31 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] |
| 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] |
| 9572 | Realists about sets say there exists a null set in the real world, with no members [Chihara] |
| 9550 | We only know relational facts about the empty set, but nothing intrinsic [Chihara] |
| 9562 | In simple type theory there is a hierarchy of null sets [Chihara] |
| 9573 | The null set is a structural position which has no other position in membership relation [Chihara] |
| 9551 | What is special about Bill Clinton's unit set, in comparison with all the others? [Chihara] |
| 9549 | The set theorist cannot tell us what 'membership' is [Chihara] |
| 9571 | ZFU refers to the physical world, when it talks of 'urelements' [Chihara] |
| 9563 | A pack of wolves doesn't cease when one member dies [Chihara] |
| 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] |
| 9561 | The mathematics of relations is entirely covered by ordered pairs [Chihara] |
| 9552 | Sentences are consistent if they can all be true; for Frege it is that no contradiction can be deduced [Chihara] |
| 9553 | Analytic geometry gave space a mathematical structure, which could then have axioms [Chihara] |
| 10192 | We can replace existence of sets with possibility of constructing token sentences [Chihara, by MacBride] |
| 13174 | A piece of flint contains something resembling perceptions and appetites [Leibniz] |
| 13175 | Entelechies are analogous to souls, as other minds are analogous to our own minds [Leibniz] |
| 9559 | If a successful theory confirms mathematics, presumably a failed theory disconfirms it? [Chihara] |
| 9566 | No scientific explanation would collapse if mathematical objects were shown not to exist [Chihara] |
| 22432 | Normally conditionals have no truth value; it is the consequent which has a conditional truth value [Quine] |
| 13172 | What we cannot imagine may still exist [Leibniz] |
| 9568 | I prefer the open sentences of a Constructibility Theory, to Platonist ideas of 'equivalence classes' [Chihara] |
| 22430 | If we understand a statement, we know the circumstances of its truth [Quine] |
| 9547 | Mathematical entities are causally inert, so the causal theory of reference won't work for them [Chihara] |
| 13173 | Death is just the contraction of an animal [Leibniz] |
| 9574 | 'Gunk' is an individual possessing no parts that are atoms [Chihara] |
| 13713 | Quine holds time to be 'space-like': past objects are as real as spatially remote ones [Quine, by Sider] |