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Ideas for 'works', 'The Tarskian Turn' and 'Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus'

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3 ideas

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 8. Facts / b. Types of fact
We may believe in atomic facts, but surely not complex disjunctive ones? [Horsten]
     Full Idea: While positive and perhaps even negative atomic facts may be unproblematic, it seems excessive to commit oneself to the existence of logically complex facts such as disjunctive facts.
     From: Leon Horsten (The Tarskian Turn [2011], 02.1)
     A reaction: Presumably it is hard to deny that very complex statements involving massive disjunctions can be true or false. But why does commitment to real facts have to involve a huge ontology? The ontology is just the ingredients of the fact, isn't it?
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 10. Vagueness / f. Supervaluation for vagueness
In the supervaluationist account, disjunctions are not determined by their disjuncts [Horsten]
     Full Idea: If 'Britain is large' and 'Italy is large' lack truth values, then so must 'Britain or Italy is large' - so on the supervaluationist account the truth value of a disjunction is not determined by the truth values of its disjuncts.
     From: Leon Horsten (The Tarskian Turn [2011], 06.2)
     A reaction: Compare Idea 15362 to get the full picture here.
If 'Italy is large' lacks truth, so must 'Italy is not large'; but classical logic says it's large or it isn't [Horsten]
     Full Idea: If 'Italy is a large country' lacks a truth value, then so too, presumably, does 'Italy is not a large country'. But 'Italy is or is not a large country' is true, on the supervaluationist account, because it is a truth of classical propositional logic.
     From: Leon Horsten (The Tarskian Turn [2011], 06.2)
     A reaction: See also Idea 15363. He cites Fine 1975.