92 ideas
| 9786 | Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R] |
| 19306 | It is a principle of reasoning not to clutter your mind with trivialities [Harman] |
| 3099 | Inference is never a conscious process [Harman] |
| 19304 | The rules of reasoning are not the rules of logic [Harman] |
| 19307 | If there is a great cost to avoiding inconsistency, we learn to reason our way around it [Harman] |
| 19309 | Logic has little relevance to reasoning, except when logical conclusions are immediate [Harman] |
| 6950 | You can be rational with undetected or minor inconsistencies [Harman] |
| 3077 | Reasoning might be defined in terms of its functional role, which is to produce knowledge [Harman] |
| 19303 | Implication just accumulates conclusions, but inference may also revise our views [Harman] |
| 12596 | Reasoning aims at increasing explanatory coherence [Harman] |
| 12599 | Reason conservatively: stick to your beliefs, and prefer reasoning that preserves most of them [Harman] |
| 6954 | A coherent conceptual scheme contains best explanations of most of your beliefs [Harman] |
| 9784 | A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R] |
| 3092 | If you believe that some of your beliefs are false, then at least one of your beliefs IS false [Harman] |
| 13941 | Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R] |
| 13942 | Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R] |
| 12595 | We have a theory of logic (implication and inconsistency), but not of inference or reasoning [Harman] |
| 3093 | Any two states are logically linked, by being entailed by their conjunction [Harman] |
| 3098 | Deductive logic is the only logic there is [Harman] |
| 3094 | You don't have to accept the conclusion of a valid argument [Harman] |
| 3084 | Our underlying predicates represent words in the language, not universal concepts [Harman] |
| 3080 | Logical form is the part of a sentence structure which involves logical elements [Harman] |
| 3081 | A theory of truth in a language must involve a theory of logical form [Harman] |
| 12597 | I might accept P and Q as likely, but reject P-and-Q as unlikely [Harman] |
| 6007 | If you know your father, but don't recognise your father veiled, you know and don't know the same person [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
| 6006 | If you say truly that you are lying, you are lying [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
| 6008 | Removing one grain doesn't destroy a heap, so a heap can't be destroyed [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
| 12598 | Reality is the overlap of true complete theories [Harman] |
| 9783 | While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes [Cartwright,R] |
| 14961 | Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart [Cartwright,R] |
| 14962 | Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts [Cartwright,R] |
| 13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
| 13954 | The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R] |
| 13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
| 13953 | An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R] |
| 13945 | A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R] |
| 19305 | The Gambler's Fallacy (ten blacks, so red is due) overemphasises the early part of a sequence [Harman] |
| 19310 | High probability premises need not imply high probability conclusions [Harman] |
| 19308 | We strongly desire to believe what is true, even though logic does not require it [Harman] |
| 3100 | You have to reaffirm all your beliefs when you make a logical inference [Harman] |
| 3089 | Only lack of imagination makes us think that 'cats are animals' is analytic [Harman] |
| 3088 | Analyticity is postulated because we can't imagine some things being true, but we may just lack imagination [Harman] |
| 3101 | Memories are not just preserved, they are constantly reinferred [Harman] |
| 3074 | People's reasons for belief are rarely conscious [Harman] |
| 3097 | We don't distinguish between accepting, and accepting as evidence [Harman] |
| 6369 | In negative coherence theories, beliefs are prima facie justified, and don't need initial reasons [Harman, by Pollock/Cruz] |
| 19311 | In revision of belief, we need to keep track of justifications for foundations, but not for coherence [Harman] |
| 19312 | Coherence is intelligible connections, especially one element explaining another [Harman] |
| 3096 | Coherence avoids scepticism, because it doesn't rely on unprovable foundations [Harman] |
| 8800 | If you would deny a truth if you know the full evidence, then knowledge has social aspects [Harman, by Sosa] |
| 6955 | Enumerative induction is inference to the best explanation [Harman] |
| 3095 | Induction is an attempt to increase the coherence of our explanations [Harman] |
| 6952 | Induction is 'defeasible', since additional information can invalidate it [Harman] |
| 6953 | All reasoning is inductive, and deduction only concerns implication [Harman] |
| 17060 | Best Explanation is the core notion of epistemology [Harman, by Smart] |
| 12602 | There is no natural border between inner and outer [Harman] |
| 12603 | We can only describe mental attitudes in relation to the external world [Harman] |
| 8130 | Qualities of experience are just representational aspects of experience ('Representationalism') [Harman, by Burge] |
| 12601 | The way things look is a relational matter, not an intrinsic matter [Harman] |
| 3073 | We see ourselves in the world as a map [Harman] |
| 3076 | Defining dispositions is circular [Harman] |
| 3075 | Could a cloud have a headache if its particles formed into the right pattern? [Harman] |
| 6951 | Ordinary rationality is conservative, starting from where your beliefs currently are [Harman] |
| 3086 | Are there any meanings apart from in a language? [Harman] |
| 12592 | Concepts in thought have content, but not meaning, which requires communication [Harman] |
| 13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
| 3078 | Speech acts, communication, representation and truth form a single theory [Harman] |
| 13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
| 12590 | Take meaning to be use in calculation with concepts, rather than in communication [Harman] |
| 12593 | The use theory attaches meanings to words, not to sentences [Harman] |
| 12588 | Meaning from use of thoughts, constructed from concepts, which have a role relating to reality [Harman] |
| 12589 | Some regard conceptual role semantics as an entirely internal matter [Harman] |
| 12600 | The content of thought is relations, between mental states, things in the world, and contexts [Harman] |
| 3090 | There is only similarity in meaning, never sameness in meaning [Harman] |
| 3082 | Ambiguity is when different underlying truth-conditional structures have the same surface form [Harman] |
| 3079 | Truth in a language is explained by how the structural elements of a sentence contribute to its truth conditions [Harman] |
| 3085 | Sentences are different from propositions, since two sentences can express one proposition [Harman] |
| 13944 | We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R] |
| 13947 | 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R] |
| 13943 | We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R] |
| 13946 | To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R] |
| 3087 | The analytic/synthetic distinction is a silly division of thought into encyclopaedia and dictionary [Harman] |
| 13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |
| 12594 | If one proposition negates the other, which is the negative one? [Harman] |
| 12591 | Mastery of a language requires thinking, and not just communication [Harman] |
| 3083 | Many predicates totally resist translation, so a universal underlying structure to languages is unlikely [Harman] |
| 5121 | Basing ethics on flourishing makes it consequentialist, as actions are judged by contributing to it [Harman] |
| 5122 | Maybe consequentialism is a critique of ordinary morality, rather than describing it [Harman] |
| 5120 | What counts as 'flourishing' must be relative to various sets of values [Harman] |
| 5123 | Maybe there is no such thing as character, and the virtues and vices said to accompany it [Harman] |
| 5124 | If a person's two acts of timidity have different explanations, they are not one character trait [Harman] |
| 5125 | Virtue ethics might involve judgements about the virtues of actions, rather than character [Harman] |