7 ideas
| 11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If a designated conclusion follows from the premisses, but the argument involves two howlers which cancel each other out, then the moral is that the path an argument takes from premisses to conclusion does matter to its logical evaluation. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], II) | |
| A reaction: The drift of this is that our view of logic should be a little closer to the reasoning of ordinary language, and we should rely a little less on purely formal accounts. |
| 11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If 'and' and 'but' really are alike in sense, in what might that likeness consist? Some philosophers of classical logic will reply that they share a sense by virtue of sharing a truth table. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000]) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard view which Rumfitt sets out to challenge. |
| 11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: A connective will possess the sense that it has by virtue of its competent users' finding certain rules of inference involving it to be primitively obvious. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], III) | |
| A reaction: Rumfitt cites Peacocke as endorsing this view, which characterises the logical connectives by their rules of usage rather than by their pure semantic value. |
| 9182 | Ancient names like 'Obadiah' depend on tradition, not on where the name originated [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: In the case of 'Obadiah', associated only with one act of writing a prophecy, ..it is the tradition which connects our use of the name with the man; where the actual name itself first came from has little to do with it. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Frege's Distinction of Sense and Reference [1975], p.256) | |
| A reaction: Excellent. This seems to me a much more accurate account of reference than the notion of a baptism. In the case of 'Homer', whether someone was ever baptised thus is of no importance to us. The tradition is everything. Also Shakespeare. |
| 9181 | The causal theory of reference can't distinguish just hearing a name from knowing its use [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The causal theory of reference, in a full-blown form, makes it impossible to distinguish between knowing the use of a proper name and simply having heard the name and recognising it as a name. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Frege's Distinction of Sense and Reference [1975], p.254) | |
| A reaction: None of these things are all-or-nothing. I have an inkling of how to use it once I realise it is a name. Of course you could be causally connected to a name and not even realise that it was a name, so something more is needed. |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |
| 2609 | If God's decrees are good, and this is not a mere tautology, then goodness is separate from God's decrees [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Theologians have always taught that God's decrees are good, and that this is not a mere tautology: it follows that goodness is logically independent of God's decrees. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Human Society in Ethics and Politics [1954], p.48) |