Does he talk about lambdas? Quine, another die-hard nominalist, at some point realized he could use lambdas to get around needing classes (and certainly attributes) as first-class objects for most purposes. — Srap Tasmaner
I feel completely in over my head with that comment about the "linguistic and conceptual orders". You see this sort of Kantian view all over 20th century Anglo-American philosophy, even in Strawson's "descriptive metaphysics" (IIRC, they both wrote books about Kant) and I really have no idea what to make of it yet... — Srap Tasmaner
I don't think the substance/accident ontology is just some notion that we unthinkingly introject because we use words in a certain way, I think it's something that comes from observation of nature - which is the same whether you're American or Chinese. The classical ontology didn't just suddenly appear or mindlessly coalesce, it was built up over hundreds of years of dialogue and argument between notable philosophers right up until about the modern period. — gurugeorge
Also, our understanding of those terms since modern philosophy is a feeble, truncated thing, relative to what the Aristotelians and Scholastics would have understood. (For example in the classical philosophy, substance and accident are tied up with concepts like actuality and potentiality - there's a whole bundle of closely-related topics in that area, that we don't really understand unless we make a study of the classical philosophy.) — gurugeorge
Is this close to what the OP is saying? Except that it extends Ibn Sina's view to include ordinary properties, besides existence? — Πετροκότσυφας
If the parallels 0 to 9 is seeing with Bourland's E-Prime are relevant - and I feel they might be (I was wondering the same thing before I saw her post) - I wonder if Sellars would rather say that, by abandoning a Platonic interpretation of triangularity, we see triangularity for what it does.Triangularity is not abandoned; rather 'triangularity' is seen for what it is," — StreetlightX
Is the "is" the essential element of predication? — Janus
If so, then are Sellar's examples 'bold X' and 'X above Y' really any different than if we drop the 'is' to express the same ideas, 'red apple' and 'X larger than Y' respectively? — Janus
(Jumblese seems appropriate given that Sellars was, reportedly, drunk all the time :rofl: ). — Janus
I wonder if Sellars would rather say that, by abandoning a Platonic interpretation of triangularity, we see triangularity for what it does. — andrewk
Unless, of course, I read in this passage something that it does not actually say. — Πετροκότσυφας
Banno is this something up your alley? — StreetlightX
X
Y
Where the fact that X is above Y conveys that 'X is larger than Y' without using the expression 'is larger than'. — StreetlightX
...nothing in the above expression (X placed above Y) does the job of 'is larger than' in the first expression — StreetlightX
For Sellars the fact of there being an 'is larger than' between X and Y, does the job of the fact of X being above Y. — StreetlightX
But, it's function isn't. By function I understand the work that the predicate does. We still use the de-linearised trick to accomplish what the predicate (in its original form) was doing. It functions as a predicate; it's just its form that has changed. — Πετροκότσυφας
But there is a way to disappear predicates. Treat them extensionally. The predicate ceases to have any meaning beyond the set of individuals it applies to. — Banno
If I understand right, linguistic objects (either predicates or boldfaces) by themselves are not doing any kind of "meaning work", it's their formal use in relation to each other (and more generally in language as a self-contained system of differences?) that does this? — Πετροκότσυφας
I think this is right, although I'm more conceptually unsteady here than with respect to predicates. Basically, Sellars develops an account of meaning in which the meaning of anything is given by it's 'functional role' in (a) language. — StreetlightX
Sellars' question, if I understand him correctly - is whether the specificity of reason ought to be taken at face value when approaching questions of ontology. — StreetlightX
Just chiming in to say I think "commitment" is the magic word here. This is exactly the word I was about to reach for over in the "Belief" thread to explain my sense of beliefs as something like rules or norms you follow in thinking and acting.
And I think of commitment as placing your bet, or running your experiment. There's a strong current of pragmatism running beneath all this that I find increasingly appealing. — Srap Tasmaner
Is that fair? — csalisbury
We can also devise languages (see Quine's predicate functor logic) which dispense entirely with individual variables or constants and thus have only predicates. Does that show that objects are dispensable and only properties have ontological standing? — Nagase
Notice also that the translation goes both ways: we can "translate" 'X is larger than Y' with your spatial arrangement, but we can also "translate" your spatial arrangement by 'X is larger than Y'. So why is one translation preferable to the other? — Nagase
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