28 ideas
9408 | Science studies phenomena, but only metaphysics tells us what exists [Mumford] |
Full Idea: Science deals with the phenomena, ..but it is metaphysics, and only metaphysics, that tells us what ultimately exists. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 01.2) |
9429 | Many forms of reasoning, such as extrapolation and analogy, are useful but deductively invalid [Mumford] |
Full Idea: There are many forms of reasoning - extrapolation, interpolation, and other arguments from analogy - that are useful but deductively invalid. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 04.4) | |
A reaction: [He cites Molnar for this] |
9427 | For Humeans the world is a world primarily of events [Mumford] |
Full Idea: For Humeans the world is a world primarily of events. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 03.6) | |
A reaction: An event is not sufficiently precise or determinate to form a basis for an ontological system. I can see that we are all mainly interested in events, but I'm not sure anyone could see them as constituting the world. Isn't their world just 'impressions'? |
9446 | Properties are just natural clusters of powers [Mumford] |
Full Idea: The view of properties I find most attractive is one in which they are natural clusters of, and exhausted by, powers (plus other connections to other properties). | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 10.6) |
9435 | A 'porridge' nominalist thinks we just divide reality in any way that suits us [Mumford] |
Full Idea: A 'porridge' nominalist denies natural kinds, and thinks there are no objective divisions in reality, so concepts or words can be used by a community to divide the world up in any way that suits their purposes. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 07.3) |
9447 | If properties are clusters of powers, this can explain why properties resemble in degrees [Mumford] |
Full Idea: If a cluster of ten powers exhausts property F, and property G differs in respect of just one power, this might explain why properties can resemble other properties and in different degrees. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 10.6) | |
A reaction: I love this. The most intractable problem about properties and universals is that of abstract reference - pink resembles red more than pink resembles green. If colours are clusters of powers, red and pink share nine out of ten of them. |
12248 | How can we show that a universally possessed property is an essential property? [Mumford] |
Full Idea: Essentialists fail to show how we ascend from being a property universally possessed, by all kind members, to the status of being an essential property. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 07.5) | |
A reaction: This is precisely where my proposal comes in - the essential properties, as opposed to the accidentaly universals, are those which explain the nature and behaviour of each kind of thing (and each individual thing). |
18052 | An assertion aims to add to the content of a context [Stalnaker, by Magidor] |
Full Idea: Stalnaker starts with the general thesis that the role of a successful assertion of s is to update the context by adding to it the content of s. | |
From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 5.3.2 | |
A reaction: This is to be compared with criteria of meaningfulness, such as verificationism, and with Grice's rules of conversational implicature. Presumably if you assert what the context presupposes, you fail to assert, without being meaningless. |
14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
Full Idea: Stalnaker's guiding idea is that in making an assertion the speaker is trying to get the audience to rule out certain possibilities. ....If all goes well, further planning will proceed on the basis of a smaller and more accurate range of possibilities. | |
From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics | |
A reaction: This sounds intuitively rather plausible, and is a nice original thought. This is what we pay clever chaps like Stalnaker to come up with. It seems to imply some notion of verisimilitude (qv. under 'truth'), depending on how much narrowing happens. |
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. |
9430 | Singular causes, and identities, might be necessary without falling under a law [Mumford] |
Full Idea: One might have a singularist view of causation in which a cause necessitates its effect, but they need not be subsumed under a law, ..and there are identities which are metaphysically necessary without being laws of nature. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 04.5) |
9445 | We can give up the counterfactual account if we take causal language at face value [Mumford] |
Full Idea: If we take causal language at face value and give up reducing causal concepts to non-causal, non-modal concepts, we can give up the counterfactual dependence account. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 10.5) |
9443 | It is only properties which are the source of necessity in the world [Mumford] |
Full Idea: If laws do not give the world necessity, what does? I argue the positive case for it being properties, and properties alone, that do the job (so we might call them 'modal properties'). | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 10.1) |
9444 | There are four candidates for the logical form of law statements [Mumford] |
Full Idea: The contenders for the logical form of a law statement are 1) a universally quantified conditional, 2) a second-order relation between first-order universals, 3) a functional equivalence, and 4) a dispositional characteristic of a natural kind. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 10.3) |
9431 | Pure regularities are rare, usually only found in idealized conditions [Mumford] |
Full Idea: Pure regularities are not nearly as common as might have been thought, and are usually only to be found in simplified or idealized conditions. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 05.3) | |
A reaction: [He cites Nancy Cartwright 1999 for this view] |
9441 | Regularity laws don't explain, because they have no governing role [Mumford] |
Full Idea: A regularity-law does not explain its instances, because such laws play no role in determining or governing their instances. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 09.7) | |
A reaction: Good. It has always seemed to me entirely vacuous to explain an event simply by saying that it falls under some law. |
9415 | Would it count as a regularity if the only five As were also B? [Mumford] |
Full Idea: While it might be true that for all x, if Ax then Bx, would we really want to count it as a genuine regularity in nature if only five things were A (and all five were also B)? | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 03.3) |
9416 | Regularities are more likely with few instances, and guaranteed with no instances! [Mumford] |
Full Idea: It seems that the fewer the instances, the more likely it is that there be a regularity, ..and if there are no cases at all, and no S is P, that is a regularity. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 03.3) | |
A reaction: [He attributes the second point to Molnar] |
9422 | If the best system describes a nomological system, the laws are in nature, not in the description [Mumford] |
Full Idea: If the world really does have its own nomological structure, that a systematization merely describes, why are the laws not to be equated with the nomological structure itself, rather than with the system that describes it? | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 03.4) |
9421 | The best systems theory says regularities derive from laws, rather than constituting them [Mumford] |
Full Idea: The best systems theory (of Mill-Ramsey-Lewis) says that laws are not seen as regularities but, rather, as those things from which regularities - or rather, the whole world history including the regularities and everything else - can be derived. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 03.4) | |
A reaction: Put this way, the theory invites questions about ontology. Regularities are just patterns in physical reality, but axioms are propositions. So are they just features of human thought, or do these axioms actuallyr reside in reality. Too weak or too strong. |
9432 | Laws of nature are necessary relations between universal properties, rather than about particulars [Mumford] |
Full Idea: The core of the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong view of the late 70s is that we have a law of nature when we have a relation of natural necessitation between universals. ..The innovation was that laws are about properties, and only indirectly about particulars. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 06.2) | |
A reaction: It sounds as if we should then be able to know the laws of nature a priori, since that was Russell's 1912 definition of a priori knowledge. |
9433 | If laws can be uninstantiated, this favours the view of them as connecting universals [Mumford] |
Full Idea: If there are laws that are instantiated in no particulars, then this would seem to favour the theory that laws connect universals rather than particulars. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 06.4) | |
A reaction: There is a dispute here between the Platonic view of uninstantiated universals (Tooley) and the Aristotelian instantiated view (Armstrong). Mumford and I prefer the dispositional account. |
9434 | Laws of nature are just the possession of essential properties by natural kinds [Mumford] |
Full Idea: If dispositional essentialism is granted, then there is a law of nature wherever there is an essential property of a natural kind; laws are just the havings of essential properties by natural kinds. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 07.2) | |
A reaction: [He is expounding Ellis's view] |
9437 | To distinguish accidental from essential properties, we must include possible members of kinds [Mumford] |
Full Idea: Where properties are possessed by all kind members, we must distinguish the accidental from essential ones by considering all actual and possible kind members. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 07.5) | |
A reaction: This is why we must treat possibilities as features of the actual world. |
9411 | There are no laws of nature in Aristotle; they became standard with Descartes and Newton [Mumford] |
Full Idea: Laws do not appear in Aristotle's metaphysics, and it wasn't until Descartes and Newton that laws entered the intellectual mainstream. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 01.5) | |
A reaction: Cf. Idea 5470. |
9439 | The Central Dilemma is how to explain an internal or external view of laws which govern [Mumford] |
Full Idea: The Central Dilemma about laws of nature is that, if they have some governing role, then they must be internal or external to the things governed, and it is hard to give a plausible account of either view. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 09.2) | |
A reaction: This dilemma is the basis of Mumford's total rejection of 'laws of nature'. I think I agree. |
9412 | You only need laws if you (erroneously) think the world is otherwise inert [Mumford] |
Full Idea: Laws are a solution to a problem that was misconceived. Only if you think that the world would be otherwise inactive or inanimate, do you have the need to add laws to your ontology. | |
From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 01.5) | |
A reaction: This is a bold and extreme view - and I agree with it. I consider laws to be quite a useful concept when discussing nature, but they are not part of the ontology, and they don't do any work. They are metaphysically hopeless. |
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. |