19 ideas
| 8207 | The quest for simplicity drove scientists to posit new entities, such as molecules in gases [Quine] |
| 8208 | In arithmetic, ratios, negatives, irrationals and imaginaries were created in order to generalise [Quine] |
| 6396 | A sentence is held true because of a combination of meaning and belief [Davidson] |
| 8205 | Explaining events just by bodies can't explain two events identical in space-time [Quine] |
| 8206 | Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia [Quine] |
| 8361 | What is true used to be possible, but it may no longer be so [Wright,GHv] |
| 11145 | Having a belief involves the possibility of being mistaken [Davidson] |
| 6397 | The concept of belief can only derive from relationship to a speech community [Davidson] |
| 6392 | Thought depends on speech [Davidson] |
| 6393 | A creature doesn't think unless it interprets another's speech [Davidson] |
| 11144 | Concepts are only possible in a language community [Davidson] |
| 6395 | An understood sentence can be used for almost anything; it isn't language if it has only one use [Davidson] |
| 6394 | The pattern of sentences held true gives sentences their meaning [Davidson] |
| 8363 | p is a cause and q an effect (not vice versa) if manipulations of p change q [Wright,GHv] |
| 8364 | We can imagine controlling floods by controlling rain, but not vice versa [Wright,GHv] |
| 8366 | The very notion of a cause depends on agency and action [Wright,GHv] |
| 8362 | We give regularities a causal character by subjecting them to experiment [Wright,GHv] |
| 8360 | We must further analyse conditions for causation, into quantifiers or modal concepts [Wright,GHv] |
| 8365 | Some laws are causal (Ohm's Law), but others are conceptual principles (conservation of energy) [Wright,GHv] |