39 ideas
9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
14064 | If a statue is identical with the clay of which it is made, that identity is contingent [Gibbard] |
14066 | A 'piece' of clay begins when its parts stick together, separately from other clay [Gibbard] |
14067 | Clay and statue are two objects, which can be named and reasoned about [Gibbard] |
14069 | We can only investigate the identity once we have designated it as 'statue' or as 'clay' [Gibbard] |
9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
14076 | Essentialism is the existence of a definite answer as to whether an entity fulfils a condition [Gibbard] |
14077 | Essentialism for concreta is false, since they can come apart under two concepts [Gibbard] |
14070 | A particular statue has sortal persistence conditions, so its origin defines it [Gibbard] |
14073 | Claims on contingent identity seem to violate Leibniz's Law [Gibbard] |
14065 | Two identical things must share properties - including creation and destruction times [Gibbard] |
14074 | Leibniz's Law isn't just about substitutivity, because it must involve properties and relations [Gibbard] |
9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
14072 | Possible worlds identity needs a sortal [Gibbard] |
14078 | Only concepts, not individuals, can be the same across possible worlds [Gibbard] |
14079 | Kripke's semantics needs lots of intuitions about which properties are essential [Gibbard] |
9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
14071 | Naming a thing in the actual world also invokes some persistence criteria [Gibbard] |
9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |