19 ideas
17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
14633 | How do we tell a table's being contingently plastic from its being essentially plastic? [Jackson] |
14635 | An x is essentially F if it is F in every possible world in which it appears [Jackson] |
14632 | Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson] |
14631 | How can you show the necessity of an a posteriori necessity, if it might turn out to be false? [Jackson] |
17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
7880 | If a blind persons suddenly sees a kestrel, that doesn't make visual and theoretical kestrels different [Papineau on Jackson] |
7378 | No one bothers to imagine what it would really be like to have ALL the physical information [Dennett on Jackson] |
7377 | Mary learns when she sees colour, so her complete physical information had missed something [Jackson] |
17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |