Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Guide to Ground' and 'Reasoning and the Logic of Things'

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4 ideas

3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 6. Verisimilitude
The one unpardonable offence in reasoning is to block the route to further truth [Peirce]
     Full Idea: To set up a philosophy which barricades the road of further advance toward the truth is the one unpardonable offence in reasoning.
     From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Reasoning and the Logic of Things [1898], IV)
     A reaction: This is Popper's rather dubious objection to essentialism in science. Yet Popper tried to do the same thing with his account of induction.
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 3. Truthmaker Maximalism
Truths need not always have their source in what exists [Fine,K]
     Full Idea: There is no reason in principle why the ultimate source of what is true should always lie in what exists.
     From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.03)
     A reaction: This seems to be the weak point of the truthmaker theory, since truths about non-existence are immediately in trouble. Saying reality makes things true is one thing, but picking out a specific bit of it for each truth is not so easy.
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 7. Making Modal Truths
If the truth-making relation is modal, then modal truths will be grounded in anything [Fine,K]
     Full Idea: The truth-making relation is usually explicated in modal terms, ...but this lets in far too much. Any necessary truth will be grounded by anything. ...The fact that singleton Socrates exists will be a truth-maker for the proposition that Socrates exists.
     From: Kit Fine (Guide to Ground [2012], 1.03)
     A reaction: If truth-makers are what has to 'exist' for something to be true, then maybe nothing must exist for a necessity to be true - in which case it has no truth maker. Or maybe 2 and 4 must 'exist' for 2+2=4?
3. Truth / E. Pragmatic Truth / 1. Pragmatic Truth
'Holding for true' is either practical commitment, or provisional theory [Peirce]
     Full Idea: Whether or not 'truth' has two meanings, I think 'holding for true' has two kinds. One is practical holding for true which alone is entitled to the name of Belief; the other is the acceptance of a proposition, which in pure science is always provisional.
     From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Reasoning and the Logic of Things [1898], IV)
     A reaction: The problem here seems to be that we can act on a proposition without wholly believing it, like walking across thin ice.