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Full Idea
The current fashion among logicians of taking sentences to be the bearers of truth and falsity indicates less an agreement on philosophical theory than a desire for rigor and smoothness in calculative practice.
Gist of Idea
Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons
Source
Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 01)
Book Ref
Cartwright,Richard: 'Philosophical Essays' [MIT 1987], p.33
A Reaction
A remark close to my heart. Propositions are rejected first because language offers hope of answers, then because they seem metaphysically odd, and finally because you can't pin them down rigorously. But the blighters won't lie down and die.
| 13941 | Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R] |
| 13942 | Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R] |
| 13943 | We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R] |
| 13944 | We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R] |
| 13946 | To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R] |
| 13947 | 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R] |
| 13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
| 13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |
| 13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
| 13945 | A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R] |