18 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] |
16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
8205 | Explaining events just by bodies can't explain two events identical in space-time [Quine] |
16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
8206 | Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia [Quine] |
16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16764 | The soul conserves the body, as we see by its dissolution when the soul leaves [Toletus] |
16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |