42 ideas
| 22659 | It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it [James] |
| 7623 | For ancient Greeks being wise was an ethical value [Putnam] |
| 22657 | All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed [James] |
| 22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
| 22648 | A single explanation must have a single point of view [James] |
| 22644 | Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact [James] |
| 4714 | Putnam's epistemic notion of truth replaces the realism of correspondence with ontological relativism [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 7617 | Before Kant, all philosophers had a correspondence theory of truth [Putnam] |
| 4716 | The correspondence theory is wrong, because there is no one correspondence between reality and fact [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 7616 | Truth is an idealisation of rational acceptability [Putnam] |
| 14203 | Intension is not meaning, as 'cube' and 'square-faced polyhedron' are intensionally the same [Putnam] |
| 14207 | If cats equal cherries, model theory allows reinterpretation of the whole language preserving truth [Putnam] |
| 14214 | If we try to cure the abundance of theories with causal links, this is 'just more theory' [Putnam, by Lewis] |
| 14205 | The sentence 'A cat is on a mat' remains always true when 'cat' means cherry and 'mat' means tree [Putnam] |
| 7610 | A fact is simply what it is rational to accept [Putnam] |
| 22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
| 7618 | Very nominalistic philosophers deny properties, though scientists accept them [Putnam] |
| 4718 | If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 7620 | Some kind of objective 'rightness' is a presupposition of thought itself [Putnam] |
| 22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
| 22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
| 14204 | Naïve operationalism would have meanings change every time the tests change [Putnam] |
| 22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
| 22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
| 22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
| 22652 | The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions [James] |
| 22651 | Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next [James] |
| 22650 | How can the ground of rationality be itself rational? [James] |
| 7611 | Rationality is one part of our conception of human flourishing [Putnam] |
| 22643 | It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality [James] |
| 14200 | 'Water' on Twin Earth doesn't refer to water, but no mental difference can account for this [Putnam] |
| 7612 | Reference is social not individual, because we defer to experts when referring to elm trees [Putnam] |
| 7613 | Concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences [Putnam] |
| 14202 | Neither individual nor community mental states fix reference [Putnam] |
| 14201 | Maybe the total mental state of a language community fixes the reference of a term [Putnam] |
| 14206 | There are infinitely many interpretations of a sentence which can all seem to be 'correct' [Putnam] |
| 22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
| 7624 | The word 'inconsiderate' nicely shows the blurring of facts and values [Putnam] |
| 541 | Virtue comes more from habit than character [Critias] |
| 22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
| 542 | Fear of the gods was invented to discourage secret sin [Critias] |
| 22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |