Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Writings from Late Notebooks' and 'Reference and Contingency'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these texts

display all the ideas for this combination of texts


4 ideas

10. Modality / A. Necessity / 2. Nature of Necessity
Something can be irrefutable; that doesn't make it true [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Something can be irrefutable; that doesn't make it true.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[247])
     A reaction: This is a warning to rationalists who are looking for strategies to demonstrate necessities a priori.
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
There are no necessary truths, but something must be held to be true [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: What's necessary is that something must be held to be true; not that something is true.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 09[38])
     A reaction: This may be right, but it doesn't follow that the truths we label as 'necessary' are the ones that we have to believe, or even that we have to believe that our chosen beliefs are necessary rather than contingent. Why did we pick those beliefs?
10. Modality / B. Possibility / 5. Contingency
'Superficial' contingency: false in some world; 'Deep' contingency: no obvious verification [Evans, by Macià/Garcia-Carpentiro]
     Full Idea: Evans says intuitively a sentence is 'superficially' contingent if the function from worlds to truth values assigns F to some world; it is 'deeply' contingent if understanding it does not guarantee that there is a verifying state of affairs.
     From: report of Gareth Evans (Reference and Contingency [1979]) by Macià/Garcia-Carpentiro - Introduction to 'Two-Dimensional Semantics' 2
     A reaction: This distinction is used by Davies and Humberstone (1980) to construct an early version of 2-D semantics (see under Language|Semantics). The point is that part comes from understanding it, and another part from assigning truth values.
10. Modality / E. Possible worlds / 3. Transworld Objects / b. Rigid designation
Rigid designators can be meaningful even if empty [Evans, by Mackie,P]
     Full Idea: Evans argues that there can be rigid designators that are meaningful even if empty.
     From: report of Gareth Evans (Reference and Contingency [1979]) by Penelope Mackie - How Things Might Have Been 1.8