33 ideas
| 16185 | Causality indicates which properties are real [Cartwright,N] |
| 11181 | Aristotelian essentialism involves a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of modal operators [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11184 | Aristotelian essentialism is about shared properties, individuating essentialism about distinctive properties [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11180 | Essentialist sentences are not theorems of modal logic, and can even be false [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11186 | 'Essentially' won't replace 'necessarily' for vacuous properties like snub-nosed or self-identical [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11185 | 'Is essentially' has a different meaning from 'is necessarily', as they often cannot be substituted [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11182 | If essences are objects with only essential properties, they are elusive in possible worlds [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 8361 | What is true used to be possible, but it may no longer be so [Wright,GHv] |
| 11183 | The use of possible worlds is to sort properties (not to individuate objects) [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11187 | In possible worlds, names are just neutral unvarying pegs for truths and predicates [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 16182 | Two main types of explanation are by causes, or by citing a theoretical framework [Cartwright,N] |
| 16184 | An explanation is a model that fits a theory and predicts the phenomenological laws [Cartwright,N] |
| 16167 | Laws get the facts wrong, and explanation rests on improvements and qualifications of laws [Cartwright,N] |
| 16169 | Laws apply to separate domains, but real explanations apply to intersecting domains [Cartwright,N] |
| 16171 | The covering law view assumes that each phenomenon has a 'right' explanation [Cartwright,N] |
| 16176 | Covering-law explanation lets us explain storms by falling barometers [Cartwright,N] |
| 16177 | I disagree with the covering-law view that there is a law to cover every single case [Cartwright,N] |
| 16180 | You can't explain one quail's behaviour by just saying that all quails do it [Cartwright,N] |
| 16183 | In science, best explanations have regularly turned out to be false [Cartwright,N] |
| 8363 | p is a cause and q an effect (not vice versa) if manipulations of p change q [Wright,GHv] |
| 8364 | We can imagine controlling floods by controlling rain, but not vice versa [Wright,GHv] |
| 8366 | The very notion of a cause depends on agency and action [Wright,GHv] |
| 8362 | We give regularities a causal character by subjecting them to experiment [Wright,GHv] |
| 8360 | We must further analyse conditions for causation, into quantifiers or modal concepts [Wright,GHv] |
| 16175 | A cause won't increase the effect frequency if other causes keep interfering [Cartwright,N] |
| 8365 | Some laws are causal (Ohm's Law), but others are conceptual principles (conservation of energy) [Wright,GHv] |
| 6781 | There are fundamental explanatory laws (false!), and phenomenological laws (regularities) [Cartwright,N, by Bird] |
| 16166 | Laws of appearances are 'phenomenological'; laws of reality are 'theoretical' [Cartwright,N] |
| 16179 | Good organisation may not be true, and the truth may not organise very much [Cartwright,N] |
| 11189 | Dispositional essences are special, as if an object loses them they cease to exist [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 16178 | There are few laws for when one theory meets another [Cartwright,N] |
| 16170 | To get from facts to equations, we need a prepared descriptions suited to mathematics [Cartwright,N] |
| 16181 | Simple laws have quite different outcomes when they act in combinations [Cartwright,N] |