30 ideas
| 3993 | Arguments are nearly always open to challenge, but they help to explain a position rather than force people to believe [Lewis] |
| 9572 | Realists about sets say there exists a null set in the real world, with no members [Chihara] |
| 9550 | We only know relational facts about the empty set, but nothing intrinsic [Chihara] |
| 9562 | In simple type theory there is a hierarchy of null sets [Chihara] |
| 9573 | The null set is a structural position which has no other position in membership relation [Chihara] |
| 9551 | What is special about Bill Clinton's unit set, in comparison with all the others? [Chihara] |
| 9549 | The set theorist cannot tell us what 'membership' is [Chihara] |
| 9571 | ZFU refers to the physical world, when it talks of 'urelements' [Chihara] |
| 9563 | A pack of wolves doesn't cease when one member dies [Chihara] |
| 9561 | The mathematics of relations is entirely covered by ordered pairs [Chihara] |
| 9552 | Sentences are consistent if they can all be true; for Frege it is that no contradiction can be deduced [Chihara] |
| 9553 | Analytic geometry gave space a mathematical structure, which could then have axioms [Chihara] |
| 10192 | We can replace existence of sets with possibility of constructing token sentences [Chihara, by MacBride] |
| 3990 | The whole truth supervenes on the physical truth [Lewis] |
| 3991 | Where pixels make up a picture, supervenience is reduction [Lewis] |
| 9559 | If a successful theory confirms mathematics, presumably a failed theory disconfirms it? [Chihara] |
| 9566 | No scientific explanation would collapse if mathematical objects were shown not to exist [Chihara] |
| 3995 | A mind is an organ of representation [Lewis] |
| 3994 | Human pain might be one thing; Martian pain might be something else [Lewis] |
| 3989 | I am a reductionist about mind because I am an a priori reductionist about everything [Lewis] |
| 3992 | Folk psychology makes good predictions, by associating mental states with causal roles [Lewis] |
| 3996 | Folk psychology doesn't say that there is a language of thought [Lewis] |
| 3998 | If you don't share an external world with a brain-in-a-vat, then externalism says you don't share any beliefs [Lewis] |
| 3997 | Nothing shows that all content is 'wide', or that wide content has logical priority [Lewis] |
| 3999 | A spontaneous duplicate of you would have your brain states but no experience, so externalism would deny him any beliefs [Lewis] |
| 4000 | Wide content derives from narrow content and relationships with external things [Lewis] |
| 9568 | I prefer the open sentences of a Constructibility Theory, to Platonist ideas of 'equivalence classes' [Chihara] |
| 9547 | Mathematical entities are causally inert, so the causal theory of reference won't work for them [Chihara] |
| 19216 | Propositions (such as 'that dog is barking') only exist if their items exist [Williamson] |
| 9574 | 'Gunk' is an individual possessing no parts that are atoms [Chihara] |