "Water" is a natural kind term, but "H2O" is a description [Putnam] |