Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism', 'Critical Common-Sensism' and 'Philosophy of Logics'

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6 ideas

3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique
Logical truth seems much less likely to 'correspond to the facts' than factual truth does [Haack]
     Full Idea: It is surely less plausible to suppose that logical truth consists in correspondence to the facts than that 'factual' truth does.
     From: Susan Haack (Philosophy of Logics [1978], 7.6)
3. Truth / F. Semantic Truth / 1. Tarski's Truth / a. Tarski's truth definition
The same sentence could be true in one language and meaningless in another, so truth is language-relative [Haack]
     Full Idea: The definition of truth will have to be, Tarski argues, relative to a language, for one and the same sentence may be true in one language, and false or meaningless in another.
     From: Susan Haack (Philosophy of Logics [1978], 7.5)
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / e. Vague objects
Vagueness is a neglected but important part of mathematical thought [Peirce]
     Full Idea: Logicians have too much neglected the study of vagueness, not suspecting the important part it plays in mathematical thought. It is the antithetical analogue of generality.
     From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Critical Common-Sensism [1905], I)
All communication is vague, and is outside the principle of non-contradiction [Peirce]
     Full Idea: The 'vague' might be defined as that to which the principle of contradiction does not apply. For it is false neither that an animal (in a vague sense) is male, nor that an animal is female. No communication between persons can be entirely non-vague.
     From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Critical Common-Sensism [1905], I)
     A reaction: Note that he makes vagueness largely a matter of the way we talk, which is David Lewis's approach, and looks right to me.
13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 6. Contextual Justification / a. Contextualism
Contextualism needs a semantics for knowledge sentences that are partly indexical [Schiffer,S]
     Full Idea: Contextualist semantics must capture the 'indexical' nature of knowledge claims, the fact that different utterances of a knowledge sentence with no apparent indexical terms can express different propositions.
     From: Stephen Schiffer (Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism [1996], p.325), quoted by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.5
     A reaction: Schiffer tries to show that this is too difficult, and DeRose defends contextualism against the charge.
The indexical aspect of contextual knowledge might be hidden, or it might be in what 'know' means [Schiffer,S]
     Full Idea: One might have a 'hidden-indexical' theory of knowledge sentences: they contain constituents that are not the semantic values of any terms; ...or 'to know' itself might be indexical, as in 'I know[easy] I have hands' or 'I know[tough] I have hands'.
     From: Stephen Schiffer (Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism [1996], p.326-7), quoted by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.5
     A reaction: [very compressed] Given the choice, I would have thought it was in 'know', since to say 'either you know p or you don't' sounds silly to me.