29 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 22285 | Impredicative definitions are circular, but fine for picking out, rather than creating something [Potter] |
| 22301 | The Identity Theory says a proposition is true if it coincides with what makes it true [Potter] |
| 22324 | It has been unfortunate that externalism about truth is equated with correspondence [Potter] |
| 22279 | Frege's sign |--- meant judgements, but the modern |- turnstile means inference, with intecedents [Potter] |
| 22291 | Deductivism can't explain how the world supports unconditional conclusions [Potter] |
| 21642 | If quantification is all substitutional, there is no ontology [Quine] |
| 22295 | Modern logical truths are true under all interpretations of the non-logical words [Potter] |
| 22310 | The formalist defence against Gödel is to reject his metalinguistic concept of truth [Potter] |
| 22298 | Why is fictional arithmetic applicable to the real world? [Potter] |
| 1633 | Absolute ontological questions are meaningless, because the answers are circular definitions [Quine] |
| 22287 | If 'concrete' is the negative of 'abstract', that means desires and hallucinations are concrete [Potter] |
| 18964 | Ontology is relative to both a background theory and a translation manual [Quine] |
| 22284 | 'Greater than', which is the ancestral of 'successor', strictly orders the natural numbers [Potter] |
| 18965 | We know what things are by distinguishing them, so identity is part of ontology [Quine] |
| 22281 | A material conditional cannot capture counterfactual reasoning [Potter] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 22327 | Knowledge from a drunken schoolteacher is from a reliable and unreliable process [Potter] |
| 1634 | Two things are relative - the background theory, and translating the object theory into the background theory [Quine] |
| 22273 | Traditionally there are twelve categories of judgement, in groups of three [Potter] |
| 22290 | The phrase 'the concept "horse"' can't refer to a concept, because it is saturated [Potter] |
| 8470 | Reference is inscrutable, because we cannot choose between theories of numbers [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| 22283 | Compositionality should rely on the parsing tree, which may contain more than sentence components [Potter] |
| 22282 | 'Direct compositonality' says the components wholly explain a sentence meaning [Potter] |
| 22296 | Compositionality is more welcome in logic than in linguistics (which is more contextual) [Potter] |
| 18963 | Indeterminacy translating 'rabbit' depends on translating individuation terms [Quine] |
| 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] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |