Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'The Philosophy of Philosophy', 'Existence and Quantification' and 'The Roots of Reference'

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24 ideas

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 5. Aims of Philosophy / e. Philosophy as reason
Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson]
3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique
Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson]
4. Formal Logic / D. Modal Logic ML / 1. Modal Logic
Quine says quantified modal logic creates nonsense, bad ontology, and false essentialism [Melia on Quine]
5. Theory of Logic / A. Overview of Logic / 7. Second-Order Logic
Various strategies try to deal with the ontological commitments of second-order logic [Hale/Wright on Quine]
7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / b. Being and existence
Philosophers tend to distinguish broad 'being' from narrower 'existence' - but I reject that [Quine]
7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 6. Criterion for Existence
All we have of general existence is what existential quantifiers express [Quine]
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 4. Anti-realism
The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson]
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 10. Vagueness / b. Vagueness of reality
There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson]
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 11. Ontological Commitment / b. Commitment of quantifiers
Existence is implied by the quantifiers, not by the constants [Quine]
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 11. Ontological Commitment / c. Commitment of predicates
Theories are committed to objects of which some of its predicates must be true [Quine]
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 11. Ontological Commitment / d. Commitment of theories
Express a theory in first-order predicate logic; its ontology is the types of bound variable needed for truth [Quine, by Lowe]
Ontological commitment of theories only arise if they are classically quantified [Quine]
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 11. Ontological Commitment / e. Ontological commitment problems
You can be implicitly committed to something without quantifying over it [Thomasson on Quine]
7. Existence / E. Categories / 1. Categories
In formal terms, a category is the range of some style of variables [Quine]
8. Modes of Existence / C. Powers and Dispositions / 3. Powers as Derived
Dispositions are physical states of mechanism; when known, these replace the old disposition term [Quine]
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / e. Vague objects
Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson]
10. Modality / D. Knowledge of Modality / 1. A Priori Necessary
Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson]
10. Modality / D. Knowledge of Modality / 4. Conceivable as Possible / a. Conceivable as possible
Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson]
We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson]
12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 2. Self-Evidence
There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson]
12. Knowledge Sources / E. Direct Knowledge / 2. Intuition
Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson]
When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson]
19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 6. Meaning as Use
You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson]
24. Political Theory / B. Nature of a State / 5. Culture
If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson]