Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Russell's hypothesis was so arranged that nothing could bear it out or refute it. Whatever our experience might be, it would be in agreement with it.

It is used in different contexts because there is a transition between similar things called "good", a transition which continues, it may be, to things which bear no similarity to earlier members of the series.

Modifications of function are ubiquitous in natural selection (for example, primate hands, bear paws, and bat wings are adaptations that evolved by natural selection from the fins of fish), so the fact that a trait was initially shaped by selection for one function does not imply that it was not subsequently shaped by selection for another function.

Perceiving further, that in order to understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider them one by one and sometimes only to bear them in mind, or embrace them in the aggregate, I thought that, in order the better to consider them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines, than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other hand, that in order to retain them in the memory or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters the briefest possible.

Frustratingly, Fodor never gives a clear definition of what he means by abduction, nor does he work through an example that lays bare exactly how a computational system (Turing machine or other) fails to do something that humans easily do. He often seems to use ‘abduction’ and its relatives to embrace any really hard problem about cognition, as if the real title of the book was We Don’t Understand Everything About the Mind Yet. But Fodor’s general idea is that when people solve a problem they have an uncanny ability to bring to bear on it just the information that is most relevant to it.

It’s generally hard work to get theories in different sciences to bear on one another’ (p. 83).

Such events, as bear little analogy to the common course of nature, are also readily confessed to be known only by experience; nor does any man imagine that the explosion of gunpowder, or the attraction of a loadstone, could ever be discovered by arguments a priori.

But the same truth may not appear, at first sight, to have the same evidence with regard to events, which have become familiar to us from our first appearance in the world, which bear a close analogy to the whole course of nature, and which are supposed to depend on the simple qualities of objects, without any secret structure of parts.

For as a man, who fired a mine, is answerable for all the consequences whether the train he employed be long or short; so wherever a continued chain of necessary causes is fixed, that Being, either finite or infinite, who produces the first, is likewise the author of all the rest, and must both bear the blame and acquire the praise which belong to them.

I WAS lately engaged in conversation with a friend who loves sceptical paradoxes; where, though he advanced many principles, of which I can by no means approve, yet as they seem to be curious, and to bear some relation to the chain of reasoning carried on throughout this enquiry, I shall here copy them from my memory as accurately as I can, in order to submit them to the judgement of the reader.