23 ideas
| 21695 | The set scheme discredited by paradoxes is actually the most natural one [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Each proposed revision of set theory is unnatural, because the natural scheme is the unrestricted one that the antinomies discredit. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Ways of Paradox [1961], p.16) | |
| A reaction: You can either takes this free-far-all version of set theory, and gradually restrain it for each specific problem, or start from scratch and build up in safe steps. The latter is (I think) the 'iterated' approach. |
| 21693 | Russell's antinomy challenged the idea that any condition can produce a set [Quine] |
| Full Idea: In the case of Russell's antinomy, the tacit and trusted pattern of reasoning that is found wanting is this: for any condition you can formulate, there is a class whose members are the things meeting the condition. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Ways of Paradox [1961], p.11) | |
| A reaction: This is why Russell's Paradox is so important for set theory, which in turn makes it important for the foundations of mathematics. |
| 21691 | Antinomies contradict accepted ways of reasoning, and demand revisions [Quine] |
| Full Idea: An 'antinomy' produces a self-contradiction by accepted ways of reasoning. It establishes that some tacit and trusted pattern of reasoning must be made explicit and henceforward be avoided or revised. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Ways of Paradox [1961], p.05) | |
| A reaction: Quine treats antinomies as of much greater importance than mere paradoxes. It is often possible to give simple explanations of paradoxes, but antinomies go to the root of our belief system. This was presumably Kant's intended meaning. |
| 21690 | Whenever the pursuer reaches the spot where the pursuer has been, the pursued has moved on [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The Achilles argument is that (if the front runner keeps running) each time the pursuer reaches a spot where the pursuer has been, the pursued has moved a bit beyond. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Ways of Paradox [1961], p.03) | |
| A reaction: Quine is always wonderfully lucid, and this is the clearest simple statement of the paradox. |
| 21689 | A barber shaves only those who do not shave themselves. So does he shave himself? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: In a certain village there is a barber, who shaves all and only those men in the village who do not shave themselves. So does the barber shave himself? The barber shaves himself if and only if he does not shave himself. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Ways of Paradox [1961], p.02) | |
| A reaction: [Russell himself quoted this version of his paradox, from an unnamed source] Quine treats his as trivial because it only concerns barbers, but the full Russell paradox is a major 'antinomy', because it concerns sets. |
| 21694 | Membership conditions which involve membership and non-membership are paradoxical [Quine] |
| Full Idea: With Russell's antinomy, ...each tie the trouble comes of taking a membership condition that itself talks in turn of membership and non-membership. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Ways of Paradox [1961], p.13) | |
| A reaction: Hence various stipulations to rule out vicious circles or referring to sets of the 'wrong type' are invoked to cure the problem. The big question is how strong to make the restrictions. |
| 21692 | If we write it as '"this sentence is false" is false', there is no paradox [Quine] |
| Full Idea: If we supplant the sentence 'this sentence is false' with one saying what it refers to, we get '"this sentence is false" is false'. But then the whole outside sentence attributes falsity no longer to itself but to something else, so there is no paradox. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Ways of Paradox [1961], p.07) | |
| A reaction: Quine is pointing us towards type theory and meta-languages to solve the problem. We now have the Revenge Liar, and the problem has not been fully settled. |
| 4986 | A weaker kind of reductionism than direct translation is the use of 'bridge laws' [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: If multiple realisability means that psychological terms cannot be translated into physics, one weaker kind of reductionism resorts to 'bridge laws' which link the theory to be reduced to the reducing theory. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §3.8) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that reduction is all-or-nothing, so there can't be a 'weaker' kind. If they are totally separate but linked by naturally necessary laws (e.g. low temperature and ice), they are supervenient, but not reducible to one another. |
| 5001 | Maybe we should see intentionality and consciousness as a single problem, not two [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers today have adopted the view that we can achieve an enormous simplification by reducing the two components of the mind-body problem - intentionality and consciousness - into one; ...consciousness is no more than representations. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §8.4) | |
| A reaction: One would then see subjective experience and informational content as two consequences of a single mental activity. This strikes me as the correct route to go. We do, after all, learn BY experiencing. Hence concepts are tied in with qualia. |
| 4993 | If a bird captures a worm, we could say its behaviour is 'about' the worm [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: When a bird pulls a worm from the ground, then swallows it piece by piece, there is a sense in which its behaviour can be said to be about the worm. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.4) | |
| A reaction: This is preparing the ground for a possible behaviourist account of intentionality. Reply: you could say rain is about puddles, or you could say we have adopted Dennett's 'intentional stance' to birds, but it tells us nothing about their psychology. |
| 5000 | Behaviourism says intentionality is an external relation; language of thought says it's internal [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: The conflict over whether intentionality is a matter of behavioural relations with the rest of the world, or of the internal states of the subject, is at its most dramatic in the contrast between behaviourism and the language of thought hypothesis. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.10) | |
| A reaction: I just don't believe any behaviourist external account of intentionality, which ducks the question of how it all works. Personally I am more drawn to maps and models than to a language of thought. I plan my actions in an imagined space-time world. |
| 4982 | Dualism implies some brain events with no physical cause, and others with no physical effect [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: If the mind causes brain events, then they are not caused by other brain events, and such causal gaps should be detectable by scientists; there should also be a gap of brain-events which cause no other brain events, because they are causing mind events. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §2.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the double causation problem which Spinoza had spotted (Idea 4862). Expressed this way, it seems a screamingly large problem for dualism. We should be able to discover some VERY strange physical activity in the brain. |
| 4991 | Behaviourism seems a good theory for intentional states, but bad for phenomenal ones [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: For many kinds of mental states, notably intentional ones such as beliefs and desires, behaviourism is appealing, ..but for sensations and experiences such as pain, it seems grossly implausible. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.1) | |
| A reaction: The theory does indeed make a bit more sense for intentional states, but it still strikes me as nonsense that there is no more to my belief that 'Whales live in the Atlantic' than a disposition to say something. WHY do I say this something? |
| 4994 | Behaviourism offers a good alternative to simplistic unitary accounts of mental relationships [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: There is a temptation to think that 'aboutness', and the 'contents' of thoughts, and the relation of 'reference', are single and unitary relationships, but behaviourism offers an alternative approach. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.5) | |
| A reaction: Personally I wouldn't touch behaviourism with a barge-pole (as it ducks the question of WHY certain behaviour occurs), but a warning against simplistic accounts of intentional states is good. I am sure there cannot be a single neat theory of refererence. |
| 4992 | In 'holistic' behaviourism we say a mental state is a complex of many dispositions [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: There is a non-reductive version of behaviourism ( which we can call 'global' or 'holistic') which says there is no more to having mental states than having a complex of certain kinds of behavioural dispositions. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.2) | |
| A reaction: This is designed to meet a standard objection to behaviourism - that there is no straight correlation between what I think and how I behave. The present theory is obviously untestable, because a full 'complex' of human dispositions is never repeated. |
| 4990 | The inverted spectrum idea is often regarded as an objection to behaviourism [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: The inverted spectrum idea is often regarded as an objection to behaviourism. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §4.5) | |
| A reaction: Thus, my behaviour at traffic lights should be identical, even if I have a lifelong inversion of red and green. A good objection. Note that physicalists can believe in inverted qualia as well a dualists, as long as the brain states are also inverted. |
| 4984 | All meaningful psychological statements can be translated into physics [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: All psychological statements which are meaningful, that is to say, which are in principle verifiable, are translatable into propositions which do not involve psychological concepts, but only the concepts of physics. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §3.8) | |
| A reaction: This shows how eliminativist behaviourism arises out of logical positivism (by only allowing what is verifiable). The simplest objection: we can't verify the mental states of others, because they are private, but they are still the best explanation. |
| 4998 | Instead of representation by sentences, it can be by a distribution of connectionist strengths [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: In a connectionist system, information is represented not by sentences but by the total distribution of connection strengths. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.6) | |
| A reaction: Neither sentences (of a language of thought) NOR connection strengths strike me as very plausible ways for a brain to represent things. It must be something to do with connections, but it must also be to do with neurons, or we get bizarre counterexamples. |
| 4985 | If mental states are multiply realisable, they could not be translated into physical terms [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: If psychological states are multiply realisable it is hard to see how they could possibly be translated into physical terms. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §3.8) | |
| A reaction: Reductive funtionalism would do it. A writing iimplement is physical and multiply realisable. Personally I prefer the strategy of saying mental states are NOT multiply realisable. If frog brains differ from ours, they probably don't feel pain like us. |
| 4997 | It seems unlikely that most concepts are innate, if a theory must be understood to grasp them [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: It is widely accepted that for many concepts, if not all, grasping the concept requires grasping some theory, ...which makes difficulties for the view that concepts are not learned: for 'radical concept nativism', as Fodor calls it. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.3) | |
| A reaction: Not a problem for traditional rationalist theories, where the whole theory can be innate along with the concept, but a big objection to modern more cautious non-holistic views (such as Fodor's). Does a bird have a concept AND theory of a nest? |
| 4999 | For behaviourists language is just a special kind of behaviour [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: Behaviourists regard the use of language as just a special kind of behaviour. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §7.9) | |
| A reaction: This is not an intuitively obvious view of language. We behave, and then we talk about behaviour. Performative utterances (like promising) have an obvious behavioural aspect, as do violent threats, but not highly theoretical language (such as maths). |
| 4995 | Behaviourists doubt whether reference is a single type of relation [Kirk,R] |
| Full Idea: To most behaviourists it seems misguided to expect there to be a single relation that connects referring expressions with their referents. | |
| From: Robert Kirk (Mind and Body [2003], §5.5) | |
| A reaction: You don't need to be a behaviourist to feel this doubt. Think about names of real people, names of fictional people, reference to misunderstood items, or imagined items, or reference in dreams, or to mathematical objects, or negations etc. |
| 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'). |