7 ideas
| 13157 | Choose the true hypothesis, which is the most intelligible one [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: One should choose the more intelligible hypothesis, and the truth is nothing but its intelligibility. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Copernicanism and Relativity of Motion [1689], p.91) | |
| A reaction: This apparently simple observation strikes me as being rather profound. Our picture of the world is shaped entirely by what is intelligible to us. An odd notion of truth, though. The age of reason. See Idea 13158. |
| 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. |
| 13158 | The Copernican theory is right because it is the only one offering a good explanation [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The Copernican account is the truest theory, that is, the most intelligible theory and the only one capable of an explanation sufficient for a person of sound reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Copernicanism and Relativity of Motion [1689], p.92) | |
| A reaction: The word 'intelligible' here seems to be linked to the notion of a best explanation. |
| 14739 | 'Water' is two-dimensionally inconstant, with different intensions in different worlds [Chalmers, by Sider] |
| Full Idea: For Chalmers, 'water' is two-dimensionally inconstant, in that it has different secondary intensions relative to different worlds of utterance. | |
| From: report of David J.Chalmers (Foundations of Two-Dimensional Semantics [2006]) by Theodore Sider - Four Dimensionalism 7.2 | |
| A reaction: In this way 'water' is regarded as being like an indexical (such as 'I'), which has a fixed meaning component, and a second component which varies with different utterances. Maybe. |
| 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). |