25 ideas
1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
18755 | Validity is explained as truth in all models, because that relies on the logical terms [McGee] |
18751 | Natural language includes connectives like 'because' which are not truth-functional [McGee] |
18761 | Second-order variables need to range over more than collections of first-order objects [McGee] |
18753 | An ontologically secure semantics for predicate calculus relies on sets [McGee] |
18754 | Logically valid sentences are analytic truths which are just true because of their logical words [McGee] |
18757 | Soundness theorems are uninformative, because they rely on soundness in their proofs [McGee] |
18760 | The culmination of Euclidean geometry was axioms that made all models isomorphic [McGee] |
3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
18762 | A maxim claims that if we are allowed to assert a sentence, that means it must be true [McGee] |
1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |
1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |