Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Content Preservation', 'On Multiplying Entities' and 'Counterfactuals'

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8 ideas

2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 6. Ockham's Razor
The quest for simplicity drove scientists to posit new entities, such as molecules in gases [Quine]
In arithmetic, ratios, negatives, irrationals and imaginaries were created in order to generalise [Quine]
7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 4. Events / c. Reduction of events
Explaining events just by bodies can't explain two events identical in space-time [Quine]
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia [Quine]
10. Modality / B. Possibility / 8. Conditionals / c. Truth-function conditionals
Lewis says indicative conditionals are truth-functional [Lewis, by Jackson]
10. Modality / B. Possibility / 9. Counterfactuals
In good counterfactuals the consequent holds in world like ours except that the antecedent is true [Lewis, by Horwich]
13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 1. External Justification
Subjects may be unaware of their epistemic 'entitlements', unlike their 'justifications' [Burge]
26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 4. Regularities / b. Best system theory
A law of nature is a general axiom of the deductive system that is best for simplicity and strength [Lewis]