display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 9001 | Frege moved Kant's question about a priori synthetic to 'how is logical certainty possible?' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: When Kant's arithmetical examples of a priori synthetic judgements were sweepingly disqualified by Frege's reduction of arithmetic to logic, attention moved to the less tendentious and logically prior question 'How is logical certainty possible?' | |
| From: Willard Quine (Carnap and Logical Truth [1954], I) | |
| A reaction: A nice summary of the story so far, from someone who should know. This still leaves the question open of whether any synthetic truths can be derived from the logical certainties which are available. |
| 20790 | A proposition is possible if it is true when nothing stops it being true [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: That proposition is possible which admits of being true, if external factors do not prevent it from being true, for example, 'Diocles is alive'. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.75 | |
| A reaction: Well that's different. So every unprevented possibility will occur tomorrow. Any possibility that does not occur tomorrow must have been prevented in some way. Whatever does occur prevents innumerable other things from occurring. Your turn… |
| 20789 | Conditionals are false if the falsehood of the conclusion does not conflict with the antecedent [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: A conditional is true if the opposite of the conclusion conflicts with the antecedent, and false if it doesn't conflict. Thus 'If it is day, Dion is walking' is false, because 'Dion is not walking' does not conflict with 'It is day'. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.73 | |
| A reaction: For the two to conflict there must be some connection in subject matter, which is not the case if the mere falsehood of the conclusion (from a true premise) falsifies the conditional. This seems like a rather good account. |