36 ideas
| 7623 | For ancient Greeks being wise was an ethical value [Putnam] |
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
| 4714 | Putnam's epistemic notion of truth replaces the realism of correspondence with ontological relativism [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 7617 | Before Kant, all philosophers had a correspondence theory of truth [Putnam] |
| 4716 | The correspondence theory is wrong, because there is no one correspondence between reality and fact [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 7616 | Truth is an idealisation of rational acceptability [Putnam] |
| 8081 | 'No councillors are bankers' and 'All bankers are athletes' implies 'Some athletes are not councillors' [Devlin] |
| 8085 | Modern propositional inference replaces Aristotle's 19 syllogisms with modus ponens [Devlin] |
| 8086 | Predicate logic retains the axioms of propositional logic [Devlin] |
| 8091 | Situation theory is logic that takes account of context [Devlin] |
| 8087 | Golden ages: 1900-1960 for pure logic, and 1950-1985 for applied logic [Devlin] |
| 8089 | Montague's intensional logic incorporated the notion of meaning [Devlin] |
| 8082 | Where a conditional is purely formal, an implication implies a link between premise and conclusion [Devlin] |
| 8072 | Sentences of apparent identical form can have different contextual meanings [Devlin] |
| 14203 | Intension is not meaning, as 'cube' and 'square-faced polyhedron' are intensionally the same [Putnam] |
| 14207 | If cats equal cherries, model theory allows reinterpretation of the whole language preserving truth [Putnam] |
| 8075 | Space and time are atomic in the arrow, and divisible in the tortoise [Devlin] |
| 14214 | If we try to cure the abundance of theories with causal links, this is 'just more theory' [Putnam, by Lewis] |
| 14205 | The sentence 'A cat is on a mat' remains always true when 'cat' means cherry and 'mat' means tree [Putnam] |
| 7610 | A fact is simply what it is rational to accept [Putnam] |
| 7618 | Very nominalistic philosophers deny properties, though scientists accept them [Putnam] |
| 16209 | How can point-duration slices of people have beliefs or desires? [Thomson] |
| 4718 | If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 8088 | People still say the Hopi have no time concepts, despite Whorf's later denial [Devlin] |
| 7620 | Some kind of objective 'rightness' is a presupposition of thought itself [Putnam] |
| 14204 | Naïve operationalism would have meanings change every time the tests change [Putnam] |
| 7611 | Rationality is one part of our conception of human flourishing [Putnam] |
| 14200 | 'Water' on Twin Earth doesn't refer to water, but no mental difference can account for this [Putnam] |
| 7612 | Reference is social not individual, because we defer to experts when referring to elm trees [Putnam] |
| 7613 | Concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences [Putnam] |
| 14202 | Neither individual nor community mental states fix reference [Putnam] |
| 14201 | Maybe the total mental state of a language community fixes the reference of a term [Putnam] |
| 8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
| 8076 | The distinction between sentences and abstract propositions is crucial in logic [Devlin] |
| 14206 | There are infinitely many interpretations of a sentence which can all seem to be 'correct' [Putnam] |
| 7624 | The word 'inconsiderate' nicely shows the blurring of facts and values [Putnam] |