38 ideas
| 17651 | Without words or other symbols, we have no world [Goodman] |
| 17652 | Truth is irrelevant if no statements are involved [Goodman] |
| 10397 | Abelard's mereology involves privileged and natural divisions, and principal parts [Abelard, by King,P] |
| 17656 | Being primitive or prior always depends on a constructional system [Goodman] |
| 17661 | We don't recognise patterns - we invent them [Goodman] |
| 17659 | Reality is largely a matter of habit [Goodman] |
| 17657 | We build our world, and ignore anything that won't fit [Goodman] |
| 17377 | All descriptive language is classificatory [Dupré] |
| 17376 | We should aim for a classification which tells us as much as possible about the object [Dupré] |
| 17654 | A world can be full of variety or not, depending on how we sort it [Goodman] |
| 10395 | Abelard was an irrealist about virtually everything apart from concrete individuals [Abelard, by King,P] |
| 10396 | If 'animal' is wholly present in Socrates and an ass, then 'animal' is rational and irrational [Abelard, by King,P] |
| 15384 | Only words can be 'predicated of many'; the universality is just in its mode of signifying [Abelard, by Panaccio] |
| 17390 | Natural kinds don't need essentialism to be explanatory [Dupré] |
| 17389 | A species might have its essential genetic mechanism replaced by a new one [Dupré] |
| 17388 | It seems that species lack essential properties, so they can't be natural kinds [Dupré] |
| 17653 | Things can only be judged the 'same' by citing some respect of sameness [Goodman] |
| 8481 | The de dicto-de re modality distinction dates back to Abelard [Abelard, by Orenstein] |
| 17660 | Discovery is often just finding a fit, like a jigsaw puzzle [Goodman] |
| 17374 | The possibility of prediction rests on determinism [Dupré] |
| 17658 | Users of digital thermometers recognise no temperatures in the gaps [Goodman] |
| 17650 | We lack frames of reference to transform physics, biology and psychology into one another [Goodman] |
| 17655 | Grue and green won't be in the same world, as that would block induction entirely [Goodman] |
| 17378 | Presumably molecular structure seems important because we never have the Twin Earth experience [Dupré] |
| 15385 | Abelard's problem is the purely singular aspects of things won't account for abstraction [Panaccio on Abelard] |
| 15383 | Nothing external can truly be predicated of an object [Abelard, by Panaccio] |
| 17649 | If the world is one it has many aspects, and if there are many worlds they will collect into one [Goodman] |
| 17381 | Phylogenetics involves history, and cladism rests species on splits in lineage [Dupré] |
| 17385 | Kinds don't do anything (including evolve) because they are abstract [Dupré] |
| 17380 | Wales may count as fish [Dupré] |
| 17382 | Cooks, unlike scientists, distinguish garlic from onions [Dupré] |
| 10398 | Natural kinds are not special; they are just well-defined resemblance collections [Abelard, by King,P] |
| 17375 | Natural kinds are decided entirely by the intentions of our classification [Dupré] |
| 17379 | Borders between species are much less clear in vegetables than among animals [Dupré] |
| 17384 | Even atoms of an element differ, in the energy levels of their electrons [Dupré] |
| 17387 | Ecologists favour classifying by niche, even though that can clash with genealogy [Dupré] |
| 17386 | The theory of evolution is mainly about species [Dupré] |
| 17383 | Species are the lowest-level classification in biology [Dupré] |