63 ideas
9786 | Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R] |
9784 | A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R] |
19023 | Slippery slope arguments are challenges to show where a non-arbitrary boundary lies [Vetter] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
19024 | A determinate property must be a unique instance of the determinable class [Vetter] |
9783 | While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes [Cartwright,R] |
17954 | Essence is a thing's necessities, but what about its possibilities (which may not be realised)? [Vetter] |
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] |
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] |
17953 | Real definition fits abstracta, but not individual concrete objects like Socrates [Vetter] |
13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
17952 | Modal accounts make essence less mysterious, by basing them on the clearer necessity [Vetter] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
17959 | Metaphysical necessity is even more deeply empirical than Kripke has argued [Vetter] |
17957 | Maybe possibility is constituted by potentiality [Vetter] |
17955 | Possible worlds allow us to talk about degrees of possibility [Vetter] |
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] |
19019 | Potentiality is the common genus of dispositions, abilities, and similar properties [Vetter] |
19022 | Water has a potentiality to acquire a potentiality to break (by freezing) [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] |
19027 | Potentiality logic is modal system T. Stronger systems collapse iterations, and necessitate potentials [Vetter] |
19025 | Potentialities may be too weak to count as 'dispositions' [Vetter] |
19031 | There are potentialities 'to ...', but possibilities are 'that ....'. [Vetter] |
17958 | The apparently metaphysically possible may only be epistemically possible [Vetter] |
17956 | Closeness of worlds should be determined by the intrinsic nature of relevant objects [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] |
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] |
13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
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] |
13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |
3031 | The greatest good is not the achievement of desire, but to desire what is proper [Menedemus, by Diog. Laertius] |
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] |
17993 | Laws are relations of kinds, quantities and qualities, supervening on the essences of a domain [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] |