31 ideas
| 21699 | Russell offered a paraphrase of definite description, to avoid the commitment to objects [Quine] |
| 16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 23708 | Humeans see properties as having no more essential features and relations than their distinctness [Friend/Kimpton-Nye, by PG] |
| 23709 | Dispositions are what individuate properties, and they constitute their essence [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23707 | Powers are properties which necessitate dispositions [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 23714 | Dispositional essentialism (unlike the grounding view) says only fundamental properties are powers [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23711 | A power is a property which consists entirely of dispositions [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23712 | Powers are qualitative properties which fully ground dispositions [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23698 | Dispositions have directed behaviour which occurs if triggered [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23699 | 'Masked' dispositions fail to react because something intervenes [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23700 | A disposition is 'altered' when the stimulus reverses the disposition [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23701 | A disposition is 'mimicked' if a different cause produces that effect from that stimulus [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23702 | A 'trick' can look like a stimulus for a disposition which will happen without it [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23703 | Some dispositions manifest themselves without a stimulus [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23704 | We could analyse dispositions as 'possibilities', with no mention of a stimulus [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 23710 | Dispositionalism says modality is in the powers of this world, not outsourced to possible worlds [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 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] |
| 16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| 16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [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] |
| 16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [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] |
| 21700 | Taking sentences as the unit of meaning makes useful paraphrasing possible [Quine] |
| 21701 | Knowing a word is knowing the meanings of sentences which contain it [Quine] |
| 23706 | Hume's Dictum says no connections are necessary - so mass and spacetime warping could separate [Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |