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Single Idea 18919

[filed under theme 3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 5. What Makes Truths / a. What makes truths ]

Full Idea

A false proposition is not made false by anything like a 'falsifying' fact. A false proposition simply fails to be made true by any fact.

Gist of Idea

There are no 'falsifying' facts, only an absence of truthmakers

Source

George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 4)

Book Ref

'The Old New Logic', ed/tr. Oderberg,David S. [MIT 2005], p.44


A Reaction

Sounds good. In truthmaker theory, one truth-value (T) is 'made', but the other one is not, so there is no symmetry between the two. Better to talk of T and not-T? See ideas on Excluded Middle.

Related Idea

Idea 17924 Excluded middle says P or not-P; bivalence says P is either true or false [Colyvan]


The 14 ideas from George Engelbretsen

Traditional term logic struggled to express relations [Engelbretsen]
Term logic rests on negated terms or denial, and that propositions are tied pairs [Engelbretsen]
Propositions can be analysed as pairs of terms glued together by predication [Engelbretsen]
Negating a predicate term and denying its unnegated version are quite different [Engelbretsen]
Standard logic only negates sentences, even via negated general terms or predicates [Engelbretsen]
Was logic a branch of mathematics, or mathematics a branch of logic? [Engelbretsen]
Existence and nonexistence are characteristics of the world, not of objects [Engelbretsen]
Facts are not in the world - they are properties of the world [Engelbretsen]
If facts are the truthmakers, they are not in the world [Engelbretsen]
There are no 'falsifying' facts, only an absence of truthmakers [Engelbretsen]
Terms denote objects with properties, and statements denote the world with that property [Engelbretsen]
'Socrates is wise' denotes a sentence; 'that Socrates is wise' denotes a proposition [Engelbretsen]
Individuals are arranged in inclusion categories that match our semantics [Engelbretsen]
Logical syntax is actually close to surface linguistic form [Engelbretsen]