110 ideas
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |
| 6123 | Empirical investigation can't discover if holes exist, or if two things share a colour [Merricks] |
| 22353 | One view says objectivity is making a successful claim which captures the facts [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 22356 | An absolute scientific picture of reality must not involve sense experience, which is perspectival [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 22359 | Topic and application involve values, but can evidence and theory choice avoid them? [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 22360 | The Value-Free Ideal in science avoids contextual values, but embraces epistemic values [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 22362 | Value-free science needs impartial evaluation, theories asserting facts, and right motivation [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 22364 | Thermometers depend on the substance used, and none of them are perfect [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 19215 | Arguers often turn the opponent's modus ponens into their own modus tollens [Merricks] |
| 14415 | A ground must be about its truth, and not just necessitate it [Merricks] |
| 14408 | Truthmaker needs truths to be 'about' something, and that is often unclear [Merricks] |
| 14395 | If a ball changes from red to white, Truthmaker says some thing must make the change true [Merricks] |
| 14398 | Truthmaker says if an entity is removed, some nonexistence truthmaker must replace it [Merricks] |
| 14403 | If Truthmaker says each truth is made by the existence of something, the theory had de re modality at is core [Merricks] |
| 14397 | Truthmaker demands not just a predication, but an existing state of affairs with essential ingredients [Merricks] |
| 14396 | If 'truth supervenes on being', worlds with the same entities, properties and relations have the same truths [Merricks] |
| 14400 | If truth supervenes on being, that won't explain why truth depends on being [Merricks] |
| 14394 | It is implausible that claims about non-existence are about existing things [Merricks] |
| 14390 | Truthmaker isn't the correspondence theory, because it offers no analysis of truth [Merricks] |
| 14412 | Speculations about non-existent things are not about existent things, so Truthmaker is false [Merricks] |
| 14414 | I am a truthmaker for 'that a human exists', but is it about me? [Merricks] |
| 14418 | Being true is not a relation, it is a primitive monadic property [Merricks] |
| 14391 | If the correspondence theory is right, then necessary truths must correspond to something [Merricks] |
| 19205 | 'Snow is white' only contingently expresses the proposition that snow is white [Merricks] |
| 14419 | Deflationism just says there is no property of being truth [Merricks] |
| 19209 | Simple Quantified Modal Logc doesn't work, because the Converse Barcan is a theorem [Merricks] |
| 19208 | The Converse Barcan implies 'everything exists necessarily' is a consequence of 'necessarily, everything exists' [Merricks] |
| 19207 | Sentence logic maps truth values; predicate logic maps objects and sets [Merricks] |
| 14393 | The totality state is the most plausible truthmaker for negative existential truths [Merricks] |
| 6143 | Prolonged events don't seem to endure or exist at any particular time [Merricks] |
| 6135 | A crumbling statue can't become vague, because vagueness is incoherent [Merricks] |
| 14413 | Some properties seem to be primitive, but others can be analysed [Merricks] |
| 6145 | Intrinsic properties are those an object still has even if only that object exists [Merricks] |
| 14416 | An object can have a disposition when the revelant conditional is false [Merricks] |
| 6124 | I say that most of the objects of folk ontology do not exist [Merricks] |
| 6134 | Is swimming pool water an object, composed of its mass or parts? [Merricks] |
| 14392 | Fregeans say 'hobbits do not exist' is just 'being a hobbit' is not exemplified [Merricks] |
| 6125 | We can eliminate objects without a commitment to simples [Merricks] |
| 14229 | Merricks agrees that there are no composite objects, but offers a different semantics [Merricks, by Liggins] |
| 6142 | The 'folk' way of carving up the world is not intrinsically better than quite arbitrary ways [Merricks] |
| 14472 | If atoms 'arranged baseballwise' break a window, that analytically entails that a baseball did it [Merricks, by Thomasson] |
| 14469 | Overdetermination: the atoms do all the causing, so the baseball causes no breakage [Merricks] |
| 6137 | Clay does not 'constitute' a statue, as they have different persistence conditions (flaking, squashing) [Merricks] |
| 6127 | 'Unrestricted composition' says any two things can make up a third thing [Merricks] |
| 6131 | Composition as identity is false, as identity is never between a single thing and many things [Merricks] |
| 6132 | Composition as identity is false, as it implies that things never change their parts [Merricks] |
| 6141 | There is no visible difference between statues, and atoms arranged statuewise [Merricks] |
| 6130 | 'Composition' says things are their parts; 'constitution' says a whole substance is an object [Merricks] |
| 6138 | It seems wrong that constitution entails that two objects are wholly co-located [Merricks] |
| 6128 | Objects decompose (it seems) into non-overlapping parts that fill its whole region [Merricks] |
| 14410 | You believe you existed last year, but your segment doesn't, so they have different beliefs [Merricks] |
| 19214 | In twinning, one person has the same origin as another person [Merricks] |
| 6136 | Eliminativism about objects gives the best understanding of the Sorites paradox [Merricks] |
| 14417 | Counterfactuals aren't about actuality, so they lack truthmakers or a supervenience base [Merricks] |
| 6133 | If my counterpart is happy, that is irrelevant to whether I 'could' have been happy [Merricks] |
| 14402 | If 'Fido is possibly black' depends on Fido's counterparts, then it has no actual truthmaker [Merricks] |
| 6150 | The 'warrant' for a belief is what turns a true belief into knowledge [Merricks] |
| 22357 | The 'experimenter's regress' says success needs reliability, which is only tested by success [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 22365 | The Bayesian approach is explicitly subjective about probabilities [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 6144 | You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks] |
| 6140 | Maybe the word 'I' can only refer to persons [Merricks] |
| 6149 | Free will and determinism are incompatible, since determinism destroys human choice [Merricks] |
| 6148 | Human organisms can exercise downward causation [Merricks] |
| 6146 | Before Creation it is assumed that God still had many many mental properties [Merricks] |
| 6147 | The hypothesis of solipsism doesn't seem to be made incoherent by the nature of mental properties [Merricks] |
| 19217 | I don't accept that if a proposition is directly about an entity, it has a relation to the entity [Merricks] |
| 19203 | A sentence's truth conditions depend on context [Merricks] |
| 19200 | Propositions are standardly treated as possible worlds, or as structured [Merricks] |
| 19206 | 'Cicero is an orator' represents the same situation as 'Tully is an orator', so they are one proposition [Merricks] |
| 19202 | Propositions are necessary existents which essentially (but inexplicably) represent things [Merricks] |
| 19204 | True propositions existed prior to their being thought, and might never be thought [Merricks] |
| 19210 | The standard view of propositions says they never change their truth-value [Merricks] |
| 19201 | Propositions can be 'about' an entity, but that doesn't make the entity a constituent of it [Merricks] |
| 19211 | Early Russell says a proposition is identical with its truthmaking state of affairs [Merricks] |
| 19212 | Unity of the proposition questions: what unites them? can the same constituents make different ones? [Merricks] |
| 19213 | We want to explain not just what unites the constituents, but what unites them into a proposition [Merricks] |
| 20692 | Money does produce happiness, but only up to a point [Harari] |
| 20663 | If a group is bound by gossip, the natural size is 150 people [Harari] |
| 20677 | Since 1500 human population has increased fourteenfold, and consumption far more [Harari] |
| 20688 | People 300m tons; domesticated animals 700m tons; larger wild animals 100m tons [Harari] |
| 20674 | The Nazi aim was to encourage progressive evolution, and avoid degeneration [Harari] |
| 20679 | We stabilise societies with dogmas, either of dubious science, or of non-scientific values [Harari] |
| 20690 | The state fostered individualism, to break the power of family and community [Harari] |
| 20689 | In 1750 losing your family and community meant death [Harari] |
| 20681 | The sacred command of capitalism is that profits must be used to increase production [Harari] |
| 20682 | The main rule of capitalism is that all other goods depend on economic growth [Harari] |
| 20683 | The progress of capitalism depends entirely on the new discoveries and gadgets of science [Harari] |
| 20687 | In capitalism the rich invest, and the rest of us go shopping [Harari] |
| 20685 | No market is free of political bias, and markets need protection of their freedoms [Harari] |
| 20693 | Freedom may work against us, as individuals can choose to leave, and make fewer commitments [Harari] |
| 20691 | Real peace is the implausibility of war (and not just its absence) [Harari] |
| 20684 | Financing is increasingly through credit rather than taxes; people prefer investing to taxation [Harari] |
| 20675 | The more you know about history, the harder it becomes to explain [Harari] |
| 20676 | History teaches us that the present was not inevitable, and shows us the possibilities [Harari] |
| 17960 | Eternalism says all times are equally real, and future and past objects and properties are real [Merricks] |
| 17961 | Growing block has a subjective present and a growing edge - but these could come apart [Merricks, by PG] |
| 14411 | Maybe only presentism allows change, by now having a property, and then lacking it [Merricks] |
| 14407 | Presentist should deny there is a present time, and just say that things 'exist' [Merricks] |
| 14406 | Presentists say that things have existed and will exist, not that they are instantaneous [Merricks] |
| 14405 | How can a presentist explain an object's having existed? [Merricks] |
| 20671 | In order to explain both order and evil, a single evil creator is best, but no one favours that [Harari] |
| 20664 | Animism is belief that every part of nature is aware and feeling, and can communicate [Harari] |
| 20666 | Most polytheist recognise one supreme power or law, behind the various gods [Harari] |
| 20667 | Polytheism is open-minded, and rarely persecutes opponents [Harari] |
| 20665 | Mythologies are usual contracts with the gods, exchanging devotion for control of nature [Harari] |
| 20669 | Dualist religions see everything as a battleground of good and evil forces [Harari] |
| 20670 | Dualist religions say the cosmos is a battleground, so can’t explain its order [Harari] |
| 20673 | Manichaeans and Gnostics: good made spirit, evil made flesh [Harari] |
| 20668 | Monotheism appeared in Egypt in 1350 BCE, when the god Aten was declared supreme [Harari] |