Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'The Philosophy of Philosophy' and 'Aquinas, Thomas'

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

display all the ideas for this combination of texts


3 ideas

3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 2. Correspondence to Facts
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.
3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique
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.
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.