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Ideas for 'Theaetetus', 'Vagueness and Contradiction' and 'Summa totius logicae'

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4 ideas

3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 6. Making Negative Truths
If nothing exists, no truthmakers could make 'Nothing exists' true [Sorensen]
     Full Idea: If nothing exists, then there are no truthmakers that could make 'Nothing exists' true.
     From: Roy Sorensen (Vagueness and Contradiction [2001], 11.2)
     A reaction: [He cites David Lewis] We may be confusing truth with facts. I take facts to be independent of minds, but truth only makes sense as a concept in the presence of minds which are endeavouring to think well.
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 12. Rejecting Truthmakers
Which toothbrush is the truthmaker for 'buy one, get one free'? [Sorensen]
     Full Idea: If I buy two toothbrushes on a 'buy one, get one free' offer, which one did I buy and which one did I get free? Those who believe that each contingent truth has a truthmaker are forced to believe that 'buy one, get one free' is false.
     From: Roy Sorensen (Vagueness and Contradiction [2001], 11.6)
     A reaction: Nice. There really is no fact of which toothbrush is the free one. The underlying proposition must presumably be 'two for the price of one'. But you could hardly fault the first slogan under the Trades Descriptions Act.
3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 1. Correspondence Truth
A proposition is true if its subject and predicate stand for the same thing [William of Ockham]
     Full Idea: If in the proposition 'This is an angel' subject and predicate stand for the same thing, the proposition is true.
     From: William of Ockham (Summa totius logicae [1323], II.c.ii)
     A reaction: An interesting statement of what looks like a correspondence theory, employing the idea that both the subject and the predicate have a reference. I think Frege would say that 'x is an angel' is unsaturated, and so lacks reference.
3. Truth / G. Axiomatic Truth / 1. Axiomatic Truth
Ockham had an early axiomatic account of truth [William of Ockham, by Halbach]
     Full Idea: Theories structurally very similar to axiomatic compositional theories of truth can be found in Ockham's 'Summa Logicae'.
     From: report of William of Ockham (Summa totius logicae [1323]) by Volker Halbach - Axiomatic Theories of Truth 3