Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Topics', 'A Subject with No Object' and 'Letters to Antoine Arnauld'

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

display all the ideas for this combination of texts


3 ideas

3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 1. Truth
The predicate is in the subject of a true proposition [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: In a true proposition the concept of the predicate is always present in the subject.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Antoine Arnauld [1686], 1686.07.4/14 X)
     A reaction: This sounds very like the Kantian notion of an analytic truth, but Leibniz is applying it to all truths. So Socrates must contain the predicate of running as part of his nature (or essence?), if 'Socrates runs' is to be true.
A truth is just a proposition in which the predicate is contained within the subject [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: In every true affirmative proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the concept of the predicate is in a sense included in that of the subject; the predicate is present in the subject; or else I do not know what truth is.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Antoine Arnauld [1686], 1686.07.4/14)
     A reaction: Why did he qualify this with "in a sense"? This is referred to as the 'concept containment theory of truth'. This is an odd view of the subject. If the truth is 'Peter fell down stairs', we don't usually think the concept of Peter contains such things.
3. Truth / H. Deflationary Truth / 2. Deflationary Truth
'True' is only occasionally useful, as in 'everything Fermat believed was true' [Burgess/Rosen]
     Full Idea: In the disquotational view of truth, what saves truth from being wholly redundant and so wholly useless, is mainly that it provides an ability to state generalisations like 'Everything Fermat believed was true'.
     From: JP Burgess / G Rosen (A Subject with No Object [1997], I.A.2.c)
     A reaction: Sounds like the thin end of the wedge. Presumably we can infer that the first thing Fermat believed on his last Christmas Day was true.