30 ideas
| 13939 | No possible evidence could decide the reality of numbers, so it is a pseudo-question [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: I cannot think of any possible evidence that would be regarded as relevant by both nominalists and realists about numbers, and would decide the controversy, or make one side more probable. Hence I regard the external questions as pseudo-questions. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 4) |
| 3123 | Science is in the business of carving nature at the joints [Segal] |
| Full Idea: Science is in the business of carving nature at the joints. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 5) |
| 3125 | Psychology studies the way rationality links desires and beliefs to causality [Segal] |
| Full Idea: A person's desires and beliefs tend to cause what they tend to rationalise. This coordination of causality and rationalisation lies at the heart of psychology. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 5.3) |
| 13936 | Questions about numbers are answered by analysis, and are analytic, and hence logically true [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: For the internal question like 'is there a prime number greater than a hundred?' the answers are found by logical analysis based on the rules for the new expressions. The answers here are analytic, i.e., logically true. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) |
| 8748 | Logical positivists incorporated geometry into logicism, saying axioms are just definitions [Carnap, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: The logical positivists brought geometry into the fold of logicism. The axioms of, say, Euclidean geometry are simply definitions of primitive terms like 'point' and 'line'. | |
| From: report of Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950]) by Stewart Shapiro - Thinking About Mathematics 5.3 | |
| A reaction: If the concept of 'line' is actually created by its definition, then we need to know exactly what (say) 'shortest' means. If we are merely describing a line, then our definition can be 'impredicative', using other accepted concepts. |
| 8960 | Internal questions about abstractions are trivial, and external ones deeply problematic [Carnap, by Szabó] |
| Full Idea: Carnap's verdict is that questions regarding the existence of abstracta tend to be trivial when taken as internal and deeply problematic when taken as external. | |
| From: report of Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950]) by Zoltán Gendler Szabó - Nominalism 6 | |
| A reaction: If the internal aspect of the problem is 'trivial', this would put Carnap in league with fictionalists, who are only committed to entities while playing the current game. What is the status of the theory? Carnap wanted flowers to bloom. |
| 13933 | Existence questions are 'internal' (within a framework) or 'external' (concerning the whole framework) [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: We distinguish two kinds of existence questions: first, entities of a new kind within the framework; we call them 'internal questions'. Second, 'external questions', concerning the existence or reality of the system of entities as a whole. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) | |
| A reaction: This nicely disposes of many ontological difficulties, but at the price of labelling most external questions as meaningless, so that the internal answers have very little commitment, and the external (big) questions are now banned. Not for me. |
| 13934 | To be 'real' is to be an element of a system, so we cannot ask reality questions about the system itself [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) |
| 13938 | A linguistic framework involves commitment to entities, so only commitment to the framework is in question [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: If someone accepts a framework for a kind of entities, then he must admit the entities as possible designata. Thus the question of the admissibility of entities is reduced to the question of the acceptability of the linguistic framework for the entities. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 4) | |
| A reaction: Despite the many differences of opinion between Quine and Carnap, this appears to be a straight endorsement by Carnap of the Quinean conception of ontological commitment. |
| 13935 | We only accept 'things' within a language with formation, testing and acceptance rules [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: To accept the thing world means nothing more than to accept a certain form of language, in other words, to accept rules for forming statements and for testing, accepting, or rejecting them. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 2) | |
| A reaction: If you derive your metaphysics from your language, then objects are linguistic conventions. But why do we accept conventions about objects? |
| 3105 | Is 'Hesperus = Phosphorus' metaphysically necessary, but not logically or epistemologically necessary? [Segal] |
| Full Idea: It is metaphysically necessary that Hesperus is Phosphorus, but not logically necessary, since logical deduction could not reveal its truth, and it is not epistemologically necessary, as the ancient Greeks didn't know the identity. (Natural necessity?) | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 1.6) |
| 3106 | If claims of metaphysical necessity are based on conceivability, we should be cautious [Segal] |
| Full Idea: Since conceivability is the chief method of assessing the claims of metaphysical necessity, I think such claims are incautious. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 1.6) |
| 13932 | Empiricists tend to reject abstract entities, and to feel sympathy with nominalism [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: Empiricists are in general rather suspicious with respect to any kind of abstract entities like properties, classes, relations, numbers, propositions etc. They usually feel more sympathy with nominalists than with realists (in the medieval sense). | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 1) | |
| A reaction: The obvious reason is that you can't have sense experiences of abstract entities. I like the question 'what are they made of?' rather than the question 'how can I experience them?'. |
| 13937 | New linguistic claims about entities are not true or false, but just expedient, fruitful or successful [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: The acceptance of new linguistic forms about entities cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 3) | |
| A reaction: The obvious problem seems to be that a complete pack of lies might be successful for a very long time, if it plugged a critical hole in a major theory. Is success judged financially? How do we judge success without mentioning truth? |
| 13940 | All linguistic forms in science are merely judged by their efficiency as instruments [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: The acceptance or rejection of abstract (or any other) linguistic forms in any branch of science will finally be decided by their efficiency as instruments. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology [1950], 5) |
| 3113 | The success and virtue of an explanation do not guarantee its truth [Segal] |
| Full Idea: The success and virtue of an explanation do not guarantee its truth. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 2.2) |
| 3112 | Folk psychology is ridiculously dualist in its assumptions [Segal] |
| Full Idea: Commonsense psychology is a powerful explanatory theory, and largely correct, but it seems to be profoundly dualist, and treats minds as immaterial spirits which can transmigrate and exist disembodied. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: Fans of folk psychology tend to focus on central normal experience, but folk psychology also seems to range from quirky to barking mad. A 'premonition' is a widely accepted mental event. |
| 3108 | If 'water' has narrow content, it refers to both H2O and XYZ [Segal] |
| Full Idea: My view is that the concepts of both the Earth person and the Twin Earth person refer to BOTH forms of diamonds or water (H2O and XYZ). | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: Fair enough, though that seems to imply that my current concepts may actually refer to all sorts of items of which I am currently unaware. But that may be so. |
| 3110 | Humans are made of H2O, so 'twins' aren't actually feasible [Segal] |
| Full Idea: Humans are largely made of H2O, so there could be no twin on Twin Earth, and (as Kuhn noted) nothing with a significantly different structure from H2O could be macroscopically very like water (but topaz and citrine will do). | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: A small point, but one that appeals to essentialists like me (see under Natural Theory/Laws of Nature). We can't learn much metaphysics from impossible examples. |
| 3124 | Externalists can't assume old words refer to modern natural kinds [Segal] |
| Full Idea: The question of what a pre-scientific term extends over is extremely difficult for a Putnam-style externalist to answer. …There seems no good reason to assume that they extend over natural kinds ('whale', 'cat', 'water'). | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: The assumption seems to be that they used to extend over descriptions, and now they extend over essences, or expert references. This can't be right. They have never changed, but now contain fewer errors. |
| 3111 | Externalism can't explain concepts that have no reference [Segal] |
| Full Idea: Empty terms and concepts provide the largest problem for the externalist thesis of the world dependence of concepts. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: A speculative concept could then become a reality (e.g. an invention). The solution seems to be to say that there is an internal and an external component to most concepts. |
| 3109 | If content is external, so are beliefs and desires [Segal] |
| Full Idea: If we accept Putnam's externalist conclusion about the meaning of a word, it is a short step to a similar conclusion about the contents of the twins' beliefs, desires and so on. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the key step which has launched a whole new externalist view of the nature of the mind. It is one thing to say that I don't quite know what my words mean, another that I don't know my own beliefs. |
| 3104 | Must we relate to some diamonds to understand them? [Segal] |
| Full Idea: Is a relationship with diamonds necessary for having a concept of diamonds? | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: Probably not, given that I have a concept of kryptonite, and that I can invent my own concepts. Suppose I was brought up to believe that diamonds are a myth? |
| 3116 | Maybe experts fix content, not ordinary users [Segal] |
| Full Idea: Putnam and Burge claim that there could be two words that a misinformed subject uses to express different concepts, but that express just one concept of the experts. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: This pushes the concept outside the mind of the user, which leaves an ontological problem of what concepts are made of, how you individuate them, and where they are located. |
| 3117 | Concepts can survive a big change in extension [Segal] |
| Full Idea: We need to think of concepts as organic entities that can persist through changes of extension. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: This would be 'organic' in the sense of modifying and growing. This is exactly right, and the interesting problem becomes the extreme cases, where an individual stretches a concept a long way. |
| 3103 | Maybe content involves relations to a language community [Segal] |
| Full Idea: It has been argued (e.g. by Tyler Burge) that certain relations to other language users are determinants of content. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: Burge's idea (with Wittgenstein behind him) strikes me as plausible (more plausible than water and elms determining the content). Our concepts actually shift during conversations. |
| 3121 | If content is narrow, my perfect twin shares my concepts [Segal] |
| Full Idea: To say that contents of my belief are narrow is to say that they are intrinsic to me, hence that any perfect twin of mine would have beliefs with the same contents. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 5) | |
| A reaction: I personally find this more congenial than externalism. If my twin and I studied chemistry, we would reach identical conclusions about water, as long as we remained perfect twins. |
| 3118 | If thoughts ARE causal, we can't explain how they cause things [Segal] |
| Full Idea: If we identify a psychological property with its causal role then we lose the obvious explanation of why the event has the causal role that it has. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: This pinpoints very nicely one of the biggest errors in modern philosophy. There are good naturalistic reasons to reduce everything to causal role, but there is a deeper layer. Essences! |
| 3119 | Even 'mass' cannot be defined in causal terms [Segal] |
| Full Idea: We can't define mass in terms of its causal powers because massive objects do different things in different physical systems. …What an object (or concept) with a given property does depends on what it interacts with. | |
| From: Gabriel M.A. Segal (A Slim Book about Narrow Content [2000], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: This leaves an epistemological problem, that we believe in mass, but can only get at it within a particular gravitational or inertial system. Don't give up on ontology at this point. |
| 468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
| Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
| From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |