68 ideas
| 16227 | Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley] |
| 15879 | The Square of Opposition has two contradictory pairs, one contrary pair, and one sub-contrary pair [Harré] |
| 16216 | Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley] |
| 15891 | Traditional quantifiers combine ordinary language generality and ontology assumptions [Harré] |
| 15878 | Some quantifiers, such as 'any', rule out any notion of order within their range [Harré] |
| 16211 | A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley] |
| 16219 | Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley] |
| 16223 | Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley] |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| 16208 | Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley] |
| 16221 | Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley] |
| 16230 | Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley] |
| 15874 | Scientific properties are not observed qualities, but the dispositions which create them [Harré] |
| 16232 | An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley] |
| 16200 | Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley] |
| 16237 | The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley] |
| 16238 | Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley] |
| 16220 | Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley] |
| 16222 | Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley] |
| 16228 | The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley] |
| 16229 | Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley] |
| 14492 | If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley] |
| 16193 | 'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley] |
| 16195 | Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley] |
| 16202 | The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley] |
| 16192 | Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley] |
| 16196 | Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley] |
| 16197 | How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley] |
| 16191 | Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley] |
| 16199 | If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley] |
| 16201 | Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley] |
| 16240 | If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley] |
| 16203 | Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley] |
| 16204 | Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley] |
| 16212 | An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley] |
| 16213 | Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley] |
| 16205 | The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley] |
| 16206 | Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley] |
| 16225 | If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley] |
| 15884 | Laws of nature remain the same through any conditions, if the underlying mechanisms are unchanged [Harré] |
| 16239 | To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley] |
| 15880 | In physical sciences particular observations are ordered, but in biology only the classes are ordered [Harré] |
| 15869 | Reports of experiments eliminate the experimenter, and present results as the behaviour of nature [Harré] |
| 15881 | We can save laws from counter-instances by treating the latter as analytic definitions [Harré] |
| 15882 | Since there are three different dimensions for generalising laws, no one system of logic can cover them [Harré] |
| 15888 | The grue problem shows that natural kinds are central to science [Harré] |
| 15887 | 'Grue' introduces a new causal hypothesis - that emeralds can change colour [Harré] |
| 15889 | It is because ravens are birds that their species and their colour might be connected [Harré] |
| 15890 | Non-black non-ravens just aren't part of the presuppositions of 'all ravens are black' [Harré] |
| 15885 | The necessity of Newton's First Law derives from the nature of material things, not from a mechanism [Harré] |
| 15868 | Idealisation idealises all of a thing's properties, but abstraction leaves some of them out [Harré] |
| 16218 | On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley] |
| 20168 | Blame usually has no effect if the recipient thinks it unjustified [Williams,B] |
| 20167 | Blame partly rests on the fiction that blamed agents always know their obligations [Williams,B] |
| 15886 | Science rests on the principle that nature is a hierarchy of natural kinds [Harré] |
| 16215 | Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley] |
| 15864 | Classification is just as important as laws in natural science [Harré] |
| 15865 | Newton's First Law cannot be demonstrated experimentally, as that needs absence of external forces [Harré] |
| 15862 | Laws can come from data, from theory, from imagination and concepts, or from procedures [Harré] |
| 15870 | Are laws of nature about events, or types and universals, or dispositions, or all three? [Harré] |
| 15871 | Are laws about what has or might happen, or do they also cover all the possibilities? [Harré] |
| 15876 | Maybe laws of nature are just relations between properties? [Harré] |
| 15860 | We take it that only necessary happenings could be laws [Harré] |
| 15867 | Laws describe abstract idealisations, not the actual mess of nature [Harré] |
| 15872 | Must laws of nature be universal, or could they be local? [Harré] |
| 15892 | Laws of nature state necessary connections of things, events and properties, based on models of mechanisms [Harré] |
| 15875 | In counterfactuals we keep substances constant, and imagine new situations for them [Harré] |
| 16207 | Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley] |