18 ideas
| 14782 | Philosophy is an experimental science, resting on common experience [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy, although it uses no microscopes or other apparatus of special observation, is really an experimental science, resting on that experience which is common to us all. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898], I) | |
| A reaction: The 'experimental' either implies that thought-experiments are central to the subject, or that philosophers are discussing the findings of scientists, but at a high level of theory and abstraction. Peirce probably means the latter. I can't disagree. |
| 14787 | Self-contradiction doesn't reveal impossibility; it is inductive impossibility which reveals self-contradiction [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: It is an anacoluthon to say that a proposition is impossible because it is self-contradictory. It rather is thought so to appear self-contradictory because the ideal induction has shown it to be impossible. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898], III) |
| 14783 | Logic, unlike mathematics, is not hypothetical; it asserts categorical ends from hypothetical means [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions. Logic, on the contrary, is categorical in its assertions. True, it is a normative science, and not a mere discovery of what really is. It discovers ends from means. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898], II) |
| 14788 | Mathematics is close to logic, but is even more abstract [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The whole of the theory of numbers belongs to logic; or rather, it would do so, were it not, as pure mathematics, pre-logical, that is, even more abstract than logic. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898], IV) | |
| A reaction: Peirce seems to flirt with logicism, but rejects in favour of some subtler relationship. I just don't believe that numbers are purely logical entities. |
| 14786 | Some logical possibility concerns single propositions, but there is also compatibility between propositions [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Many say everything is logically possible which involves no contradiction. In this sense two contradictory propositions may be severally possible. In the substantive sense, the contradictory of a possible proposition is impossible (if we were omniscient). | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898], III) |
| 14789 | Experience is indeed our only source of knowledge, provided we include inner experience [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: If Mill says that experience is the only source of any kind of knowledge, I grant it at once, provided only that by experience he means personal history, life. But if he wants me to admit that inner experience is nothing, he asks what cannot be granted. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898]) | |
| A reaction: Notice from Idea 14785 that Peirce has ideas in mind, and not just inner experiences like hunger. Empiricism certainly begins to look more plausible if we expand the notion of experience. It must include what we learned from prior experience. |
| 14785 | The world is one of experience, but experiences are always located among our ideas [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The real world is the world of sensible experience, and it is part of the process of sensible experience to locate its facts in the world of ideas. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898], III) | |
| A reaction: This is the neatest demolition of the sharp dividing line between empiricism and rationalism that I have ever encountered. |
| 2590 | Dispositions need mental terms to define them [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The chief difficulty with the behaviour-disposition account is the virtual impossibility of specifying a disposition except as a 'disposition of x to behave as though x were in pain'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.57) | |
| A reaction: This has become the best-known objection to behaviourism - that you can't specify a piece of behaviour clearly unless you mention the mental state which it is expressing. The defence is to go on endlessly mentioning further behaviour. |
| 2591 | Total paralysis would mean that there were mental states but no behaviour at all [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Two animals with all motor nerves cut will have the same actual and potential behaviour (i.e. none), but if only one has uncut pain fibres, it will feel pain where the other won't. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.57) | |
| A reaction: This is a splendidly literal and practical argument against behaviourism - if you prevent all the behaviour, you don't thereby prevent the experience. Clearly we have to say something about what is inside the 'black box' of the mind. |
| 2588 | Is pain a functional state of a complete organism? [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I propose the hypothesis that pain, or the state of being in pain, is a functional state of a whole organism. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.54) | |
| A reaction: This sounds wrong right from the start. Pain hurts. The fact that it leads to avoidance behaviour etc. seems much more like a by-product of pain than its essence. |
| 2589 | Functionalism is compatible with dualism, as pure mind could perform the functions [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The functional-state hypothesis is not incompatible with dualism, as a system consisting of a body and a soul could meet the required conditions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.55) | |
| A reaction: He doesn't really believe this, of course. This claim led to all the weak objections to functionalism involving silly implementations of minds. A brain is the only plausible way to implement our mental functions. |
| 2592 | Functional states correlate with AND explain pain behaviour [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The presence of a certain functional state is not merely 'correlated with' but actually explains the pain behaviour on the part of the organism. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.58) | |
| A reaction: Does it offer any further explanation beyond saying that it is the brain state that causes the behaviour? The pain is just a link between damage and avoidance. I wish that is all that pain was. |
| 2587 | Temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy, but they are two different concepts [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The concept of temperature is not the same as the concept of mean molecular kinetic energy. But temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968], p.52) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard analogy for mind-brain identity, and it seems fair enough to me. The mind is the activity of the brain. It is rather unhelpful to think of weather in terms of chemistry, but it is actions of chemicals. |
| 6376 | Neuroscience does not support multiple realisability, and tends to support identity [Polger on Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Putnam was too quick to assert neuroscientific support for multiple realizability; current evidence does not reveal it, and there is some reason to think the enterprises of neuroscience are premised on the hypothesis of brain-state identity. | |
| From: comment on Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968]) by Thomas W. Polger - Natural Minds Ch.1.4 | |
| A reaction: I have always been suspicious of the glib claim that mental states were multiply realisable. I see no reason to think that octupi see colours as we do, or experience fear as we do, even though their behaviour has to be similar, for survival. |
| 2330 | If humans and molluscs both feel pain, it can't be a single biological state [Putnam, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Mental states have vastly diverse physical/biological realizations in different species and structures (e.g. pain in humans and in molluscs), so no mental state can be identified with any single physical/biological state. | |
| From: report of Hilary Putnam (The Nature of Mental States [1968]) by Jaegwon Kim - Mind in a Physical World n p.120 | |
| A reaction: But maybe mollusc and human nervous systems ARE the same in the respects that matter. We don't know enough about pain to deny that possibility. |
| 14784 | Ethics is the science of aims [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Ethics is the science of aims. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Nature of Mathematics [1898], II) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing slogan. He is discussing the aims of logic. I think what he means is that ethics is the science of value. 'Science' may be optimistic, but I would sort of agree with his basic idea. |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |