18 ideas
| 6334 | The function of the truth predicate? Understanding 'true'? Meaning of 'true'? The concept of truth? A theory of truth? [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: We must distinguish the function of the truth predicate, what it is to understand 'true', the meaning of 'true', grasping the concept of truth, and a theory of truth itself. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.8) | |
| A reaction: It makes you feel tired to think about it. Presumably every other philosophical analysis has to do this many jobs. Clearly Horwich wants to propose one account which will do all five jobs. Personally I don't believe these five are really distinct. |
| 6342 | Some correspondence theories concern facts; others are built up through reference and satisfaction [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: One correspondence theory (e.g. early Wittgenstein) concerns representations and facts; alternatively (Tarski, Davidson) the category of fact is eschewed, and the truth of sentences or propositions is built out of relations of reference and satisfaction. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.7.35) | |
| A reaction: A helpful distinction. Clearly the notion of a 'fact' is an elusive one ("how many facts are there in this room?"), so it seems quite promising to say that the parts of the sentence correspond, rather than the whole thing. |
| 6332 | The common-sense theory of correspondence has never been worked out satisfactorily [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The common-sense notion that truth is a kind of 'correspondence with the facts' has never been worked out to anyone's satisfaction. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I've put this in to criticise it. Philosophy can't work by rejecting theories which can't be 'worked out', and accepting theories (like Tarski's) because they can be 'worked out'. All our theories will end up minimal, and defiant of common sense. |
| 6335 | The redundancy theory cannot explain inferences from 'what x said is true' and 'x said p', to p [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The redundancy theory is unable to account for the inference from "Oscar's claim is true" and "Oscar's claim is that snow is white" to "the proposition 'that snow is white' is true", and hence to "snow is white". | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.9) | |
| A reaction: Earlier objections appealed to the fact that the word 'true' seemed to have a use in ordinary speech, but this seems a much stronger one. In general, showing the role of a term in making inferences pins it down better than ordinary speech does. |
| 6344 | Truth is a useful concept for unarticulated propositions and generalisations about them [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: All uses of the truth predicate are explained by the hypothesis that its entire raison d'être is to help us say things about unarticulated propositions, and in particular to express generalisations about them. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Concl) | |
| A reaction: This certain is a very deflationary notion of truth. Articulated propositions are considered to stand on their own two feet, without need of 'is true'. He makes truth sound like a language game, though. Personally I prefer to mention reality. |
| 6336 | No deflationary conception of truth does justice to the fact that we aim for truth [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: It has been suggested that no deflationary conception of truth could do justice to the fact that we aim for the truth. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.11) | |
| A reaction: (He mentions Dummett and Wright). People don't only aim for it - they become very idealistic about it, and sometimes die for it. Personally I think that any study of truth should use as its example police investigations, not philosophical analysis. |
| 23299 | Horwich's deflationary view is novel, because it relies on propositions rather than sentences [Horwich, by Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Horwich's brave and striking move is to make the primary bearers of truth propositions - not exactly a new idea in itself, but new in the context of a serious attempt to defend deflationism. | |
| From: report of Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990]) by Donald Davidson - The Folly of Trying to Define Truth p.30 | |
| A reaction: Davidson rejects propositions because they can't be individuated, but I totally accept propositions. I'm puzzled why this would produce a deflationist theory, since I think it points to a much more robust view. |
| 6337 | The deflationary picture says believing a theory true is a trivial step after believing the theory [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: According to the deflationary picture, believing that a theory is true is a trivial step beyond believing the theory. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.2.17) | |
| A reaction: What has gone wrong with this picture is that you cannot (it seems to me) give a decent account of belief without mentioning truth. To believe a proposition is to hold it true. Hume's emotional account (Idea 2208) makes belief bewildering. |
| 6339 | Logical form is the aspects of meaning that determine logical entailments [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The logical forms of the sentences in a language are those aspects of their meanings that determine the relations of deductive entailment holding amongst them. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.6.30) | |
| A reaction: A helpful definition. Not all sentences, therefore, need to have a 'logical form'. Is the logical form the same as the underlying proposition. The two must converge, given that propositions lack the ambiguity that is often found in sentences. |
| 17447 | Parsons says counting is tagging as first, second, third..., and converting the last to a cardinal [Parsons,C, by Heck] |
| Full Idea: In Parsons's demonstrative model of counting, '1' means the first, and counting says 'the first, the second, the third', where one is supposed to 'tag' each object exactly once, and report how many by converting the last ordinal into a cardinal. | |
| From: report of Charles Parsons (Frege's Theory of Numbers [1965]) by Richard G. Heck - Cardinality, Counting and Equinumerosity 3 | |
| A reaction: This sounds good. Counting seems to rely on that fact that numbers can be both ordinals and cardinals. You don't 'convert' at the end, though, because all the way you mean 'this cardinality in this order'. |
| 12432 | Explanation of necessity must rest on something necessary or something contingent [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The dilemma is that to give the ultimate source of any necessity, we must either appeal to something which could not have been otherwise (i.e. is itself necessary), or advert to something which could have been otherwise (i.e. is itself merely contingent). | |
| From: Bob Hale (The Source of Necessity [2002], p.301) | |
| A reaction: [Hale is summarising Blackburn's view, and going on to disagree with it] Hale looks for a third way, but Blackburn seems to face us with quite a plausible dilemma. |
| 12434 | Why is this necessary, and what is necessity in general; why is this necessary truth true, and why necessary? [Hale] |
| Full Idea: We must distinguish between explaining particular necessities and explaining necessity in general; and we ought to distinguish between explaining, in regard to any necessary truth, why it is true, and explaining why it is necessary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (The Source of Necessity [2002], p.308) | |
| A reaction: Useful. The pluralist view I associate with Fine says we can explain types of necessity, but not necessity in general. If we seek truthmakers, there is a special case of what adds the necessity to the truth. |
| 12435 | The explanation of a necessity can be by a truth (which may only happen to be a necessary truth) [Hale] |
| Full Idea: My claim is that there are non-transitive explanations of necessities, where what explains is indeed necessary, but what explains the necessity of the explanandum is not the explanation's necessity, but its truth simpliciter. | |
| From: Bob Hale (The Source of Necessity [2002], p.311) | |
| A reaction: The big idea is to avoid a regress of necessities. The actual truths he proposes are essentialist. An interesting proposal. It might depend on how one views essences (as giving identity, or causal power) |
| 12433 | If necessity rests on linguistic conventions, those are contingent, so there is no necessity [Hale] |
| Full Idea: If the alleged necessity, e,g, 2+2=4, really does depend upon a convention governing the use of the words in which we state it, and the existence of that convention is merely a contingent matter, then it can't after all be necessary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (The Source of Necessity [2002], p.302) | |
| A reaction: [Hale is citing Blackburn for this claim] Hale suggests replies, by keeping truth and meaning separate, and involving laws of logic. Blackburn clearly has a good point. |
| 12436 | Concept-identities explain how we know necessities, not why they are necessary [Hale] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me that identity-relations among concepts have more to do with explaining how we know that vixens are female foxes etc., than with explaining why it is necessary, and, more generally, with explaining why some necessities are knowable a priori. | |
| From: Bob Hale (The Source of Necessity [2002], P.313) | |
| A reaction: Hale rejects the conceptual and conventional accounts of necessity, in favour of the essentialist view. This strikes me as a good suggestion of Hale's, since I agree with him about the essentialism. |
| 6338 | We could know the truth-conditions of a foreign sentence without knowing its meaning [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: Someone who does not understand German and is told 'Schnee ist weiss' is true if frozen H2O is white, does not understand the German sentence, even though he knows the truth-conditions. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.5.22 n1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a powerful objection to Davidson's well-known claim that meaning is truth-conditions. Horwich likes the idea that meaning is use, but I think a similar objection arises - you can use a sentence well without knowing its meaning. |
| 6340 | There are Fregean de dicto propositions, and Russellian de re propositions, or a mixture [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: There are pure, Fregean, abstract, de dicto propositions, in which a compositional structure is filled only with senses; there are pure, Russellian, concrete, de re propositions, which are filled with referents; and there are mixed propositions. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.6.31) | |
| A reaction: Once Frege has distinguished sense from reference, this distinction of propositions is likely to follow. The current debate over the internalist and externalist accounts of concepts seems to continue the debate. A mixed strategy sounds good. |
| 6341 | Right translation is a mapping of languages which preserves basic patterns of usage [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: The right translation between words of two languages is the mapping that preserves basic patterns of usage - where usage is characterised non-semantically, in terms of circumstances of application, assertibility conditions and inferential role. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Truth (2nd edn) [1990], Ch.6.32) | |
| A reaction: It still strikes me that if you ask why a piece of language is used in a certain way, you find yourself facing something deeper about meaning than mere usage. Horwich cites Wittgenstein and Quine in his support. Could a machine pass his test? |