Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'On Multiplying Entities', 'The Facts of Causation' and '14: Superstition'

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8 ideas

2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 6. Ockham's Razor
8208 In arithmetic, ratios, negatives, irrationals and imaginaries were created in order to generalise [Quine]
8207 The quest for simplicity drove scientists to posit new entities, such as molecules in gases [Quine]
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 5. What Makes Truths / a. What makes truths
10365 We might use 'facta' to refer to the truth-makers for facts [Mellor, by Schaffer,J]
7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 4. Events / c. Reduction of events
8205 Explaining events just by bodies can't explain two events identical in space-time [Quine]
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
8206 Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia [Quine]
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 8. Particular Causation / b. Causal relata
4785 Causal statements relate facts (which are whatever true propositions express) [Mellor, by Psillos]
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 8. Particular Causation / e. Probabilistic causation
8408 Probabilistic causation says C is a cause of E if it increases the chances of E occurring [Mellor, by Tooley]
28. God / C. Attitudes to God / 5. Atheism
5957 Absurd superstitions make people atheist, not disharmony in nature [Plutarch]