23 ideas
| 7454 | Gassendi is the first great empiricist philosopher [Hacking] |
| Full Idea: Gassendi is the first in the great line of empiricist philosophers that gradually came to dominate European thought. | |
| From: Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: Epicurus, of course, was clearly an empiricist. British readers should note that Gassendi was not British. |
| 13134 | We negate predicates but do not negate names [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: We negate predicates but do not negate names. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §88) | |
| A reaction: This is a point for anyone like Ramsey who wants to collapse the distinction between particulars and universals, or singular terms and their predicates. |
| 13124 | Categories can be ordered by both containment and generality [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: Categories are usually not assumed to be ordered by containment, but also be generality. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §02) | |
| A reaction: I much prefer generality, which is responsive to the full picture, whereas containment seems to appeal too much to the orderly and formalised mind. Containments overlap, so we can't dream of a perfectly neat system. |
| 13117 | How far down before we are too specialised to have a category? [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: How far down are we allowed to go before the categories become too special to qualify as ontological categories? | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question, because we can't deny a category to a set with only one member, otherwise the last surviving dodo would not have been a dodo. |
| 13116 | Maybe objects in the same category have the same criteria of identity [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: There is an idea that objects belonging to the same category have the same criteria of identity. This view was first explicitly endorsed by Frege (1884), and was later systematized by Dummett (1981). | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This approach is based on identity between equivalence classes. Westerhoff says it means, implausibly, that the resulting categories cannot share properties. |
| 13118 | Categories are base-sets which are used to construct states of affairs [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: My fundamental idea is that 'form-sets' are intersubstitutable constituents of states of affairs with the same form, and 'base-sets' are special form-sets which can be used to construct other form-sets. Ontological categories are the base-sets. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The spirit of this is, of course, to try to achieve the kind of rigour that is expected in contemporary professional philosophy, by aiming for some sort of axiom-system that is related to a well established precise discipline like set theory. Maybe. |
| 13125 | Categories are held to explain why some substitutions give falsehood, and others meaninglessness [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: It is usually assumed of ontological categories that they can explain why certain substitutions make a statement false ('prime' for 'odd'), while others make it meaningless ('sweet' for 'odd', of numbers). | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §05) | |
| A reaction: So there is a strong link between big ontological questions, and Ryle's famous identification of the 'category mistake'. The phenomenon of the category mistake is undeniable, and should make us sympathetic to the idea of categories. |
| 13126 | Categories systematize our intuitions about generality, substitutability, and identity [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: Systems of ontological categories are systematizations of our intuitions about generality, intersubstitutability, and identity. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §23) | |
| A reaction: I think we might be able to concede this without conceding the relativism about categories which Westerhoff espouses. I would claim that our 'intuitions' are pretty accurate about the joints of nature, and hence accurate about these criteria. |
| 13130 | Categories as generalities don't give a criterion for a low-level cut-off point [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: Categories in terms of generality, dependence and containment are unsatisfactory because of the 'cut-off point problem': they don't give an account of how far down the order we can go and be sure we are still dealing with categories. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §27) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why this should be a devastating objection to any theory. I have a very clear notion of a human being, but a very hazy notion of how far back towards its conception a human being extends. |
| 13131 | The aim is that everything should belong in some ontological category or other [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: It seems to be one of the central points of constructing systems of ontological categories that everything can be placed in some category or other. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §49) | |
| A reaction: After initial resistance to this, I suppose I have to give in. The phoenix (a unique mythological bird) is called a 'phoenix', though it might just be called 'John' (cf. God). If there were another phoenix, we would know how to categorise it. |
| 13123 | All systems have properties and relations, and most have individuals, abstracta, sets and events [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: Surveyed ontological systems show overlaps: properties and relations turn up in every system; individuals form part of five systems; abstracta, collections/sets and events are in four; facts are in two. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §02) | |
| A reaction: Westerhoff is a hero for doing such a useful survey. Of course, Quine challenges properties, and relations are commonly given a reductive analysis. Individuals can be challenged, and abstracta reduced. Sets are fictions. Events or facts? Etc. |
| 13115 | Ontological categories are like formal axioms, not unique and with necessary membership [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: I deny the absolutism of a unique system of ontological categories and the essentialist view of membership in ontological categories as necessary features. ...I regard ontological categories as similar to axioms of formalized theories. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The point is that modern axioms are not fundamental self-evident truths, but an economic set of basic statements from which some system can be derived. There may be no unique set of axioms for a formal system. |
| 13119 | Categories merely systematise, and are not intrinsic to objects [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: My conclusion is that categories are relativistic, used for systematization, and that it is not an intrinsic feature of an object to belong to a category, and that there is no fundamental distinction between individuals and properties. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] He calls his second conclusion 'anti-essentialist', but I think we can still get an account of (explanatory) essence while agreeing with his relativised view of categories. Wiggins might be his main opponent. |
| 13135 | A thing's ontological category depends on what else exists, so it is contingent [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: What ontological category a thing belongs to is not dependent on its inner nature, but dependent on what other things there are in the world, and this is a contingent matter. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §89) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at those, like Wiggins, who claim that category is essential to a thing, and there is no possible world in which that things could belong to another category. Sounds good, till you try to come up with examples. |
| 13129 | Essential kinds may be too specific to provide ontological categories [Westerhoff] |
| Full Idea: Essential kinds can be very specific, and arguably too specific for the purposes of ontological categories. | |
| From: Jan Westerhoff (Ontological Categories [2005], §27) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. There doesn't seem to be any precise guideline as to how specific an essential kind might be. In scientific essentialism, each of the isotopes of tin has a distinct essence, but why should they not be categories |
| 7447 | Probability was fully explained between 1654 and 1812 [Hacking] |
| Full Idea: There is hardly any history of probability to record before Pascal (1654), and the whole subject is very well understood after Laplace (1812). | |
| From: Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: An interesting little pointer on the question of whether the human race is close to exhausting all the available intellectual problems. What then? |
| 7448 | Probability is statistical (behaviour of chance devices) or epistemological (belief based on evidence) [Hacking] |
| Full Idea: Probability has two aspects: the degree of belief warranted by evidence, and the tendency displayed by some chance device to produce stable relative frequencies. These are the epistemological and statistical aspects of the subject. | |
| From: Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: The most basic distinction in the subject. Later (p.124) he suggests that the statistical form (known as 'aleatory' probability) is de re, and the other is de dicto. |
| 7449 | Epistemological probability based either on logical implications or coherent judgments [Hacking] |
| Full Idea: Epistemological probability is torn between Keynes etc saying it depends on the strength of logical implication, and Ramsey etc saying it is personal judgement which is subject to strong rules of internal coherence. | |
| From: Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 7449 for epistemological probability. My immediate intuition is that the Ramsey approach sounds much more plausible. In real life there are too many fine-grained particulars involved for straight implication to settle a probability. |
| 7450 | In the medieval view, only deduction counted as true evidence [Hacking] |
| Full Idea: In the medieval view, evidence short of deduction was not really evidence at all. | |
| From: Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Hacking says the modern concept of evidence comes with probability in the 17th century. That might make it one of the most important ideas ever thought of, allowing us to abandon certainties and live our lives in a more questioning way. |
| 7451 | Formerly evidence came from people; the new idea was that things provided evidence [Hacking] |
| Full Idea: In the medieval view, people provided the evidence of testimony and of authority. What was lacking was the seventeenth century idea of the evidence provided by things. | |
| From: Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: A most intriguing distinction, which seems to imply a huge shift in world-view. The culmination of this is Peirce's pragmatism, in Idea 6948, of which I strongly approve. |
| 7452 | An experiment is a test, or an adventure, or a diagnosis, or a dissection [Hacking, by PG] |
| Full Idea: An experiment is a test (if T, then E implies R, so try E, and if R follows, T seems right), an adventure (no theory, but try things), a diagnosis (reading the signs), or a dissection (taking apart). | |
| From: report of Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.4) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: A nice analysis. The Greeks did diagnosis, then the alchemists tried adventures, then Vesalius began dissections, then the followers of Bacon concentrated on the test, setting up controlled conditions. 'If you don't believe it, try it yourself'. |
| 7459 | Follow maths for necessary truths, and jurisprudence for contingent truths [Hacking] |
| Full Idea: Mathematics is the model for reasoning about necessary truths, but jurisprudence must be our model when we deliberate about contingencies. | |
| From: Ian Hacking (The Emergence of Probability [1975], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. Certainly huge thinking, especially since the Romans, has gone into the law, and creating rules of evidence. Maybe all philosophers should study law and mathematics? |
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |