display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 5651 | Traditional views of truth are tautologies, and truth is empty without a subject [Kierkegaard, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Kierkegaard developed the idea of 'truth as subjectivity'; the traditional conceptions of truth - correspondence or coherence - he regarded as equally empty, not because false, but because tautologous; truth ceases to be empty when related to a subject. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.13 | |
| A reaction: It strikes me that the correspondence theory of truth also involves a subject. If you become too obsessed with the subject, you lose the concept of truth. You need a concept of the non-subject too. Truth concerns the contents of thought. |
| 21388 | The causes of future true events must exist now, so they will happen because of destiny [Chrysippus, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: True future events cannot be such as do not possess causes on account of which they will happen; therefore that which is true must possess causes: and so, when the [true future events] happen they will have happened as a result of destiny. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 9.23-8 | |
| A reaction: [exact ref unclear] Presumably the current causes are the truthmakers for the future events, and so the past is the truthmaker of the future, if you are a determinist. |
| 20780 | Graspable presentations are criteria of facts, and are molded according to their objects [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Of presentations, some are graspable, some non-graspable. The graspable presentation, which they say is the criterion of facts [pragmata], is that which comes from an existing object and is stamped and molded in accordance wth the existing object itself. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.46 | |
| A reaction: [in lost Physics Bk 2] The big modern anguish over truth-as-correspondence is how you are supposed to verify the 'accordance'. This idea seems to blur the ideas of truth and justification (the 'criterion'), and you can't have both as accordance. |
| 20793 | How could you ever know that the presentation is similar to the object? [Sext.Empiricus on Chrysippus] |
| Full Idea: One cannot say that the soul grasps the externally existing objects by means of the states of the senses on the basis of the similarity of these states to the externally existing objects. For on what basis will it know the similarity? | |
| From: comment on Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Outlines of Pyrrhonism 2.74 | |
| A reaction: This exactly the main modern reason for rejecting the correspondence theory of truth. You are welcome to affirm a robust view of truth, but supporting it by claiming a correspondence or resemblance is dubious. |
| 9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Even if talk of truth as correspondence to the facts is metaphorical, it is a bad metaphor for analytic truth in a way that it is not for synthetic truth. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: A very simple and rather powerful point. Maybe the word 'truth' should be withheld from such cases. You might say that accepted analytic truths are 'conventional'. If that is wrong, then they correspond to natural facts at a high level of abstraction. |