Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Mahaprajnaparamitashastra', 'Is Hume's Principle analytic?' and 'Truth'

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4 ideas

3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 1. Correspondence Truth
True sentences says the appropriate descriptive thing on the appropriate demonstrative occasion [Austin,JL]
     Full Idea: A sentence is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it 'refers') is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions.
     From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], §3)
     A reaction: This is correspondence by convention rather than correspondence by mapping. Personally I prefer some sort of mapping account, despite all the difficulty and vagueness of specifying what maps onto what.
3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique
Correspondence theorists shouldn't think that a country has just one accurate map [Austin,JL]
     Full Idea: Correspondence theorists too often talk as one would who held that every map is either accurate or inaccurate; that every country can have but one accurate map.
     From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], n 24)
     A reaction: A well-made point, for those who intuitively hang on to correspondence as not only good common sense, but also some sort of salvation for a realist view of the world which might give us certainty in epistemology.
18. Thought / E. Abstraction / 7. Abstracta by Equivalence
An 'abstraction principle' says two things are identical if they are 'equivalent' in some respect [Boolos]
     Full Idea: Hume's Principle has a structure Boolos calls an 'abstraction principle'. Within the scope of two universal quantifiers, a biconditional connects an identity between two things and an equivalence relation. It says we don't care about other differences.
     From: George Boolos (Is Hume's Principle analytic? [1997]), quoted by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics 3.7
     A reaction: This seems to be the traditional principle of abstraction by ignoring some properties, but dressed up in the clothes of formal logic. Frege tries to eliminate psychology, but Boolos implies that what we 'care about' is relevant.
23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 3. Virtues / a. Virtues
The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna]
     Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom.
     From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88)
     A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate').