39 ideas
| 9449 | The plausible Barcan formula implies modality in the actual world [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Modality in the actual world is the import of the Barcan formula, and there are good reasons for accepting the Barcan formula. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: If you thought logic was irrelevant to metaphysics, this should make you think twice. |
| 9501 | If all existents are causally active, that excludes abstracta and causally isolated objects [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If one says that 'everything that exists is causally active', that rules out abstracta (notably sets and numbers), and it rules out objects that are causally isolated. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I like the principle. I take abstracta to be brain events, so they are causally active, within highly refined and focused brains, and if your physics is built on the notion of fields then I would think a 'causally isolated' object incoherent. |
| 9500 | If naturalism refers to supervenience, that leaves necessary entities untouched [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If one's naturalistic principles are formulated in terms of supervenience, then necessary entities are left untouched. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be part of the reason why some people like supervenience - that it leaves a pure 'space of reasons' which is unreachable from the flesh and blood inside a cranium. Personall I like the space of reasons, but I drop the 'pure'. |
| 9502 | There might be just one fundamental natural property [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The thought that there might be just one fundamental natural property is not that strange. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: A nice variation on the Parmenides idea that only the One exists. Bird's point would refer to a possible unification of modern physics. We see, for example, the forces of electricity and of magnetism turning out to be the same force. |
| 9477 | Categorical properties are not modally fixed, but change across possible worlds [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Categorical properties do not have their dispositional characters modally fixed, but may change their dispositional characters (and their causal and nomic behaviour more generally) across different worlds. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the key ground for Bird's praiseworth opposition to categorical propertie. I take it to be a nonsense to call the category in which we place something a 'property' of that thing. A confusion of thought with reality. |
| 9490 | The categoricalist idea is that a property is only individuated by being itself [Bird] |
| Full Idea: In the categoricalist view, the essential properties of a natural property are limited to its essentially being itself and not some distinct property. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: He associates this view with Lewis (modern regularity view) and Armstrong (nomic necessitation), and launches a splendid attack against it. I have always laughed at the idea that 'being Socrates' was one of the properties of Socrates. |
| 9495 | If we abstractly define a property, that doesn't mean some object could possess it [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The possibility of abstract definition does not show that we have defined a property that we can know, independently of any theory, that it is physically possible for some object to possess. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a naturalist resisting the idea that there is no more to a property than set-membership. I strongly agree. We need a firm notion of properties as features of the actual world; anything else should be called something like 'categorisations'. |
| 9492 | Categoricalists take properties to be quiddities, with no essential difference between them [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The categoricalist conception of properties takes them to be quiddities, which are primitive identities between fundamental qualities, having no difference with regard to their essence. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: Compare 'haecceitism' about indentity of objects, though 'quidditism' sounds even less plausible. Bird attributes this view to Lewis and Armstrong, and makes it sound well daft. |
| 9503 | To name an abundant property is either a Fregean concept, or a simple predicate [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It isn't clear what it is to name an abundant property. One might reify them, as akin to Fregean concepts, or it might be equivalent to a simple predication. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.1.2) | |
| A reaction: 'Fregean concepts' would make them functions that purely link things (hence relational?). One suspects that people who actually treat abundant properties as part of their ontology (Lewis) are confusing natural properties with predicates. |
| 14540 | Only real powers are fundamental [Bird, by Mumford/Anjum] |
| Full Idea: Bird says only real powers are fundamental. | |
| From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum - Getting Causes from Powers 1.5 | |
| A reaction: They disagree, and want higher-level properties in their ontology. I'm with Bird, except that something must exist to have the powers. Powers are fundamental to all the activity of nature, and are intrinsic to the stuff which constitutes nature. |
| 9450 | If all properties are potencies, and stimuli and manifestation characterise them, there is a regress [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Potencies are characterized in terms of their stimulus and manifestation properties, then if potencies are the only properties then these properties are also potencies, and must be characterized by yet further properties, leading to a vicious regress. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is cited as the most popular objection to the dispositional account of properties. |
| 9498 | The essence of a potency involves relations, e.g. mass, to impressed force and acceleration [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The essence of a potency involves a relation to something else; if inertial mass is a potency then its essence involves a relation to a stimulus property (impressed force) and a manifestation property (acceleration). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.3.3) | |
| A reaction: It doesn't seem quite right to say that the relations are part of the essence, if they might not occur, but some other relations might happen in their place. An essence is what makes a relation possible (like being good-looking). |
| 9474 | A disposition is finkish if a time delay might mean the manifestation fizzles out [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Finkish dispositions arise because the time delay between stimulus and manifestation provides an opportunity for the disposition to go out of existence and so halt the process that would bring about the manifestation. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a problem for the conditional analysis of dispositions; there may be a disposition, but it never reaches manifestation. Bird rightly points us towards actual powers rather than dispositions that need manifestation. |
| 9475 | A robust pot attached to a sensitive bomb is not fragile, but if struck it will easily break [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If a robust iron pot is attached to a bomb with a sensitive detonator. If the pot is struck, the bomb will go off, so they counterfactual 'if the pot were struck it would break' is true, but it is not a fragile pot. This is a 'mimic' of the disposition. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.5.1) | |
| A reaction: A very nice example, showing that a true disposition would have to be an internal feature (a power) of the pot itself, not a mere disposition to behave. The problem is these pesky empiricists, who want to reduce it all to what is observable. |
| 9499 | Megarian actualists deny unmanifested dispositions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The Megarian actualist denies that a disposition can exist without being manifested. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: I agree with Bird that this extreme realism seems wrong. As he puts it (p.109), "unrealized possibilities must be part of the actual world". This commitment is beginning to change my understanding of the world I am looking at. |
| 9486 | Why should a universal's existence depend on instantiation in an existing particular? [Bird] |
| Full Idea: An instantiation condition seems to be a failure of nerve as regards realism about universals. If universals really are entities in their own right, why should their existence depend upon a relationship with existing particulars? | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: I like this challenge, which seems to leave fans of universals no option but full-blown Platonism, which most of them recognise as being deeply implausible. |
| 9472 | Resemblance itself needs explanation, presumably in terms of something held in common [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The realist view of resemblance nominalism is that it is resemblance that needs explaining. When there is resemblance it is natural to want to explain it, in terms of something held in common. Explanations end somewhere, but not with resemblance. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
| A reaction: I smell a regress. If a knife and a razor resemble because they share sharpness, you have to see that the sharp phenomenon falls within the category of 'sharpness' before you can make the connection, which is spotting its similarity. |
| 9482 | If the laws necessarily imply p, that doesn't give a new 'nomological' necessity [Bird] |
| Full Idea: It does not add to the kinds of necessity to say that p is 'nomologically necessary' iff (the laws of nature → p) is metaphysically necessary. That trick of construction could be pulled for 'feline necessity' (true in all worlds that contain cats). | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: I love it! Bird seems to think that the only necessity is 'metaphysical' necessity, true in all possible worlds, and he is right. The question arises in modal logic, though, of the accessibility between worlds (which might give degrees of necessity?). |
| 9481 | Logical necessitation is not a kind of necessity; George Orwell not being Eric Blair is not a real possibility [Bird] |
| Full Idea: I do not regard logical necessitation as a kind of necessity. It is logically possible that George Orwell is not Eric Blair, but in what sense is this any kind of possibility? It arises from having two names, but that confers no genuine possibility. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: How refreshing. All kinds of concepts like this are just accepted by philosophers as obvious, until someone challenges them. The whole undergrowth of modal thinking needs a good flamethrower taken to it. |
| 9505 | Empiricist saw imaginability and possibility as close, but now they seem remote [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Whereas the link between imaginability and possibility was once held, under the influence of empiricism, to be close, it is now widely held to be very remote. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8) | |
| A reaction: Tim Williamson nicely argues the opposite - that assessment of possibility is an adjunct of our ability to think counterfactually, which is precisely an operation of the imagination. Big error is possible, but how else could we do it? |
| 9491 | Haecceitism says identity is independent of qualities and without essence [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The core of haecceitism is the view that the transworld identity of particulars does not supervene on their qualitative features. ...The simplest expression of it is that particulars lack essential properties. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be something the 'bare substratum' account of substance (associated with Locke). You are left with the difficulty of how to individuate an instance of the haecceity, as opposed to the bundle of properties attached to it. |
| 9487 | We can't reject all explanations because of a regress; inexplicable A can still explain B [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Some regard the potential regress of explanations as a reason to think that the very idea of explanation is illusory. This is a fallacy; it is not a necessary condition on A's explaining B that we have an explanation for A also. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.4) | |
| A reaction: True, though to say 'B is explained by A, but A is totally baffling' is not the account we are dreaming of. And the explanation would certainly fail if we could say nothing at all about A, apart from naming it. |
| 23035 | The good life aims at perfections, or absolute laws, or what is absolutely desirable [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: The differentia of the good life …is controlled by the consciousness of there being some perfection which has to be fulfilled, some law which has to be obeyed, something absolutely desirable whatever the individual may for the time desire. | |
| From: T.H. Green (Prolegomena to Ethics [1882], p.134), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: The 'perfection' suggests Plato, and the 'law' suggests Kant. The idea that something is 'absolutely desirable' is, I suspect, aimed at the utilitarians, who don't care what is desired. I'm no idealist, but have some sympathy with this idea. |
| 23037 | People are improved by egalitarian institutions and habits [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Man has bettered himself through institutions and habits which tend to make the welfare of all the welfare of each. | |
| From: T.H. Green (Prolegomena to Ethics [1882], p.180), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: I like this a lot. We underestimate how the best social values are promoted by the existence of enlightened institutions, rather than by preaching and teaching. Schools, law courts and churche embody their values. |
| 23043 | All talk of the progress of a nation must reduce to the progress of its individual members [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Our ultimate standard of worth is an ideal of personal worth. All other values are relative to personal values. To speak of any progress of a nation or society or mankind except as relative to some greater worth of persons is to use words without meaning. | |
| From: T.H. Green (Prolegomena to Ethics [1882], p.193), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: Note that, pre-verificationism, a Victorian talks of plausible words actually being meaningless. This is a good statement of the core doctrine of liberalism. |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 9493 | We should explain causation by powers, not powers by causation [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The notion of 'causal power' is not to be analysed in terms of causation; if anything, the relationship is the reverse. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
| A reaction: It is a popular view these days to take causation as basic (as opposed to the counterfactual account), but I prefer this view. If anything is basic in nature, it is the dynamic force in the engine room, which is the active powers of substances. |
| 9494 | Singularism about causes is wrong, as the universals involved imply laws [Bird] |
| Full Idea: While singularists about causation might think that a particular has its causal powers independently of law, it is difficult to see how a universal could have or confer causal powers without generating what we would naturally think of as a law. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
| A reaction: This is a middle road between the purely singularist account (Anscombe) and the fully nomological account. We might say that a caused event will be 'involved in law-like behaviour', without attributing the cause to a law. |
| 9507 | Laws are explanatory relationships of things, which supervene on their essences [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The laws of a domain are the fundamental, general explanatory relationships between kinds, quantities, and qualities of that domain, that supervene upon the essential natures of those things. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the scientific essentialist view of laws [see entries there, in 'Laws of Nature']. There seems uncertainty between 'kinds' and 'qualities' (with 'quantities' looking like a category mistake). I vote, with Ellis, for natural kinds as the basis. |
| 9488 | Laws are either disposition regularities, or relations between properties [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Instead of viewing laws as regular relationships between dispositional properties and stimulus-manifestation, they can be conceived of as a relation between properties. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: Bird offers these as the two main views, with the first coming from scientific essentialism, and the second from Armstrong's account of universals. Personally I favour the first, but Bird suggests that powers give the best support for both views. |
| 9496 | That other diamonds are hard does not explain why this one is [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The fact that some other diamonds are hard does not explain why this diamond is hard. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.3.2) | |
| A reaction: A very nice aphorism! It pinpoints the whole error of trying to explain the behaviour of the world by citing laws. Why should this item obey that law? Bird prefers 'powers', and so do I. |
| 9479 | Dispositional essentialism says laws (and laws about laws) are guaranteed regularities [Bird] |
| Full Idea: For the regularity version of dispositional essentialism about laws, laws are those regularities whose truth is guaranteed by the essential dispositional nature of one or more of the constituents. Regularities that supervene on such laws are also laws. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Even if you accept necessary behaviour resulting from essential dispositions, you still need to distinguish the important regularities from the accidental ones, so the word 'guarantee' is helpful, even if it raises lots of difficulties. |
| 9473 | Laws cannot offer unified explanations if they don't involve universals [Bird] |
| Full Idea: Laws, or what flow from them, are supposed to provide a unified explanation of the behaviours of particulars. Without universals the explanation of the behaviours of things lacks the required unity. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
| A reaction: Sounds a bit question-begging? Gravity seems fairly unified, whereas the frequency of London buses doesn't. Maybe I could unify bus-behaviour by positing a few new universals? The unity should first be in the phenomena, not in the explanation. |
| 9484 | If the universals for laws must be instantiated, a vanishing particular could destroy a law [Bird] |
| Full Idea: If universals exist only where and when they are instantiated, this make serious trouble for the universals view of laws. It would be most odd if a particular, merely by changing its properties, could cause a law to go out of existence. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This sounds conclusive. He notes that this is probably why Armstrong does not adopt this view (though Lowe seems to favour it). Could there be a possible property (and concomitant law) which was never ever instantiated? |
| 9506 | Salt necessarily dissolves in water, because of the law which makes the existence of salt possible [Bird] |
| Full Idea: We cannot have a world where it is true both that salt exists (which requires Coulomb's Law to be true), and that it fails to dissolve in water (which requires Coulomb's Law to be false). So the dissolving is necessary even if the Law is contingent. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8.2) | |
| A reaction: Excellent. It is just like the bonfire on the Moon (imaginable through ignorance, but impossible). People who assert that the solubility of salt is contingent tend not to know much about chemistry. |
| 23713 | Most laws supervene on fundamental laws, which are explained by basic powers [Bird, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| Full Idea: According to Bird, non-fundamental laws supervene on fundamental laws, and so are ultimately explained by fundamental powers. | |
| From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by Friend/Kimpton-Nye - Dispositions and Powers 3.6.1 | |
| A reaction: This looks like the picture I subscribe to. Roughly, fundamental laws are explained by powers, and non-fundamental laws are explained by properties, which are complexes of powers. 'Fundamental' may not be a precise term! |
| 9489 | Essentialism can't use conditionals to explain regularities, because of possible interventions [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The straightforward dispositional essentialist account of laws by subjunctive conditionals is false because dispositions typically suffer from finks and antidotes. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: [Finks and antidotes intervene before a disposition can take effect] This seems very persuasive to me, and shows why you can't just explain laws as counterfactual or conditional claims. Explanation demands what underlies them. |
| 9504 | The relational view of space-time doesn't cover times and places where things could be [Bird] |
| Full Idea: The obvious problem with the simple relational view of space and time is that it fails to account for the full range of spatio-temporal possibility. There seem to be times and places where objects and events could be, but are not. | |
| From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.3.2) | |
| A reaction: This view seems strongly supported by intuition. I certainly don't accept the views of physicists and cosmologists on the subject, because they seem to approach the whole thing too instrumentally. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |