Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy by Peter Unger

Author:Peter Unger [Unger, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199330812
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Where a pluralist sees several things—a statue, the clay from which it is made, the piece of clay—the monist sees a single thing. We might call it a “mere” thing since it is not taken to be, in itself, one of the more specific things picked out be the pluralist. (page 198)

5. This is a point that goes beyond the perfectly patent thought that the expression most standardly used, by English speakers, to express the concept of a piece of copper—the expression “piece of copper”—is very different from the expression that’s so used, by such speakers, to most standardly express the concept of a copper sculpture—the expression “copper sculpture ”. For one thing, the expression “piece of copper” comprises precisely three English words, while the other expression, “copper sculpture” comprises only two words. That’s not even a close call. What’s quite close to being the same as the point about the two concepts may be this idea: The semantic conditions of “piece of copper” are quite different from those of “copper sculpture”.

6. Here’s a reader-friendly observation: In the previous paragraph, I suggest an employment for the term “concept” on which it will apply, of course, to ever so many concepts that nobody’s ever so much as even entertained or considered, let alone employed at all intentionally. There are, to be sure, other employments of the term, perhaps every bit as common or natural, on which its conditions of application will be more constrained. On such a stricter course, it will be more straightforwardly natural to speak of people inventing, and having invented, many concepts—as with saying that people in the twentieth century invented the concept of an email, and as with saying Nelson Goodman invented the concept of grue and the concept of bleen. For ease of exposition, it is best for me to use concept in the very liberal way that, in the previous paragraph, I’ve already begun doing—a way in which it would certainly be more natural to say, and would probably be more correct to say, that Goodman didn’t so much invent the concept of grue as he latched onto a certain previously unconsidered concept. See his Fact, Fiction and Forecast, The Athlone Press, 1954.At all events, nothing in this chapter’s main lines of argument depends upon this choice of mine, as one who has read through the chapter will be able to verify. Having made my friendly observation, I return to the main line of our discussion.

7. That may be true even while this also is true: There are very many still other inconvenient ideas that, as concerns some matters of great philosophical import, are inferior to (almost all) our convenient ideas—and also worse than very many inconvenient ideas, as well. Thus, the concept of an elementary particle might be superior, in a philosophically significant way, to the concept of an elementary particle that’s more than seven kilometers from any pharmacy.

8. As I’m pleased to relate, I am far from being the only philosopher who takes

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