Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Truth' and 'Truth-making and Correspondence'

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16 ideas

3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 2. Defining Truth
If truths are just identical with facts, then truths will make themselves true [David]
     Full Idea: According to the identity theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it is identical with a fact. ...This leads to the unacceptable claim that every true proposition makes itself true (because it is identical to its fact).
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], n 14)
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 2. Truthmaker Relation
Examples show that truth-making is just non-symmetric, not asymmetric [David]
     Full Idea: That 'there is at least one proposition' ...is a case where something makes itself true, which generates a counterexample to the natural assumption that truth-making is asymmetric; truth-making, it seems, is merely non-symmetric.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 4)
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 4. Truthmaker Necessitarianism
It is assumed that a proposition is necessarily true if its truth-maker exists [David]
     Full Idea: Friends of the truth-maker principle usually hold that the following states a crucial necessary condition on truth-making: if x makes y true, then, necessarily, if x exists then y is true.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 2)
     A reaction: My objection is that the proposition y is taken to pre-exist, primly awaiting the facts that will award it 'truth'. An ontology that contains an infinity of propositions, most of which so far lack a truth-value, is incoherent. You can have x, but no y!
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 5. What Makes Truths / a. What makes truths
Two different propositions can have the same fact as truth-maker [David]
     Full Idea: Two different propositions can have the same fact as truth-maker. For example, 'L is happy or L is hungry', and 'L is happy or L is thirsty', which are both made true by the fact that L is happy.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1)
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 5. What Makes Truths / b. Objects make truths
What matters is truth-making (not truth-makers) [David]
     Full Idea: The term 'truthmaker' just labels whatever stands in the truth-making relation to a truth. The truth-making relation is crucial. It would have been just as well to refer to the truth-'maker' principle as the truth-'making' principle.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1)
     A reaction: This is well said. The commitment of this theory is to something which makes each proposition true. There is no initial commitment to any theories about what sorts of things do the job.
3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 11. Truthmaking and Correspondence
Correspondence is symmetric, while truth-making is taken to be asymmetric [David]
     Full Idea: Correspondence appears to be a symmetric relation while truth-making appears to be, or is supposed to be, an asymmetric relation.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], Intro)
Correspondence is an over-ambitious attempt to explain truth-making [David]
     Full Idea: Truth-maker theory says that the attempt by correspondence to fill in the generic truth-maker principle with something more informative fails. It is too ambitious, offering a whole zoo of funny facts that are not needed.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1)
     A reaction: A typical funny fact is a disjunctive fact, which makes 'he is hungry or thirsty' true (when it can just be made true by the simple fact that he is thirsty).
Correspondence theorists see facts as the only truth-makers [David]
     Full Idea: Correspondence theorists are committed to the view that, since truth is correspondence with a fact, only facts can make true propositions true.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 4)
3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 1. Correspondence Truth
True sentences says the appropriate descriptive thing on the appropriate demonstrative occasion [Austin,JL]
     Full Idea: A sentence is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it 'refers') is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions.
     From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], §3)
     A reaction: This is correspondence by convention rather than correspondence by mapping. Personally I prefer some sort of mapping account, despite all the difficulty and vagueness of specifying what maps onto what.
Correspondence theory likes ideal languages, that reveal the structure of propositions [David]
     Full Idea: Correspondence theorists tend to promote ideal languages, ...which is intended to mirror perfectly the structure of the propositions it expresses.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], n 03)
3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 2. Correspondence to Facts
What makes a disjunction true is simpler than the disjunctive fact it names [David]
     Full Idea: The proposition that 'L is happy or hungry' can be made true by the fact that L is happy. This does not have the same complexity or constituent structure as the proposition it makes true.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1)
One proposition can be made true by many different facts [David]
     Full Idea: One proposition can be made true by many different facts (such as 'there are some happy dogs').
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 1)
3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique
Correspondence theorists shouldn't think that a country has just one accurate map [Austin,JL]
     Full Idea: Correspondence theorists too often talk as one would who held that every map is either accurate or inaccurate; that every country can have but one accurate map.
     From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], n 24)
     A reaction: A well-made point, for those who intuitively hang on to correspondence as not only good common sense, but also some sort of salvation for a realist view of the world which might give us certainty in epistemology.
8. Modes of Existence / A. Relations / 4. Formal Relations / a. Types of relation
A reflexive relation entails that the relation can't be asymmetric [David]
     Full Idea: An asymmetric relation must be irreflexive: any case of aRa will yield a reductio of the assumption that R is asymmetric.
     From: Marian David (Truth-making and Correspondence [2009], 4)
26. Natural Theory / A. Speculations on Nature / 5. Infinite in Nature
Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius]
     Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless.
     From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3
27. Natural Reality / G. Biology / 3. Evolution
Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield]
     Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime.
     From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus
     A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea.