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Full Idea
While positive and perhaps even negative atomic facts may be unproblematic, it seems excessive to commit oneself to the existence of logically complex facts such as disjunctive facts.
Gist of Idea
We may believe in atomic facts, but surely not complex disjunctive ones?
Source
Leon Horsten (The Tarskian Turn [2011], 02.1)
Book Ref
Horsten,Leon: 'The Tarskian Turn' [MIT 2011], p.13
A Reaction
Presumably it is hard to deny that very complex statements involving massive disjunctions can be true or false. But why does commitment to real facts have to involve a huge ontology? The ontology is just the ingredients of the fact, isn't it?
Related Idea
Idea 15337 The correspondence 'theory' is too vague - about both 'correspondence' and 'facts' [Horsten]
| 21673 | There are simple and complex facts; the latter depend on further facts [Chrysippus, by Cicero] |
| 18376 | Russell asserts atomic, existential, negative and general facts [Russell, by Armstrong] |
| 18737 | There are no positive or negative facts; these are just the forms of propositions [Wittgenstein] |
| 15201 | That Queen Anne is dead is a 'general fact', not a fact about Queen Anne [Prior,AN] |
| 17688 | Negative facts are supervenient on positive facts, suggesting they are positive facts [Armstrong] |
| 8163 | Since 'no bird here' and 'no squirrel here' seem the same, we must talk of 'atomic' facts [Dummett] |
| 6075 | Facts are object-plus-extension, or property-plus-set-of-properties, or object-plus-property [McGinn] |
| 19322 | Why can there not be disjunctive, conditional and negative facts? [Kirkham] |
| 15071 | Tensed and tenseless sentences state two sorts of fact, which belong to two different 'realms' of reality [Fine,K] |
| 10367 | There is only one fact - the True [Schaffer,J] |
| 15338 | We may believe in atomic facts, but surely not complex disjunctive ones? [Horsten] |
| 17293 | Worldly facts are obtaining states of affairs, with constituents; conceptual facts also depend on concepts [Audi,P] |