60 ideas
| 17651 | Without words or other symbols, we have no world [Goodman] |
| 14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
| 14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
| 17652 | Truth is irrelevant if no statements are involved [Goodman] |
| 18851 | Pairing (with Extensionality) guarantees an infinity of sets, just from a single element [Rosen] |
| 15510 | Classes are a host of ethereal, platonic, pseudo entities [Goodman] |
| 9920 | Two objects can apparently make up quite distinct arrangements in sets [Goodman, by Burgess/Rosen] |
| 10657 | The counties of Utah, and the state, and its acres, are in no way different [Goodman] |
| 12394 | If the result is bad, we change the rule; if we like the rule, we reject the result [Goodman] |
| 14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
| 14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
| 17656 | Being primitive or prior always depends on a constructional system [Goodman] |
| 17661 | We don't recognise patterns - we invent them [Goodman] |
| 17659 | Reality is largely a matter of habit [Goodman] |
| 17657 | We build our world, and ignore anything that won't fit [Goodman] |
| 14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
| 17654 | A world can be full of variety or not, depending on how we sort it [Goodman] |
| 14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
| 14292 | Dispositions seem more ethereal than behaviour; a non-occult account of them would be nice [Goodman] |
| 7956 | If all and only red things were round things, we would need to specify the 'respect' of the resemblance [Goodman, by Macdonald,C] |
| 7957 | Without respects of resemblance, we would collect blue book, blue pen, red pen, red clock together [Goodman, by Macdonald,C] |
| 7952 | If we apply the same word to different things, it is only because we are willing to do so [Goodman, by Macdonald,C] |
| 8915 | How we refer to abstractions is much less clear than how we refer to other things [Rosen] |
| 18852 | A Meinongian principle might say that there is an object for any modest class of properties [Rosen] |
| 17653 | Things can only be judged the 'same' by citing some respect of sameness [Goodman] |
| 18850 | 'Metaphysical' modality is the one that makes the necessity or contingency of laws of nature interesting [Rosen] |
| 18849 | Metaphysical necessity is absolute and universal; metaphysical possibility is very tolerant [Rosen] |
| 18857 | Standard Metaphysical Necessity: P holds wherever the actual form of the world holds [Rosen] |
| 14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
| 18858 | Sets, universals and aggregates may be metaphysically necessary in one sense, but not another [Rosen] |
| 18856 | Non-Standard Metaphysical Necessity: when ¬P is incompatible with the nature of things [Rosen] |
| 18848 | Something may be necessary because of logic, but is that therefore a special sort of necessity? [Rosen] |
| 18855 | Combinatorial theories of possibility assume the principles of combination don't change across worlds [Rosen] |
| 12191 | Counterfactuals are true if logical or natural laws imply the consequence [Goodman, by McFetridge] |
| 14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
| 18853 | A proposition is 'correctly' conceivable if an ominiscient being could conceive it [Rosen] |
| 17660 | Discovery is often just finding a fit, like a jigsaw puzzle [Goodman] |
| 3061 | Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing [Anaxarchus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 17658 | Users of digital thermometers recognise no temperatures in the gaps [Goodman] |
| 17650 | We lack frames of reference to transform physics, biology and psychology into one another [Goodman] |
| 18749 | Goodman argued that the confirmation relation can never be formalised [Goodman, by Horsten/Pettigrew] |
| 17646 | Goodman showed that every sound inductive argument has an unsound one of the same form [Goodman, by Putnam] |
| 17655 | Grue and green won't be in the same world, as that would block induction entirely [Goodman] |
| 8917 | The Way of Abstraction used to say an abstraction is an idea that was formed by abstracting [Rosen] |
| 8912 | Nowadays abstractions are defined as non-spatial, causally inert things [Rosen] |
| 8913 | Chess may be abstract, but it has existed in specific space and time [Rosen] |
| 8914 | Sets are said to be abstract and non-spatial, but a set of books can be on a shelf [Rosen] |
| 8916 | Conflating abstractions with either sets or universals is a big claim, needing a big defence [Rosen] |
| 8918 | Functional terms can pick out abstractions by asserting an equivalence relation [Rosen] |
| 8919 | Abstraction by equivalence relationships might prove that a train is an abstract entity [Rosen] |
| 14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
| 20440 | Art is a referential activity, hence indefinable, but it has a set of symptoms [Goodman] |
| 20439 | Artistic symbols are judged by the fruitfulness of their classifications [Goodman, by Giovannelli] |
| 8113 | Art is like understanding a natural language, and needs a grasp of a symbol system [Goodman, by Gardner] |
| 20438 | A performance is only an instance of a work if there is not a single error [Goodman] |
| 20437 | A copy only becomes an 'instance' of an artwork if there is a system of notation [Goodman] |
| 17649 | If the world is one it has many aspects, and if there are many worlds they will collect into one [Goodman] |
| 4794 | We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them [Goodman] |
| 18854 | The MRL view says laws are the theorems of the simplest and strongest account of the world [Rosen] |
| 14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |