4 ideas
| 23123 | Basic to human culture are binary oppositions, such as eating raw or cooked [Levi-Strauss, by Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Lévi-Strauss made canonic to French structuralism the idea that human culture could be understood through a series of binary oppositionsn - the difference between what could be eaten raw and what cooked being one of the most fundamental. | |
| From: report of Claude Lévi-Strauss (works [1950]) by T.H. Green - Prolegomena to Ethics 1 | |
| A reaction: My guess is that such oppositions can often be illuminating, but will always be eventually judged as too simplistic. |
| 2572 | Logical truth seems much less likely to 'correspond to the facts' than factual truth does [Haack] |
| Full Idea: It is surely less plausible to suppose that logical truth consists in correspondence to the facts than that 'factual' truth does. | |
| From: Susan Haack (Philosophy of Logics [1978], 7.6) |
| 2570 | The same sentence could be true in one language and meaningless in another, so truth is language-relative [Haack] |
| Full Idea: The definition of truth will have to be, Tarski argues, relative to a language, for one and the same sentence may be true in one language, and false or meaningless in another. | |
| From: Susan Haack (Philosophy of Logics [1978], 7.5) |
| 16861 | A false theory could hardly rival the explanatory power of natural selection [Darwin] |
| Full Idea: It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. | |
| From: Charles Darwin (The Origin of the Species [1859], p.476), quoted by Peter Lipton - Inference to the Best Explanation (2nd) 11 'The scientific' | |
| A reaction: More needs to be said, since the whims of God could explain absolutely everything (in a manner that would be somehow less that fully satisfying to the enquiring intellect). |