25 ideas
| 9455 | Maybe proper names have the content of fixing a thing's category [Bealer] |
| 9454 | The four leading theories of definite descriptions are Frege's, Russell's, Evans's, and Prior's [Bealer] |
| 5500 | Biologists see many organic levels, 'abstract' if seen from below, 'structural' if seen from above [Lycan] |
| 9476 | If dispositions are more fundamental than causes, then they won't conceptually reduce to them [Bird on Lewis] |
| 5494 | 'Lightning is electric discharge' and 'Phosphorus is Venus' are synthetic a posteriori identities [Lycan] |
| 8425 | For true counterfactuals, both antecedent and consequent true is closest to actuality [Lewis] |
| 8424 | Determinism says there can't be two identical worlds up to a time, with identical laws, which then differ [Lewis] |
| 5496 | Functionalism has three linked levels: physical, functional, and mental [Lycan] |
| 5499 | A mental state is a functional realisation of a brain state when it serves the purpose of the organism [Lycan] |
| 9452 | Propositions might be reduced to functions (worlds to truth values), or ordered sets of properties and relations [Bealer] |
| 9453 | Sentences saying the same with the same rigid designators may still express different propositions [Bealer] |
| 9451 | Modal logic and brain science have reaffirmed traditional belief in propositions [Bealer] |
| 8420 | A proposition is a set of possible worlds where it is true [Lewis] |
| 5501 | People are trying to explain biological teleology in naturalistic causal terms [Lycan] |
| 8405 | A theory of causation should explain why cause precedes effect, not take it for granted [Lewis, by Field,H] |
| 8427 | I reject making the direction of causation axiomatic, since that takes too much for granted [Lewis] |
| 10392 | It is just individious discrimination to pick out one cause and label it as 'the' cause [Lewis] |
| 8419 | The modern regularity view says a cause is a member of a minimal set of sufficient conditions [Lewis] |
| 8421 | Regularity analyses could make c an effect of e, or an epiphenomenon, or inefficacious, or pre-empted [Lewis] |
| 17525 | The counterfactual view says causes are necessary (rather than sufficient) for their effects [Lewis, by Bird] |
| 17524 | Lewis has basic causation, counterfactuals, and a general ancestral (thus handling pre-emption) [Lewis, by Bird] |
| 8397 | Counterfactual causation implies all laws are causal, which they aren't [Tooley on Lewis] |
| 8423 | My counterfactual analysis applies to particular cases, not generalisations [Lewis] |
| 8426 | One event causes another iff there is a causal chain from first to second [Lewis] |
| 4795 | Lewis's account of counterfactuals is fine if we know what a law of nature is, but it won't explain the latter [Cohen,LJ on Lewis] |