45 ideas
| 2352 | The job of the philosopher is to distinguish facts about the world from conventions [Putnam] |
| 2345 | Semantic notions do not occur in Tarski's definitions, but assessing their correctness involves translation [Putnam] |
| 2347 | Asserting the truth of an indexical statement is not the same as uttering the statement [Putnam] |
| 2349 | Realists believe truth is correspondence, independent of humans, is bivalent, and is unique [Putnam] |
| 8780 | Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2' [Geach] |
| 2351 | Aristotle says an object (e.g. a lamp) has identity if its parts stay together when it is moved [Putnam] |
| 11910 | Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X' [Geach] |
| 21833 | Research suggest that we overrate conscious experience [Flanagan] |
| 8775 | A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction [Geach] |
| 8776 | We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too [Geach] |
| 2567 | You can't define real mental states in terms of behaviour that never happens [Geach] |
| 2568 | Beliefs aren't tied to particular behaviours [Geach] |
| 2331 | Functionalism says robots and people are the same at one level of abstraction [Putnam] |
| 2071 | If concepts have external meaning, computational states won't explain psychology [Putnam] |
| 2332 | Functionalism can't explain reference and truth, which are needed for logic [Putnam] |
| 2348 | Is there just one computational state for each specific belief? [Putnam] |
| 21834 | Sensations may be identical to brain events, but complex mental events don't seem to be [Flanagan] |
| 2344 | If we are going to eliminate folk psychology, we must also eliminate folk logic [Putnam] |
| 2074 | Can we give a scientific, computational account of folk psychology? [Putnam] |
| 2343 | Reference may be different while mental representation is the same [Putnam] |
| 8781 | The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them [Geach] |
| 8769 | If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts [Geach] |
| 8770 | 'Abstractionism' is acquiring a concept by picking out one experience amongst a group [Geach] |
| 8771 | 'Or' and 'not' are not to be found in the sensible world, or even in the world of inner experience [Geach] |
| 8772 | We can't acquire number-concepts by extracting the number from the things being counted [Geach] |
| 8773 | Abstractionists can't explain counting, because it must precede experience of objects [Geach] |
| 8774 | The numbers don't exist in nature, so they cannot have been abstracted from there into our languages [Geach] |
| 8778 | Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently [Geach] |
| 8777 | If 'black' and 'cat' can be used in the absence of such objects, how can such usage be abstracted? [Geach] |
| 8779 | We can form two different abstract concepts that apply to a single unified experience [Geach] |
| 2346 | Meaning and translation (which are needed to define truth) both presuppose the notion of reference [Putnam] |
| 2354 | "Meaning is use" is not a definition of meaning [Putnam] |
| 2336 | Holism seems to make fixed definition more or less impossible [Putnam] |
| 2334 | Meaning holism tried to show that you can't get fixed meanings built out of observation terms [Putnam] |
| 2335 | Understanding a sentence involves background knowledge and can't be done in isolation [Putnam] |
| 2340 | We should separate how the reference of 'gold' is fixed from its conceptual content [Putnam] |
| 2341 | Like names, natural kind terms have their meaning fixed by extension and reference [Putnam] |
| 2338 | Reference (say to 'elms') is a social phenomenon which we can leave to experts [Putnam] |
| 2339 | Aristotle implies that we have the complete concepts of a language in our heads, but we don't [Putnam] |
| 21837 | Morality is normative because it identifies best practices among the normal practices [Flanagan] |
| 21830 | For Darwinians, altruism is either contracts or genetics [Flanagan] |
| 21835 | We need Eudaimonics - the empirical study of how we should flourish [Flanagan] |
| 21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
| 2342 | "Water" is a natural kind term, but "H2O" is a description [Putnam] |
| 21832 | Buddhists reject God and the self, and accept suffering as key, and liberation through wisdom [Flanagan] |