display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 20787 | A proposition is what can be asserted or denied on its own [Chrysippus] |
| Full Idea: A proposition is what can be asserted or denied on its own, for example, 'It is day' or 'Dion is walking'. | |
| From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.65 | |
| A reaction: Note the phrase 'on its own'. If you say 'it is day and Dion is walking', that can't be denied on its own, because first the two halves must each be evaluated, so presumably that doesn't count as a stoic proposition. |
| 9654 | A proposition is a set of entire possible worlds which instantiate a particular property [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I identify propositions with certain properties - namely, with those that are instantiated only by entire possible worlds. Then if properties generally are the sets of their instances, a proposition is a set of possible worlds. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't get this. How can the proposition that tomatoes are edible be an entire set of possible worlds? The proposition seems to be about tomatoes, and nothing else. Should we talk of 'possibilities', rather than of 'possible worlds'? |
| 15736 | A proposition is the property of being a possible world where it holds true [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I identify propositions with properties that are instantiated only by entire possible worlds. If properties are the sets of their instances, a proposition is a set of possible worlds. A proposition is the property of being a world where it holds. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: This is so far away from my concept of a proposition (as a truth-evaluable representational mental event) that I struggle to compute it. So the proposition that I am sitting here is the property of 'being the actual world'. Eh? |
| 15738 | Propositions can't have syntactic structure if they are just sets of worlds [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If it is central to 'proposition' that there be quasi-syntactic structure, so that there are subject-predicate, or negative, or conjunctive, or quantified propositions, then sets of possible worlds will not do. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: He proposes 'more complicated set-theoretic constructions out of possibilia' instead. I am very much committed to propositions having quasi-syntactic structure. |