Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'On Being (frags)', 'Making It Explicit' and 'Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow'

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2 ideas

3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 2. Correspondence to Facts
Facts can't make claims true, because they are true claims [Brandom, by Kusch]
     Full Idea: Brandom says that facts do not make claims true, because facts simply are true claims.
     From: report of Robert B. Brandom (Making It Explicit [1994], p.327) by Martin Kusch - Knowledge by Agreement Ch.18
     A reaction: Nice. Notoriously, anyone defending the correspondence theory of truth in terms of facts had better say what they mean by a 'fact'. Personally I take a fact to be a non-verbal, mind-independent situation in the world, so I disagree with Brandom.
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 5. Direction of causation
There are few traces of an event before it happens, but many afterwards [Lewis, by Horwich]
     Full Idea: Lewis claims that most events are over-determined by subsequent states of the world, but not by their history. That is, the future of every event contains many independent traces of its occurrence, with little prior indication that it would happen.
     From: report of David Lewis (Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow [1979]) by Paul Horwich - Lewis's Programme p.209
     A reaction: Lewis uses this asymmetry to deduce the direction of causation, and hence the direction of time. Most people (including me, I think) would prefer to use the axiomatic direction of time to deduce directions of causation. Lewis was very wicked.