论弗雷格的“真之收缩”思想

弗雷格运用逻辑分析的方法,提出了自己独特的"真"之思想,形成了关于"真"的完整理论。在他看来,"真"不具有实体属性,不存在与客体在存在方式或存在状况的符合与对应,"真"只用来表达断定句形式中的断定力。当"5是素数"这个句子带有断定力时,真也就被表达出来,它与"5是素数是真的"表达了同样的内容。另外,他将"真"作为初始概念,认为真是不可定义的。如果对"真"进行定义,将走入"定义的循环"。因为要知道什么是"真",就需要论证表象与现实的一致性,而二者的一致又依赖于"真"的定义。这种思路与做法必将导致循环定义,故弗雷格认为"真"是不可定义的。基于以上两点的分析,他再次对符合论提出批评。他认为,如果符合论对"真"的理解是正确的话,那么结论是"事实比真更为基本,应该在事实的基础上定义真",但这显然是错误的,因为我们总是通过真来确定事实,而不是通过事实来确定真。我们似乎可以在弗雷格思想中找到收缩论的雏型,因为他关于"真"的认识与收缩论在很大程度上是一致的。收缩论最重要的观点在于说"P是真的"和说"P"有相同的涵义,谓词"是真的"是多余的。"真"本身是可收缩的,不带有实体性质。于是,我们可把弗雷格作为表达真之收缩观点的第一位哲学家,虽然他并不是坚定的收缩论者。     

Against zero-dimensional material objects (and other bare particulars)

A modus tollens against zero-dimensional material objects is presented from the premises (i) that if there are zero-dimensional material objects then there are bare particulars, and (ii) that there are no bare particulars. The argument for the first premise proceeds by elimination. First, bare particular theory and bundle theory are motivated as the most appealing theories of property exemplification. It is then argued that the bundle theorist??s Ockhamism ought to lead her to reject spatiotemporally located zero-dimensional property instances. Finally, it is argued that since she must accept such instances if she accepts zero-dimensional material object bundles, she ought to avoid the latter. This leaves bare particular theory as the default view of zero-dimensional material objects. The argument for the second premise invokes the thesis that the exemplification of at least one sparse property is a prerequisite for the existence of any particular. It is argued from Humean considerations that bare particulars fail this prerequisite.     

'The World is the Totality of Things, Not of Facts': A Strawsonian Reply to Searle

John R. Searle (1995; 1998, Ch. 9) claims that P.F. Strawson's well known objections to correspondence theories of truth (Strawson 1950) can be side-stepped, if we regard the correspondence theorist's facts as 'conditions in the world' (1998, p. 392) rather than as complex objects. In response, I claim both that Searle's notion of a 'condition in the world' is obscure, and that such conditions cannot be the facts of a correspondence theorist on account of their being unsuited for truthmaking.
The failure of Searle's attempt to come up with a correspondence theory which evades Strawson's objections does not indicate that we should seek to formulate a correspondence theory in some other way. I argue that that the correspondence theorists's truthmaker axiom is improperly motivated, and, in the light of this, suggest that facts be treated as true propositions rather than as items which make propositions true. The article ends with a defence of this position against two recent objections.     

Bradley and the impossibility of absolute truth

Bradley thought that there is a connexion between the theory of reality and the theory of truth. The theory of reality to which he subscribed, Monism, rules out a correspondence theory of truth, he thought, since it denies the existence of a plurality of facts, or things, in virtue of correspondence to which a judgment could be true. But though he rejects the correspondence theory he insists on the independence of truth from belief, wish and hope. For him the test of truth is coherence, which has two aspects, system and comprehensiveness. However, he does not think that this test yields ‘absolute’ truth. This, he maintains, for at least three different reasons, is unobtainable. Judgments can only be partially true. However, since there are degrees of truth, some judgments are closer to the truth than others, even though none are, or could be, unconditionally true.     

Truth in the Tractatus

My paper takes issue both with the standard view that the Tractatus contains a correspondence theory and with recent suggestions that it features a deflationary or semantic theory. Standard correspondence interpretations are mistaken, because they treat the isomorphism between a sentence and what it depicts as a sufficient condition of truth rather than of sense. The semantic/deflationary interpretation ignores passages that suggest some kind of correspondence theory. The official theory of truth in the Tractatus is an obtainment theory – a sentence is true iff the state of affairs it depicts obtains. This theory differs from deflationary theories in that it involves an ontology of states of affairs/facts; and it can be transformed into a type of correspondence theory: a sentence is true iff it corresponds to, i.e. depicts an obtaining state of affairs (fact). Admittedly, unlike correspondence theories as commonly portrayed, this account does not involve a genuinely truth-making relation. It features a relation of correspondence, yet it is that of depicting, between a meaningful sentence and its sense – a possible state of affairs. What makes for truth is not that relation, but the obtaining of the depicted state of affairs. This does not disqualify the Tractatus from holding a correspondence theory, however, since the correspondence theories of Moore and Russell are committed to a similar position. Alternatively, the obtainment theory can be seen as a synthesis of correspondence, semantic and deflationary approaches. It does justice to the idea that what is true depends solely on what is the case, and it combines a semantic explanation of the relation between a sentence and what it says with a deflationary account of the agreement between what the sentence says and what obtains or is the case if it is true     

Coherence and Truth: A Cognitive Model of Propositional Truth Attribution

The truth value assigned to a proposition is treated by philosophers, logicians, and most psychologists as an abstract construct, a theoretical object outside the cognitive system. Breaking away from this consensus, we propose to carry out a psychological investigation to analyse the objective, verifiable properties of representations categorized as true by human individuals. We shall reject the conception whereby attributing a truth value to a proposition is the result of the activation of knowledge about the truth of that proposition. We shall also exclude the conception of truth as the result of the establishment of a correspondence with the world. We propose that truth be understood as the result of a decision about the values taken on by the conditions for fulfilment of the act of referencing in a mental model. Our cognitive model of propositional truth attribution is built on the assumption that the truth value of a proposition is determined by the ability of that proposition to fit into the theory of the field to which it refers. This attribution is viewed as a two-stage cognitive activity. During the first stage, the features defining the coherence of the proposition in the activated mental model determine its plausibility value. This defines a generally inconsistent set of truth candidates. The second stage involves selecting the subset containing all propositions which, in context, will be considered true. Two selection criteria are used: maximum consistency and connectivity. The preliminary experimental results proved to be compatible with the proposed model.     

Temporal necessity; Hard facts/soft facts

Conclusion In conclusion, then, the notion of temporal necessity is certainly queer and perhaps a misnomer. It really has little to do with temporality per se and everything to do with counterfactual openness or closedness. We have seen that the future is as unalterable as the past, but that this purely logical truth is not antithetical to freedom or contingency. Moreover, we have found certain past facts are counterfactually open in that were future events or actualities to be other than they will be, these past facts would have been different as a consequence. God's beliefs about the future are such past facts. Moreover, the effects of actions which God would have taken had He believed differently are also such past facts. Oddly enough, then, virtually any past fact is potentially counterfactually open, and the only necessity that remains is purely de facto. We, of course, do not in general know which events of the past depend counterfactually on present actions, and those cases we do know about seem rather trivial. Our intuitions of the necessity, unalterability, and unpreventability of the past as opposed to the future stem from the impossibility of backward causation, which is precluded by the dynamic nature of time and becoming. But the counterfactual dependence of God's beliefs on future events or actualities is not a case of backward causation: rather future-tense propositions are true in virtue of what will happen, given a view of truth as correspondence, and God simply has the essential property of knowing all and only true propositions. With regard to the future, virtually all facts are counterfactually open, and therefore future-tense propositions are not temporally necessary. Propositions thus move from being temporally contingent to being temporally necessary when all the opportunities to affect things counterfactually have slipped by. Hence, the mere fact that an event is past is no indication that it is counterfactually closed. This is especially evident in the case of God's foreknowledge. If we say that God foreknows that I shall do x and therefore I cannot refrain from doing x, lest I change God's past foreknowledge, we are being deceived by a modality which has nothing to do with my power or freedom. All that is impossible is the conjunction of God's foreknowledge that p and of ~ p; but this modality in sensu composito has no bearing on my ability to act such that ~ p would be true and God would have foreknown differently. Temporal necessity, then, turns out to be only obliquely temporal and modally weak, certainly no threat to freedom or divine foreknowledge.     

Making Sense of Truth-Makers

This essay argues that propositions are made true by facts. A proposition is the sense expressed by a statement (sentence token used to make a truth claim). Facts are positive or negative constitutive properties of the domain of discourse (usually the actual world). The presence of horses is a positive constitutive property of the world; the absence of unicorns is a negative one. This notion of constitutive properties accords well with the Hume-Kant claim that existence is not a property of any individual said to exist. While Frege held existence to be a property of concepts and Russell held it to be a property of propositional functions, our view sees existence as a property of a domain of discourse. To say that Native Dancer exists is simply to say that the world is characterized by the presence of Native Dancer; to say that Pegasus does not exist is to say the world is characterized by the absence of Pegasus. Such properties of presence and absence are facts. Facts make true propositions true; nothing makes false propositions false (they simply fail to be made true). Facts are not items in the world; they are (constitutive) properties of the world.     

The Trouble with Tarski

As a result of thinking ( pace Tarski, wrongly) that it is propositions, not sentences, that are true or false, it has been supposed (also wrongly) that propositions such as that 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white are necessarily true. But changing the rules for the use of the words in a sentence has no effect on the truth of the proposition, only on what proposition it formulates. Many similar statements, e.g., that 'plus' does not mean plus, are only pragmatically contradictory: if this were true, it would be impossible to say so in these words. One should distinguish between sentences that express necessary truths, and sentences that necessarily express truths. It follows that many well known accounts of necessity are wrong, that the truth of an analytic proposition does not follow from the definitions of the words in the sentence that expresses it, that it is not helpful to define meaning in terms of truth, that truth is not relative to language, and that conventionalism is false. This paper is a move in the direction of establishing the eternity of truth.     

Nihilism,Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem

Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years by Wright and Blackburn) that Mackie’s error theory can’t be true because if it were, we would have to give up morality or give up moralizing. I answer this argument with a little bit of help from Nietzsche. I then pose a problem, the Doppelganger Problem, for the meta-ethical nihilism that I attribute to Mackie and Nietzsche. (If A is a moral proposition then not-A is a moral proposition: hence not all moral propositions can be false.) I solve the problem by reformulating the error theory and also deal with a variant of the problem, the Reinforced Doppelganger, glancing at a famous paper of Ronald Dworkin’s. Thus, whatever its demerits, the error theory, is not self-refuting, nor does it require us to give up morality.     

FOUNDATIONALISM AND ARBITRARINESS

Abstract: Nonskeptical foundationalists say that there are basic beliefs. But, one might object, either there is a reason why basic beliefs are likely to be true or there is not. If there is, then they are not basic; if there is not, then they are arbitrary. I argue that this dilemma is not nearly as decisive as its author, Peter Klein, would have us believe.     

Correspondence Truth and Quantum Mechanics

The logic of a physical theory reflects the structure of the propositions referring to the behaviour of a physical system in the domain of the relevant theory. It is argued in relation to classical mechanics that the propositional structure of the theory allows truth-value assignment in conformity with the traditional conception of a correspondence theory of truth. Every proposition in classical mechanics is assigned a definite truth value, either ‘true’ or ‘false’, describing what is actually the case at a certain moment of time. Truth-value assignment in quantum mechanics, however, differs; it is known, by means of a variety of ‘no go’ theorems, that it is not possible to assign definite truth values to all propositions pertaining to a quantum system without generating a Kochen–Specker contradiction. In this respect, the Bub–Clifton ‘uniqueness theorem’ is utilized for arguing that truth-value definiteness is consistently restored with respect to a determinate sublattice of propositions defined by the state of the quantum system concerned and a particular observable to be measured. An account of truth of contextual correspondence is thereby provided that is appropriate to the quantum domain of discourse. The conceptual implications of the resulting account are traced down and analyzed at length. In this light, the traditional conception of correspondence truth may be viewed as a species or as a limit case of the more generic proposed scheme of contextual correspondence when the non-explicit specification of a context of discourse poses no further consequences.     

What the Deflationist May Say About Truthmaking

The correspondence theory of truth is often thought to be supported by the intuition that if a proposition (sentence, belief) is true, then something makes it true. I argue that this appearance is illusory and is sustained only by a conflation of two distinct notions of truthmaking, existential and non-existential. Once the conflation is exposed, I maintain, deflationism is seen to be adequate for accommodating truthmaking intuitions.     

Setting the Facts Straight

Substantial facts (or states of affairs) are not well-understood entities. Many philosophers object to their existence on this basis. Yet facts, if they can be understood, promise to do a lot of philosophical work: they can be used to construct theories of property possession and truthmaking, for example. Here, I give a formal theory of facts, including negative and logically complex facts. I provide a theory of reduction similar to that of the typed λ-calculus and use it to provide identity conditions for facts. This theory validates truthmaker maximalism: it provides truthmakers for all truths. I then show how the usual truth-in-a-model relation can be replaced by two relations: one between models and facts, saying that a given fact obtains relative to the model, and the other between facts and propositions: the truthmaking relation.     

Wittgenstein on Verification and Seeing-As, 1930–1932

This article examines the little-explored remarks on verification in Wittgenstein's notebooks during the period between 1930 and 1932. In these remarks, Wittgenstein connects a verificationist theory of meaning with the notion of logical multiplicity, understood as a space of possibilities: a proposition is verified by a fact if and only if the proposition and the fact have the same logical multiplicity. But while in his early philosophy logical multiplicities were analysed as an outcome of the formal properties of simple objects and simple signs, Wittgenstein in the early 1930s connects the notion of logical multiplicity with the notion of ways of seeing. I will argue that the relevant ways of seeing are closely similar to seeing-as or aspect seeing. According to Wittgenstein's view in the early 1930s, logical multiplicities are part of our perceptual experience of propositions and facts. In this sense, the verification relation depends on how we experience propositions and facts as being surrounded by a logical space of possibilities. Strikingly, Wittgenstein's way of thinking about the verification relation offers solutions to a set of seemingly intractable problems connected with the versions of verificationism developed by members of the Vienna Circle.     

On the structural similarities between worlds and times

In the debate about the nature and identity of possible worlds, philosophers have neglected the parallel questions about the nature and identity of moments of time. These are not questions about the structure of time in general, but rather about the internal structure of each individual time. Times and worlds share the following structural similarities: both are maximal with respect to propositions (at every world and time, either p or ～p is true, for every p); both are consistent; both are closed (every modal consequence of a proposition true at a world is also true at that world, and every tense-theoretic consequence of a proposition true at a time is also true at that time); just as there is a unique actual world, there is a unique present moment; and just as a proposition is necessarily true iff true at all worlds, a proposition is eternally true iff true at all times. In this paper, I show that a simple extension of my theory of worlds yields a theory of times in which the above structural similarities between the two are consequences.     

TEMPORALLY LOCALISED FACTS AND THE PROBLEM OF INTRINSIC CHANGE

Hugh Mellor has proposed what appears to be a new solution to the problem of intrinsic change ( Mellor 1998 ). Assuming endurantism and a B‐theoretic, nonpresentist view of time, facts are supposed to have only enduring things and atemporal properties (or relations) as constituents, but no times. The having of properties and relations is not relativised to times. Instead, the whole of a fact is conceived of as temporally localised. It will be argued that this interesting and novel proposal does not succeed as an account of change in the intrinsic properties of things. The basic difficulty is that the view still leads into contradiction, since it makes it incomprehensible how one and the same thing can have both a property and some incompatible property. The having of these incompatible properties is treated as two facts. But to add that these facts have certain temporal locations is of no help for avoiding the contradiction.     

Exemplification and Universal Realism

The relation between universal and particular is considered to be the Achilles’ heel of universal realism. However, modern universal realism with facts does not have the difficulties which traditional Platonic universal realism had. Its exemplification relation connecting particulars and universals in atomic facts is very different from Platonic participation. Bradley’s regress argument against the exemplification relation can be refuted in two different ways. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to avoid the assumption of an exemplification relation and thus to go without the Achilles’ heel altogether.     

Maxwell and materialism

In a recent article, Grover Maxwell presents a case for a kind of mind-brain identity theory which he claims precludes materialism. His case is based on some views about meaning which I find plausible. However, I will argue that, by adopting certain assumptions about the nature of sensory experience, and extending some of Maxwell's views about meaning in a plausible way, the issue of a materialistic identity theory is reopened. Ultimately, I will agree that such a theory is not true, but more is needed to show this than Maxwell gives us. But the question of materialism is not thereby closed, because it has become axiomatic these days that materialism does not require an identity theory. So I will go on to consider if all forms of materialism have been ruled out by Maxwell's theory, as extended by me. I will end with a tentative affirmative answer but also with a proposal which, if it can be worked out, would reverse the decision.