17 ideas
18365 | If truths are just identical with facts, then truths will make themselves true [David] |
Full Idea: According to the identity theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it is identical with a fact. ...This leads to the unacceptable claim that every true proposition makes itself true (because it is identical to its fact). | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], n 14) |
18362 | Examples show that truth-making is just non-symmetric, not asymmetric [David] |
Full Idea: That 'there is at least one proposition' ...is a case where something makes itself true, which generates a counterexample to the natural assumption that truth-making is asymmetric; truth-making, it seems, is merely non-symmetric. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 4) |
18360 | It is assumed that a proposition is necessarily true if its truth-maker exists [David] |
Full Idea: Friends of the truth-maker principle usually hold that the following states a crucial necessary condition on truth-making: if x makes y true, then, necessarily, if x exists then y is true. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 2) | |
A reaction: My objection is that the proposition y is taken to pre-exist, primly awaiting the facts that will award it 'truth'. An ontology that contains an infinity of propositions, most of which so far lack a truth-value, is incoherent. You can have x, but no y! |
18358 | Two different propositions can have the same fact as truth-maker [David] |
Full Idea: Two different propositions can have the same fact as truth-maker. For example, 'L is happy or L is hungry', and 'L is happy or L is thirsty', which are both made true by the fact that L is happy. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1) |
18355 | What matters is truth-making (not truth-makers) [David] |
Full Idea: The term 'truthmaker' just labels whatever stands in the truth-making relation to a truth. The truth-making relation is crucial. It would have been just as well to refer to the truth-'maker' principle as the truth-'making' principle. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1) | |
A reaction: This is well said. The commitment of this theory is to something which makes each proposition true. There is no initial commitment to any theories about what sorts of things do the job. |
18354 | Correspondence is symmetric, while truth-making is taken to be asymmetric [David] |
Full Idea: Correspondence appears to be a symmetric relation while truth-making appears to be, or is supposed to be, an asymmetric relation. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], Intro) |
18356 | Correspondence is an over-ambitious attempt to explain truth-making [David] |
Full Idea: Truth-maker theory says that the attempt by correspondence to fill in the generic truth-maker principle with something more informative fails. It is too ambitious, offering a whole zoo of funny facts that are not needed. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1) | |
A reaction: A typical funny fact is a disjunctive fact, which makes 'he is hungry or thirsty' true (when it can just be made true by the simple fact that he is thirsty). |
18363 | Correspondence theorists see facts as the only truth-makers [David] |
Full Idea: Correspondence theorists are committed to the view that, since truth is correspondence with a fact, only facts can make true propositions true. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 4) |
18364 | Correspondence theory likes ideal languages, that reveal the structure of propositions [David] |
Full Idea: Correspondence theorists tend to promote ideal languages, ...which is intended to mirror perfectly the structure of the propositions it expresses. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], n 03) |
18357 | What makes a disjunction true is simpler than the disjunctive fact it names [David] |
Full Idea: The proposition that 'L is happy or hungry' can be made true by the fact that L is happy. This does not have the same complexity or constituent structure as the proposition it makes true. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1) |
18359 | One proposition can be made true by many different facts [David] |
Full Idea: One proposition can be made true by many different facts (such as 'there are some happy dogs'). | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1) |
18361 | A reflexive relation entails that the relation can't be asymmetric [David] |
Full Idea: An asymmetric relation must be irreflexive: any case of aRa will yield a reductio of the assumption that R is asymmetric. | |
From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 4) |
16643 | Accidents always remain suited to a subject [Bonaventura] |
Full Idea: An accident's aptitudinal relationship to a subject is essential, and this is never taken away from accidents….for it is true to say that they are suited to a subject. | |
From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], IV.12.1.1.1c) | |
A reaction: This is the compromise view that allows accidents to be separated, for Transubstantiation, while acknowledging that we identify them with their subjects. |
16696 | Successive things reduce to permanent things [Bonaventura] |
Full Idea: Everything successive reduces to something permanent. | |
From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], II.2.1.1.3 ad 5), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.2 | |
A reaction: Avicenna first took successive entities seriously, but Bonaventure and Aquinas seem to have rejected them, or given reductive accounts of them. It resembles modern actualists versus modal realists. |
19701 | Fallibilism is consistent with dogmatism or scepticism, and is not alternative to them [Dougherty] |
Full Idea: There has been a tendency to treat fallibilism as an alternative to either dogmatism or scepticism. ...But it is much better to think of fallibilism as consistent with either dogmatism or skepticism. | |
From: Trent Dougherty (Fallibilism [2011], 'Closure') | |
A reaction: It seems perfectly reasonably to describe oneself as a 'fallibilist dogmatist' (perhaps from the Pope?), or a 'fallibilist sceptic' (perhaps from Peter Unger?), so this idea sounds correct. |
19700 | It is best to see the fallibility in the reasons, rather than in the agents or the knowledge [Dougherty] |
Full Idea: It seems best to take fallible reasons as the basic notion of fallibilism. So fallible knowers are agents who know what they know on the basis of fallible reasons. Fallible knowledge will be knowledge on basis of fallible reasons. | |
From: Trent Dougherty (Fallibilism [2011], 'Cognates') | |
A reaction: This is because an ideal knower would be compelled by the evidence, so if fallibilism is universal it must reside in the evidence and not in the knower (bottom p.131). |
19702 | We can't normally say that we know something 'but it might be false' [Dougherty] |
Full Idea: It will ordinarily be conversationally inappropriate to say 'I know that p, but p might be false' even if it is true, since this would mislead an interlocutor to infer that that possibility was an epistemically significant one. | |
From: Trent Dougherty (Fallibilism [2011], 'Epistemic') | |
A reaction: This seems to imply hypocrisy when a fallibilist philosopher claims (in non-philosophical company) to know something. Fair enough. Philosophers are in a permanent state of hypocrisy about what they are really thinking. That's the fun of it. |