75 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 4642 | No fact can be real and no proposition true unless there is a Sufficient Reason (even if we can't know it) [Leibniz] |
| 18019 | People have dreams which involve category mistakes [Magidor] |
| 17998 | Category mistakes are either syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic [Magidor] |
| 18012 | Category mistakes as syntactic needs a huge number of fine-grained rules [Magidor] |
| 18013 | Embedded (in 'he said that…') category mistakes show syntax isn't the problem [Magidor] |
| 18011 | Category mistakes seem to be universal across languages [Magidor] |
| 18016 | Two good sentences should combine to make a good sentence, but that might be absurd [Magidor] |
| 18015 | The normal compositional view makes category mistakes meaningful [Magidor] |
| 18017 | If a category mistake is synonymous across two languages, that implies it is meaningful [Magidor] |
| 18021 | Category mistakes are meaningful, because metaphors are meaningful category mistakes [Magidor] |
| 18030 | A good explanation of why category mistakes sound wrong is that they are meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18031 | If a category mistake has unimaginable truth-conditions, then it seems to be meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18032 | Category mistakes are neither verifiable nor analytic, so verificationism says they are meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18034 | Category mistakes play no role in mental life, so conceptual role semantics makes them meaningless [Magidor] |
| 18037 | Maybe when you say 'two is green', the predicate somehow fails to apply? [Magidor] |
| 18039 | If category mistakes aren't syntax failure or meaningless, maybe they just lack a truth-value? [Magidor] |
| 18041 | Category mistakes suffer from pragmatic presupposition failure (which is not mere triviality) [Magidor] |
| 18055 | In 'two is green', 'green' has a presupposition of being coloured [Magidor] |
| 18056 | Category mistakes because of presuppositions still have a truth value (usually 'false') [Magidor] |
| 18057 | 'Numbers are coloured and the number two is green' seems to be acceptable [Magidor] |
| 18058 | Maybe the presuppositions of category mistakes are the abilities of things? [Magidor] |
| 18059 | The presuppositions in category mistakes reveal nothing about ontology [Magidor] |
| 2115 | Everything in the universe is interconnected, so potentially a mind could know everything [Leibniz] |
| 18040 | Intensional logic maps logical space, showing which predicates are compatible or incompatible [Magidor] |
| 2111 | Falsehood involves a contradiction, and truth is contradictory of falsehood [Leibniz] |
| 17997 | Some suggest that the Julius Caesar problem involves category mistakes [Magidor] |
| 7644 | The monad idea incomprehensibly spiritualises matter, instead of materialising soul [La Mettrie on Leibniz] |
| 11857 | He replaced Aristotelian continuants with monads [Leibniz, by Wiggins] |
| 7843 | Is a drop of urine really an infinity of thinking monads? [Voltaire on Leibniz] |
| 12751 | It is unclear in 'Monadology' how extended bodies relate to mind-like monads. [Garber on Leibniz] |
| 19363 | Changes in a monad come from an internal principle, and the diversity within its substance [Leibniz] |
| 19352 | A 'monad' has basic perception and appetite; a 'soul' has distinct perception and memory [Leibniz] |
| 7931 | If a substance is just a thing that has properties, it seems to be a characterless non-entity [Leibniz, by Macdonald,C] |
| 18060 | We can explain the statue/clay problem by a category mistake with a false premise [Magidor] |
| 17554 | There must be some internal difference between any two beings in nature [Leibniz] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 2112 | Truths of reason are known by analysis, and are necessary; facts are contingent, and their opposites possible [Leibniz] |
| 9344 | Mathematical analysis ends in primitive principles, which cannot be and need not be demonstrated [Leibniz] |
| 2110 | We all expect the sun to rise tomorrow by experience, but astronomers expect it by reason [Leibniz] |
| 2109 | Increase a conscious machine to the size of a mill - you still won't see perceptions in it [Leibniz] |
| 19362 | We know the 'I' and its contents by abstraction from awareness of necessary truths [Leibniz] |
| 18020 | Propositional attitudes relate agents to either propositions, or meanings, or sentence/utterances [Magidor] |
| 18035 | Two sentences with different meanings can, on occasion, have the same content [Magidor] |
| 18018 | To grasp 'two' and 'green', must you know that two is not green? [Magidor] |
| 18008 | Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor] |
| 18010 | 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor] |
| 18053 | The semantics of a sentence is its potential for changing a context [Magidor] |
| 17999 | Strong compositionality says meaningful expressions syntactically well-formed are meaningful [Magidor] |
| 18000 | Weaker compositionality says meaningful well-formed sentences get the meaning from the parts [Magidor] |
| 18014 | Understanding unlimited numbers of sentences suggests that meaning is compositional [Magidor] |
| 18001 | Are there partial propositions, lacking truth value in some possible worlds? [Magidor] |
| 18036 | A sentence can be meaningful, and yet lack a truth value [Magidor] |
| 18051 | In the pragmatic approach, presuppositions are assumed in a context, for successful assertion [Magidor] |
| 18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |
| 18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |
| 18047 | A presupposition is what makes an utterance sound wrong if it is not assumed? [Magidor] |
| 18048 | A test for presupposition would be if it provoked 'hey wait a minute - I have no idea that....' [Magidor] |
| 18049 | The best tests for presupposition are projecting it to negation, conditional, conjunction, questions [Magidor] |
| 18050 | If both s and not-s entail a sentence p, then p is a presupposition [Magidor] |
| 18054 | Why do certain words trigger presuppositions? [Magidor] |
| 18028 | Gricean theories of metaphor involve conversational implicatures based on literal meanings [Magidor] |
| 18029 | Non-cognitivist views of metaphor says there are no metaphorical meanings, just effects of the literal [Magidor] |
| 18027 | Metaphors as substitutes for the literal misses one predicate varying with context [Magidor] |
| 18022 | Metaphors tend to involve category mistakes, by joining disjoint domains [Magidor] |
| 18024 | One theory says metaphors mean the same as the corresponding simile [Magidor] |
| 18023 | Theories of metaphor divide over whether they must have literal meanings [Magidor] |
| 18025 | The simile view of metaphors removes their magic, and won't explain why we use them [Magidor] |
| 18026 | Maybe a metaphor is just a substitute for what is intended literally, like 'icy' for 'unemotional' [Magidor] |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 12707 | The true elements are atomic monads [Leibniz] |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 2114 | This is the most perfect possible universe, in its combination of variety with order [Leibniz] |
| 2113 | God alone (the Necessary Being) has the privilege that He must exist if He is possible [Leibniz] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |