45 ideas
| 21757 | Philosophy is the conceptual essence of the shape of history [Hegel] |
| 9847 | A contextual definition permits the elimination of the expression by a substitution [Dummett] |
| 22285 | Impredicative definitions are circular, but fine for picking out, rather than creating something [Potter] |
| 22301 | The Identity Theory says a proposition is true if it coincides with what makes it true [Potter] |
| 22324 | It has been unfortunate that externalism about truth is equated with correspondence [Potter] |
| 9820 | In classical logic, logical truths are valid formulas; in higher-order logics they are purely logical [Dummett] |
| 22279 | Frege's sign |--- meant judgements, but the modern |- turnstile means inference, with intecedents [Potter] |
| 22291 | Deductivism can't explain how the world supports unconditional conclusions [Potter] |
| 22295 | Modern logical truths are true under all interpretations of the non-logical words [Potter] |
| 9896 | A prime number is one which is measured by a unit alone [Dummett] |
| 18255 | Addition of quantities is prior to ordering, as shown in cyclic domains like angles [Dummett] |
| 9895 | A number is a multitude composed of units [Dummett] |
| 9852 | We understand 'there are as many nuts as apples' as easily by pairing them as by counting them [Dummett] |
| 9829 | The identity of a number may be fixed by something outside structure - by counting [Dummett] |
| 9828 | Numbers aren't fixed by position in a structure; it won't tell you whether to start with 0 or 1 [Dummett] |
| 9876 | Set theory isn't part of logic, and why reduce to something more complex? [Dummett] |
| 22310 | The formalist defence against Gödel is to reject his metalinguistic concept of truth [Potter] |
| 22298 | Why is fictional arithmetic applicable to the real world? [Potter] |
| 9884 | The distinction of concrete/abstract, or actual/non-actual, is a scale, not a dichotomy [Dummett] |
| 22287 | If 'concrete' is the negative of 'abstract', that means desires and hallucinations are concrete [Potter] |
| 9869 | Realism is just the application of two-valued semantics to sentences [Dummett] |
| 22284 | 'Greater than', which is the ancestral of 'successor', strictly orders the natural numbers [Potter] |
| 9880 | Nominalism assumes unmediated mental contact with objects [Dummett] |
| 9885 | The existence of abstract objects is a pseudo-problem [Dummett] |
| 9858 | Abstract objects nowadays are those which are objective but not actual [Dummett] |
| 9859 | It is absurd to deny the Equator, on the grounds that it lacks causal powers [Dummett] |
| 9860 | 'We've crossed the Equator' has truth-conditions, so accept the Equator - and it's an object [Dummett] |
| 9872 | Abstract objects need the context principle, since they can't be encountered directly [Dummett] |
| 9848 | Content is replaceable if identical, so replaceability can't define identity [Dummett, by Dummett] |
| 9842 | Frege introduced criteria for identity, but thought defining identity was circular [Dummett] |
| 22281 | A material conditional cannot capture counterfactual reasoning [Potter] |
| 22327 | Knowledge from a drunken schoolteacher is from a reliable and unreliable process [Potter] |
| 22273 | Traditionally there are twelve categories of judgement, in groups of three [Potter] |
| 22290 | The phrase 'the concept "horse"' can't refer to a concept, because it is saturated [Potter] |
| 9849 | Maybe a concept is 'prior' to another if it can be defined without the second concept [Dummett] |
| 9850 | An argument for conceptual priority is greater simplicity in explanation [Dummett] |
| 9873 | Abstract terms are acceptable as long as we know how they function linguistically [Dummett] |
| 9993 | There is no reason why abstraction by equivalence classes should be called 'logical' [Dummett, by Tait] |
| 9857 | We arrive at the concept 'suicide' by comparing 'Cato killed Cato' with 'Brutus killed Brutus' [Dummett] |
| 9833 | To abstract from spoons (to get the same number as the forks), the spoons must be indistinguishable too [Dummett] |
| 22283 | Compositionality should rely on the parsing tree, which may contain more than sentence components [Potter] |
| 22282 | 'Direct compositonality' says the components wholly explain a sentence meaning [Potter] |
| 22296 | Compositionality is more welcome in logic than in linguistics (which is more contextual) [Potter] |
| 9836 | Fregean semantics assumes a domain articulated into individual objects [Dummett] |
| 18257 | Why should the limit of measurement be points, not intervals? [Dummett] |