34 ideas
| 4748 | Anselm of Canterbury identified truth with God [Anselm, by Engel] |
| Full Idea: Anselm of Canterbury identified truth with God. | |
| From: report of Anselm (De Veritate (On Truth) [1095]) by Pascal Engel - Truth §1.6 | |
| A reaction: An interesting claim, perhaps, depending on what it means. God decrees truth, God knows all truth, God makes truth possible, God connects us to the world, God is the world…? |
| 10405 | In the iterative conception of sets, they form a natural hierarchy [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: In the iterative conception of sets, they form a natural hierarchy. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.1) |
| 10407 | Logical Form explains differing logical behaviour of similar sentences [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: 'Logical Form' is a technical notion motivated by the observation that sentences with a similar surface structure may exhibit quite different logical behaviour. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: [Swoyer goes on to give some nice examples] The tricky question is whether each sentence has ONE logical form. Pragmatics warns us of the dangers. One needs to check numerous inferences from a given sentences, not just one. |
| 14592 | Some abstract things have a beginning and end, so may exist in time (though not space) [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Many things that seem to be abstract also seem to have a beginning (and ending) in time, such as a language like Urdu. It may be tempting to say that such things exist in time but not in space, but where exactly? | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Abstract Entities [2008], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: A few distinctions might be needed. Urdu-speaking is an ability of certain people. We abstract from that their 'language'. There is nothing there apart from that ability. It has no more abstract existence than the 'weather'. |
| 10421 | Supervenience is nowadays seen as between properties, rather than linguistic [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is sometimes taken to be a relationship between two fragments of language, but it is increasingly taken to be a relationship between pairs of families of properties. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.17) | |
| A reaction: If supervenience is a feature of the world, rather than of our descriptions, then it cries out for explanation, just as any other regularities do. Personally I would have thought the best explanation of the supervenience of mind and body was obvious. |
| 14594 | Ontologists seek existence and identity conditions, and modal and epistemic status for a thing [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Four things philosophers often want to know about a given sort of entity are: its existence conditions, its identity conditions, its modal status, and its epistemic status. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Abstract Entities [2008], 3) | |
| A reaction: I prefer 'modal profile' to 'modal status'. The 'existence conditions' sound rather epistemic. Why does the existence of anything require 'conditions' other than just existing? I suspect identity is irrelevant if humans aren't around. |
| 10410 | Anti-realists can't explain different methods to measure distance [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Anti-realists theories of measurement (like operationalism) cannot explain how we can use different methods to measure the same thing (e.g. lengths and distances in cosmology, geology, histology and atomic physics). | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Swoyer says that the explanation is that measurement aims at objective properties, the same in each of these areas. Quite good. |
| 10399 | If a property such as self-identity can only be in one thing, it can't be a universal [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Some properties may not be universals, if they can only be exemplified by one thing, such as 'being identical with Socrates'. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000]) | |
| A reaction: I think it is absurd to think that self-identity is an intrinsic 'property', possessed by everything. That a=a is a convenience for logicians, meaning nothing in the world. And it is relational. The sharing of properties is indeed what needs explanation. |
| 10416 | Can properties have parts? [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Can properties have parts? | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: If powers are more fundamental than properties, with the latter often being complexes of the underlying powers, then yes they do. But powers don't. Presumably whatever is fundamental shouldn't have parts. Why? |
| 14595 | Can properties exemplify other properties? [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Can properties themselves exemplify properties? | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Abstract Entities [2008], 3) | |
| A reaction: Since I espouse a rather strict causal view of true properties, and lump the rest into the category of 'predicates', I am inclined to answer 'no' to this. Most people would disagree. 'Bright red' seems to be an example. But it isn't. |
| 10417 | There are only first-order properties ('red'), and none of higher-order ('coloured') [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: 'Elementarism' is the view that there are first-order properties, but that there are no properties of any higher-order. There are first-order properties like various shades of red, but there is no higher-order property, like 'being a colour'. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Bergmann 1968] Interesting. Presumably the programme is naturalistic (and hence congenial to me), and generalisations about properties are conceptual, while the properties themselves are natural. |
| 10413 | The best-known candidate for an identity condition for properties is necessary coextensiveness [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: The best-known candidate for an identity condition for properties is necessary coextensiveness. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 6) | |
| A reaction: The necessity (in all possible worlds) covers renates and cordates. It is hard to see how one could assert the necessity without some deeper explanation. What makes us deny that actually coextensive renates and cordates have different properties? |
| 10402 | Various attempts are made to evade universals being wholly present in different places [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: The worry that a single thing could be wholly present in widely separated locations has led to trope theory, to the claim that properties are not located in their instances, or to the view that this treats universals as if they were individuals. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: I find it dispiriting to come to philosophy in the late twentieth century and have to inherit such a ridiculous view as that there are things that are 'wholly present' in many places. |
| 10400 | Conceptualism says words like 'honesty' refer to concepts, not to properties [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Conceptualists urge that words like 'honesty', which might seem to refer to properties, really refer to concepts. A few contemporary philosophers have defended conceptualism, and recent empirical work bears on it, but the view is no longer common. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: ..and that's all Swoyer says about this very interesting view! He only cites Cocchiarella 1986 Ch.3. The view leaves a lot of work to be done in explaining how nature is, and how our concepts connect to it, and arise in response to it. |
| 10403 | If properties are abstract objects, then their being abstract exemplifies being abstract [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: If properties are abstract objects, then the property of being abstract should itself exemplify the property of being abstract. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: Swoyer links this observation with Plato's views on self-predication, and his Third Man Argument (which I bet originated with Aristotle in the Academy!). Do we have a regress of objects, as well as a regress of properties? |
| 14593 | Quantum field theory suggests that there are, fundamentally, no individual things [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Quantum field theory strongly suggests that there are (at the fundamental level) no individual, particular things. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Abstract Entities [2008], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: When people introduce quantum theory into ontological discussions I reach for my shotgun, but it does rather look as if things turn to mush at the bottom level. |
| 10406 | One might hope to reduce possible worlds to properties [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: One might hope to reduce possible worlds to properties. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Zalta 1983 4.2, and Forrest 1986] I think we are dealing with nothing more than imagined possibilities, which are inferred from our understanding of the underlying 'powers' of the actual world (expressed as 'properties'). |
| 10404 | Extreme empiricists can hardly explain anything [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Extreme empiricists wind up unable to explain much of anything. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the major problem for empiricism, but I am not sure why inference to the best explanation should not be part of a sensible empirical approach. Thinking laws are just 'descriptions of regularities' illustrates the difficulty. |
| 10408 | Intensions are functions which map possible worlds to sets of things denoted by an expression [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Intensions are functions that assign a set to the expression at each possible world, ..so the semantic value of 'red' is the function that maps each possible world to the set of things in that world that are red. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: I am suddenly deeply alienated from this mathematical logicians' way of talking about what 'red' means! We need more psychology, not less. We call things red if we imagine them as looking red. Is imagination a taboo in analytical philosophy? |
| 10409 | Research suggests that concepts rely on typical examples [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Recent empirical work on concepts says that many concepts have graded membership, and stress the importance of phenomena like typicality, prototypes, and exemplars. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Rorsch 1978 as the start of this] I say the mind is a database, exactly corresponding to tables, fields etc. Prototypes sound good as the way we identify a given category. Universals are the 'typical' examples labelling areas (e.g. goat). |
| 10401 | The F and G of logic cover a huge range of natural language combinations [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: All sorts of combinations of copulas ('is') with verbs, adverbs, adjectives, determiners, common nouns, noun phrases and prepositional phrases go over into the familiar Fs and Gs of standard logical notation. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice warning of how misleading logic can be when trying to understand how we think about reality. Montague semantics is an attempt to tackle the problem. Numbers as adjectives are a clear symptom of the difficulties. |
| 10420 | Maybe a proposition is just a property with all its places filled [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: Some say we can think of a proposition as a limiting case of a property, as when the two-place property '___ loves ___' can become the zero-placed property, or proposition 'that Sam loves Darla'. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 7.6) | |
| A reaction: If you had a prior commitment to the idea that reality largely consists of bundles of properties, I suppose you might find this tempting. |
| 6005 | Animals are dangerous and nourishing, and can't form contracts of justice [Hermarchus, by Sedley] |
| Full Idea: Hermarchus said that animal killing is justified by considerations of human safety and nourishment and by animals' inability to form contractual relations of justice with us. | |
| From: report of Hermarchus (fragments/reports [c.270 BCE]) by David A. Sedley - Hermarchus | |
| A reaction: Could the last argument be used to justify torturing animals? Or could we eat a human who was too brain-damaged to form contracts? |
| 10412 | If laws are mere regularities, they give no grounds for future prediction [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: If laws were mere regularities, then the fact that observed Fs have been Gs would give us no reason to conclude that those Fs we haven't encountered will also be Gs. | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: I take this simple point to be very powerful. No amount of regularity gives grounds for asserting future patterns - one only has Humean habits. Causal mechanisms are what we are after. |
| 10411 | Two properties can have one power, and one property can have two powers [Swoyer] |
| Full Idea: If properties are identical when they confer the same capacities on their instances, different properties seem able to bestow the same powers (e.g. force), and one property can bestow different powers (attraction or repulsion). | |
| From: Chris Swoyer (Properties [2000], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: Interesting, but possibly a misunderstanding. Powers are basic, and properties are combinations of powers. A 'force' isn't a basic power, it is a consequence of various properties. Relational behaviours are also not basic powers, which are the source. |
| 21244 | Conceiving a greater being than God leads to absurdity [Anselm] |
| Full Idea: If some mind could think of something better than thou, the creature would rise above the Creator and judge its Creator; but this is altogether absurd. | |
| From: Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Ch 3) | |
| A reaction: An error, revealing a certain desperation. If a greafer being could be conceived than the being so far imagined as God (a necessarily existing being), that being would BE God, by his own argument (and not some arrogant 'creature'). |
| 21241 | Even the fool can hold 'a being than which none greater exists' in his understanding [Anselm] |
| Full Idea: Even the fool must be convinced that a being than which none greater can be thought exists at least in his understanding, since when he hears this he understands it, and whatever is understood is in the understanding. | |
| From: Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Ch 2) | |
| A reaction: Psalm 14.1: 'The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God'. But how does the fool interpret the words, if he has limited imagination? He might get no further than an attractive film star. He would need prompting to think of a spiritual being. |
| 21242 | If that than which a greater cannot be thought actually exists, that is greater than the mere idea [Anselm] |
| Full Idea: Clearly that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist in the understanding alone. For it it is actually in the understanding alone, it can be thought of as existing also in reality, and this is greater. | |
| From: Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Ch 2) | |
| A reaction: The suppressed premise is 'something actually existing is greater than the mere conception of it'. As it stands this is wrong. I can imagine a supreme evil. But see Idea 21243. |
| 1421 | A perfection must be independent and unlimited, and the necessary existence of Anselm's second proof gives this [Malcolm on Anselm] |
| Full Idea: Anselm's second proof works, because he sees that necessary existence (or the impossibility of non-existence) really is a perfection. This is because a perfection requires no dependence or limit or impediment. | |
| From: comment on Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Ch 3) by Norman Malcolm - Anselm's Argument Sect II | |
| A reaction: I have the usual problem, that it doesn't seem to follow that the perfect existence of something bestows a perfection. It may be necessary that 'for every large animal there exists a disease'. Satan may exist necessarily. |
| 21245 | The word 'God' can be denied, but understanding shows God must exist [Anselm] |
| Full Idea: We think of a thing when we say the world, and in another way when we think of the very thing itself. In the second sense God cannot be thought of as nonexistent. No one who understands can think God does not exist. | |
| From: Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Ch 4) | |
| A reaction: It seems open to the atheist to claim the exact opposite - that you can commit to God's existence if it is just a word, but understanding shows that God is impossible (perhaps because of contradictions). How to arbitrate? |
| 21246 | Guanilo says a supremely fertile island must exist, just because we can conceive it [Anselm] |
| Full Idea: Guanilo supposes that we imagine an island surpassing all lands in its fertility. We might then say that we cannot doubt that it truly exists is reality, because anyone can conceive it from a verbal description. | |
| From: Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Reply 3) | |
| A reaction: Guanilo was a very naughty monk, who must have had sleepless nights over this. One could further ask whether an island might have necessary existence. Anselm needs 'a being' to be a special category of thing. |
| 21247 | Nonexistence is impossible for the greatest thinkable thing, which has no beginning or end [Anselm] |
| Full Idea: If anyone does think of something a greater than which cannot be thought, then he thinks of something which cannot be thought of as nonexistent, ...for then it could be thought of as having a beginning and an end. And this is impossible. | |
| From: Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Reply 3) | |
| A reaction: A nice idea, but it has a flip side. If the atheist denies God's existence, then it follows that (because no beginning is possible for such a being) the existence of God is impossible. Anselm adds that contingent existents have parts (unlike God). |
| 21243 | An existing thing is even greater if its non-existence is inconceivable [Anselm] |
| Full Idea: Something can be thought of as existing, which cannot be thought of as not existing, and this is greater than that which cannot be thought of as not existing. | |
| From: Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Ch 3) | |
| A reaction: This is a necessary addition, to single out the concept of God as special. But you really must give reasons for saying God's non-existence is inconceivable. Atheists seem to manage. |
| 1420 | Anselm's first proof fails because existence isn't a real predicate, so it can't be a perfection [Malcolm on Anselm] |
| Full Idea: Anselm's first proof fails, because he treats existence as being a perfection, which it isn't, because that would make it a real predicate. | |
| From: comment on Anselm (Proslogion [1090], Ch 2) by Norman Malcolm - Anselm's Argument Sect I | |
| A reaction: Not everyone accepts Kant's claim that existence cannot be a predicate. They all seem to know what a perfection is. Can the Mona Lisa (an object) not be a perfection? Must it be broken down into perfect predicates? |