display all the ideas for this combination of texts
14 ideas
14992 | We don't care about plain truth, but truth in joint-carving terms [Sider] |
Full Idea: What we care about is truth in joint-carving terms, not just truth. | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 04.5) | |
A reaction: The thought is that it matters what conceptual scheme is used to express the truth (the 'ideology'). Truths can be true but uninformative or unexplanatory. |
18369 | There are at least fourteen candidates for truth-bearers [Kirkham] |
Full Idea: Among the candidates [for truthbearers] are beliefs, propositions, judgments, assertions, statements, theories, remarks, ideas, acts of thought, utterances, sentence tokens, sentence types, sentences (unspecified), and speech acts. | |
From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 2.3) | |
A reaction: I vote for propositions, but only in the sense of the thoughts underlying language, not the Russellian things which are supposed to exist independently from thinkers. |
10910 | The best account of truth-making is isomorphism [Wittgenstein, by Mulligan/Simons/Smith] |
Full Idea: The most sophisticated account of truth-making to have appeared to date is the 'isomorphism' theory of the Tractatus. | |
From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]) by Mulligan/Simons/Smith - Truth-makers §5 | |
A reaction: Wittgenstein's theory is clearly closely related to Russell's 'congruence' theory of correspondence of around 1912. |
15012 | Orthodox truthmaker theories make entities fundamental, but that is poor for explanation [Sider] |
Full Idea: According to the entrenched truthmaker theorist, the fundamental facts consist just of facts citing the existence of entities. It's hard to see how all the complexity we experience could possibly be explained from that sparse basis. | |
From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 08.5) | |
A reaction: This may be the 'entrenched' truthmaker view, but it is not clear why there could not be more complicated fundamental truthmakers, with structure as well as entities. And powers. |
23462 | He says the world is the facts because it is the facts which fix all the truths [Wittgenstein, by Morris,M] |
Full Idea: Wittgenstein is thinking of the world as what makes truths true. …To get all the truths fixed we need more than the things: we need, as it were, the way things are - that is to say, the facts. | |
From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 1.12) by Michael Morris - Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus 1 | |
A reaction: Morris says this is 'sometimes suggested'. It strikes me as plausible, and makes LW a key source for the modern truthmaker idea. Perhaps in David Lewis's version of it. The facts include the relations and processes of the things. |
18349 | All truths have truth-makers, but only atomic truths correspond to them [Wittgenstein, by Rami] |
Full Idea: In 1922 Wittgenstein said that every truth has a truth-maker, but only atomic truths correspond to their truth-makers. | |
From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]) by Adolph Rami - Introduction: Truth and Truth-Making note 04 | |
A reaction: Presumably this is what logical atomism is meant to be (cf Russell). The atomic sentences plug into the world, and the rest are constructions from them, making the latter more remote from the truth-makers. |
10967 | Wittgenstein's picture theory is the best version of the correspondence theory of truth [Read on Wittgenstein] |
Full Idea: Wittgenstein's picture theory is without doubt the best thought-out and developed of all the versions of the correspondence theory of truth. | |
From: comment on Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]) by Stephen Read - Thinking About Logic Ch.1 |
7087 | Language is [propositions-elementary propositions-names]; reality is [facts-states of affairs-objects] [Wittgenstein, by Grayling] |
Full Idea: Language consists in propositions, which are made of 'elementary' propositions, which are based ultimately on names. This matches the world of facts, compounded out of 'states of affairs', which are compounded of objects. | |
From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]) by A.C. Grayling - Wittgenstein Ch.2 | |
A reaction: This is Grayling's summary of the basic idea of the 'Tractatus'. The whole thing seems to be an elaborate version of Russell's 'congruence' account of the correspondence theory of truth. Later Wittgenstein is loss of faith in this theory. |
4702 | The account of truth in the 'Tractatus' seems a perfect example of the correspondence theory [Wittgenstein, by O'Grady] |
Full Idea: Wittgenstein's account in the 'Tractatus' is often taken as a paradigm instance of a sophisticated correspondence theory of truth. | |
From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.2 | |
A reaction: This might explain why I am so much more drawn to the 'Tractatus' than to the later relativistic anti-philosophical mind-eliminitavist, meaning-eliminativist Wittgenstein. |
7056 | Pictures reach out to or feel reality, touching at the edges, correlating in its parts [Wittgenstein] |
Full Idea: A picture attaches to reality by reaching out to it; it is laid against reality like a measure; only the end-points actually touch the object; the pictorial relationship consists of correlations of picture's elements with things, the picture's feelers. | |
From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 2.1511-5) | |
A reaction: (somewhat compressed). This is Wittgenstein's so-called 'picture theory' of meaning (replaced later by 'meaning is use'). It is perhaps better seen as an account of the correspondence theory of truth. Compare Russell's 'congruence' view (Idea 5427). |
23483 | Proposition elements correlate with objects, but the whole picture does not correspond to a fact [Wittgenstein, by Morris,M] |
Full Idea: Correlation need only be between elements of the picture and things in reality; it is not also required that there be a correspondence between the picture as a whole and a fact in reality - so things can be depicted falsely. | |
From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 2.15121) by Michael Morris - Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus 3C | |
A reaction: To turn his picture theory into a correspondence theory of truth would need a further step, of saying the proposition is true when the two structures coincide. I don't think LW says that. |
19318 | A 'sequence' of objects is an order set of them [Kirkham] |
Full Idea: A 'sequence' of objects is like a set of objects, except that, unlike a set, the order of the objects is important when dealing with sequences. ...An infinite sequence satisfies 'x2 is purple' if and only if the second member of the sequence is purple. | |
From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
A reaction: This explains why Tarski needed set theory in his metalanguage. |
19319 | If one sequence satisfies a sentence, they all do [Kirkham] |
Full Idea: If one sequence satisfies a sentence, they all do. ...Thus it matters not whether we define truth as satisfaction by some sequence or as satisfaction by all sequences. | |
From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.4) | |
A reaction: So if the striker scores a goal, the team has scored a goal. |
19320 | If we define truth by listing the satisfactions, the supply of predicates must be finite [Kirkham] |
Full Idea: Because the definition of satisfaction must have a separate clause for each predicate, Tarski's method only works for languages with a finite number of predicates, ...but natural languages have an infinite number of predicates. | |
From: Richard L. Kirkham (Theories of Truth: a Critical Introduction [1992], 5.5) | |
A reaction: He suggest predicates containing natural numbers, as examples of infinite predicates. Davidson tried to extend the theory to natural languages, by (I think) applying it to adverbs, which could generate the infinite predicates. Maths has finite predicates. |