60 ideas
7623 | For ancient Greeks being wise was an ethical value [Putnam] |
19023 | Slippery slope arguments are challenges to show where a non-arbitrary boundary lies [Vetter] |
4714 | Putnam's epistemic notion of truth replaces the realism of correspondence with ontological relativism [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
7617 | Before Kant, all philosophers had a correspondence theory of truth [Putnam] |
4716 | The correspondence theory is wrong, because there is no one correspondence between reality and fact [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
7616 | Truth is an idealisation of rational acceptability [Putnam] |
19033 | Deontic modalities are 'ought-to-be', for sentences, and 'ought-to-do' for predicates [Vetter] |
19032 | S5 is undesirable, as it prevents necessities from having contingent grounds [Vetter] |
19036 | The Barcan formula endorses either merely possible things, or makes the unactualised impossible [Vetter] |
11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
14203 | Intension is not meaning, as 'cube' and 'square-faced polyhedron' are intensionally the same [Putnam] |
14207 | If cats equal cherries, model theory allows reinterpretation of the whole language preserving truth [Putnam] |
19034 | The world is either a whole made of its parts, or a container which contains its parts [Vetter] |
19015 | Grounding can be between objects ('relational'), or between sentences ('operational') [Vetter] |
19012 | The Humean supervenience base entirely excludes modality [Vetter] |
14214 | If we try to cure the abundance of theories with causal links, this is 'just more theory' [Putnam, by Lewis] |
14205 | The sentence 'A cat is on a mat' remains always true when 'cat' means cherry and 'mat' means tree [Putnam] |
7610 | A fact is simply what it is rational to accept [Putnam] |
19024 | A determinate property must be a unique instance of the determinable class [Vetter] |
7618 | Very nominalistic philosophers deny properties, though scientists accept them [Putnam] |
19021 | I have an 'iterated ability' to learn the violin - that is, the ability to acquire that ability [Vetter] |
19016 | We should think of dispositions as 'to do' something, not as 'to do something, if ....' [Vetter] |
19017 | Nomological dispositions (unlike ordinary ones) have to be continually realised [Vetter] |
19014 | How can spatiotemporal relations be understood in dispositional terms? [Vetter] |
19030 | Why does origin matter more than development; why are some features of origin more important? [Vetter] |
19040 | We take origin to be necessary because we see possibilities as branches from actuality [Vetter] |
19008 | The modern revival of necessity and possibility treated them as special cases of quantification [Vetter] |
19029 | It is necessary that p means that nothing has the potentiality for not-p [Vetter] |
4718 | If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
19028 | Possibilities are potentialities of actual things, but abstracted from their location [Vetter] |
19010 | All possibility is anchored in the potentiality of individual objects [Vetter] |
19013 | Possibility is a generalised abstraction from the potentiality of its bearer [Vetter] |
19022 | Water has a potentiality to acquire a potentiality to break (by freezing) [Vetter] |
19025 | Potentialities may be too weak to count as 'dispositions' [Vetter] |
23705 | A potentiality may not be a disposition, but dispositions are strong potentialities [Vetter, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
19009 | Potentiality does the explaining in metaphysics; we don't explain it away or reduce it [Vetter] |
19019 | Potentiality is the common genus of dispositions, abilities, and similar properties [Vetter] |
19027 | Potentiality logic is modal system T. Stronger systems collapse iterations, and necessitate potentials [Vetter] |
19031 | There are potentialities 'to ...', but possibilities are 'that ....'. [Vetter] |
19011 | If worlds are sets of propositions, how do we know which propositions are genuinely possible? [Vetter] |
19037 | Are there possible objects which nothing has ever had the potentiality to produce? [Vetter] |
7620 | Some kind of objective 'rightness' is a presupposition of thought itself [Putnam] |
14204 | Naïve operationalism would have meanings change every time the tests change [Putnam] |
19018 | Explanations by disposition are more stable and reliable than those be external circumstances [Vetter] |
19020 | Grounding is a kind of explanation, suited to metaphysics [Vetter] |
7611 | Rationality is one part of our conception of human flourishing [Putnam] |
14200 | 'Water' on Twin Earth doesn't refer to water, but no mental difference can account for this [Putnam] |
7612 | Reference is social not individual, because we defer to experts when referring to elm trees [Putnam] |
7613 | Concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences [Putnam] |
14202 | Neither individual nor community mental states fix reference [Putnam] |
14201 | Maybe the total mental state of a language community fixes the reference of a term [Putnam] |
11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
14206 | There are infinitely many interpretations of a sentence which can all seem to be 'correct' [Putnam] |
7624 | The word 'inconsiderate' nicely shows the blurring of facts and values [Putnam] |
19039 | The view that laws are grounded in substance plus external necessity doesn't suit dispositionalism [Vetter] |
19038 | Dispositional essentialism allows laws to be different, but only if the supporting properties differ [Vetter] |
19026 | If time is symmetrical between past and future, why do they look so different? [Vetter] |
19041 | Presentists explain cross-temporal relations using surrogate descriptions [Vetter] |