32 ideas
8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
18009 | Chomsky established the view that category mistakes are well-formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
8081 | 'No councillors are bankers' and 'All bankers are athletes' implies 'Some athletes are not councillors' [Devlin] |
8085 | Modern propositional inference replaces Aristotle's 19 syllogisms with modus ponens [Devlin] |
8086 | Predicate logic retains the axioms of propositional logic [Devlin] |
8091 | Situation theory is logic that takes account of context [Devlin] |
8087 | Golden ages: 1900-1960 for pure logic, and 1950-1985 for applied logic [Devlin] |
8089 | Montague's intensional logic incorporated the notion of meaning [Devlin] |
8082 | Where a conditional is purely formal, an implication implies a link between premise and conclusion [Devlin] |
8072 | Sentences of apparent identical form can have different contextual meanings [Devlin] |
8075 | Space and time are atomic in the arrow, and divisible in the tortoise [Devlin] |
15435 | If you think universals are immanent, you must believe them to be sparse, and not every related predicate [Lewis] |
15451 | I assume there could be natural properties that are not instantiated in our world [Lewis] |
15433 | Tropes are particular properties, which cannot recur, but can be exact duplicates [Lewis] |
15436 | Universals are meant to give an account of resemblance [Lewis] |
15438 | We can add a primitive natural/unnatural distinction to class nominalism [Lewis] |
15448 | The 'magical' view of structural universals says they are atoms, even though they have parts [Lewis] |
15449 | If 'methane' is an atomic structural universal, it has nothing to connect it to its carbon universals [Lewis] |
15439 | The 'pictorial' view of structural universals says they are wholes made of universals as parts [Lewis] |
15441 | The structural universal 'methane' needs the universal 'hydrogen' four times over [Lewis] |
15445 | Butane and Isobutane have the same atoms, but different structures [Lewis] |
15434 | Structural universals have a necessary connection to the universals forming its parts [Lewis] |
15437 | We can't get rid of structural universals if there are no simple universals [Lewis] |
15446 | Composition is not just making new things from old; there are too many counterexamples [Lewis] |
15440 | A whole is distinct from its parts, but is not a further addition in ontology [Lewis] |
15444 | Different things (a toy house and toy car) can be made of the same parts at different times [Lewis] |
8088 | People still say the Hopi have no time concepts, despite Whorf's later denial [Devlin] |
15450 | Maybe abstraction is just mereological subtraction [Lewis] |
15443 | Mathematicians abstract by equivalence classes, but that doesn't turn a many into one [Lewis] |
18007 | Syntax is independent of semantics; sentences can be well formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
8076 | The distinction between sentences and abstract propositions is crucial in logic [Devlin] |