43 ideas
7623 | For ancient Greeks being wise was an ethical value [Putnam] |
7454 | Gassendi is the first great empiricist philosopher [Hacking] |
4714 | Putnam's epistemic notion of truth replaces the realism of correspondence with ontological relativism [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
7617 | Before Kant, all philosophers had a correspondence theory of truth [Putnam] |
4716 | The correspondence theory is wrong, because there is no one correspondence between reality and fact [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
7616 | Truth is an idealisation of rational acceptability [Putnam] |
18806 | Frege thought traditional categories had psychological and linguistic impurities [Frege, by Rumfitt] |
8490 | First-level functions have objects as arguments; second-level functions take functions as arguments [Frege] |
8492 | Relations are functions with two arguments [Frege] |
14203 | Intension is not meaning, as 'cube' and 'square-faced polyhedron' are intensionally the same [Putnam] |
14207 | If cats equal cherries, model theory allows reinterpretation of the whole language preserving truth [Putnam] |
8487 | Arithmetic is a development of logic, so arithmetical symbolism must expand into logical symbolism [Frege] |
18899 | Frege takes the existence of horses to be part of their concept [Frege, by Sommers] |
14214 | If we try to cure the abundance of theories with causal links, this is 'just more theory' [Putnam, by Lewis] |
14205 | The sentence 'A cat is on a mat' remains always true when 'cat' means cherry and 'mat' means tree [Putnam] |
7610 | A fact is simply what it is rational to accept [Putnam] |
4028 | Frege allows either too few properties (as extensions) or too many (as predicates) [Mellor/Oliver on Frege] |
7618 | Very nominalistic philosophers deny properties, though scientists accept them [Putnam] |
8489 | The concept 'object' is too simple for analysis; unlike a function, it is an expression with no empty place [Frege] |
4718 | If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
7448 | Probability is statistical (behaviour of chance devices) or epistemological (belief based on evidence) [Hacking] |
7447 | Probability was fully explained between 1654 and 1812 [Hacking] |
7449 | Epistemological probability based either on logical implications or coherent judgments [Hacking] |
7450 | In the medieval view, only deduction counted as true evidence [Hacking] |
7451 | Formerly evidence came from people; the new idea was that things provided evidence [Hacking] |
7620 | Some kind of objective 'rightness' is a presupposition of thought itself [Putnam] |
7452 | An experiment is a test, or an adventure, or a diagnosis, or a dissection [Hacking, by PG] |
14204 | Naïve operationalism would have meanings change every time the tests change [Putnam] |
7459 | Follow maths for necessary truths, and jurisprudence for contingent truths [Hacking] |
7611 | Rationality is one part of our conception of human flourishing [Putnam] |
14200 | 'Water' on Twin Earth doesn't refer to water, but no mental difference can account for this [Putnam] |
7612 | Reference is social not individual, because we defer to experts when referring to elm trees [Putnam] |
7613 | Concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences [Putnam] |
9947 | Concepts are the ontological counterparts of predicative expressions [Frege, by George/Velleman] |
10319 | An assertion about the concept 'horse' must indirectly speak of an object [Frege, by Hale] |
8488 | A concept is a function whose value is always a truth-value [Frege] |
9948 | Unlike objects, concepts are inherently incomplete [Frege, by George/Velleman] |
14202 | Neither individual nor community mental states fix reference [Putnam] |
14201 | Maybe the total mental state of a language community fixes the reference of a term [Putnam] |
4972 | I may regard a thought about Phosphorus as true, and the same thought about Hesperus as false [Frege] |
14206 | There are infinitely many interpretations of a sentence which can all seem to be 'correct' [Putnam] |
7624 | The word 'inconsiderate' nicely shows the blurring of facts and values [Putnam] |
8491 | The Ontological Argument fallaciously treats existence as a first-level concept [Frege] |