Understanding Truth

Soames, Scott

doi:10.1093/0195123352.001.0001

Cited by 481 publications

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“…3 Exhibit Two: Soames on the Existence of Sentence Types Soames (1999;Simons 1987) starts his argument for the existence of propositions by first considering an argument for distinguishing sentence types and tokens. 2 Imagine that two people, x and y, utter the same sentence.…”

Section: Salmon (2008) Argues That Nominalists Cannot Plausibly Deny mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To see why, we need to consider two different kids of cases: those in which utterances of sentences with different meanings express the same proposition and those in which utterances of sentences with the same meaning express different propositions.'' (Soames 1999). 6 Perhaps a nominalist can be happy with reconstructing sentence types as equivalence classes of sentence tokens.…”

Section: Salmon (2008) Argues That Nominalists Cannot Plausibly Deny mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Salmon in his argument against nominalism about numbers (Salmon 2008) and Soames in his argument for the existence of sentence types (Simons 1987;Soames 1999) employ (respectively) higher-order and first-order logic to model certain natural language inferences. In both cases, the conclusions of those natural language inferences are supposed to carry commitment to abstract objects, partially because their renderings in those formal systems seem to do that.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Numbers and Propositions Versus Nominalists: Yellow Cards for Salmon & Soames

Urbaniak

2012

Erkenn

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Salmon and Soames argue against nominalism about numbers and sentence types. They employ (respectively) higher-order and first-order logic to model certain natural language inferences and claim that the natural language conclusions carry commitment to abstract objects, partially because their renderings in those formal systems seem to do that. I argue that this strategy fails because the nominalist can accept those natural language consequences, provide them with plausible and non-committing truth conditions and account for the inferences made without committing themselves to abstract objects. I sketch a modal account of higher-order quantification, on which instead of ranging over sets, higher order quantifiers are used to make (logical) possibility claims about which predicate tokens can be introduced. This approach provides an alternative account of truth conditions for natural language sentences which seem to employ higher-order quantification, thus allowing the nominalist to evade Salmon's argument. I also show how the nominalist can account for the occurrence of apparently singular abstract terms in certain true statements. I argue that the nominalist can achieve this by, first, dividing singular terms into real singular terms (referring to concrete objects) and only apparent singular terms (called onomatoids), introduced for the sake of brevity and simplicity, and then providing an account of nominalistically acceptable truth conditions of sentences containing onomatoids. I develop such an account in terms of modally interpreted abstraction principles and argue that applying this strategy to Soames's argument allows the nominalists to defend themselves.

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Section: Salmon (2008) Argues That Nominalists Cannot Plausibly Deny mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Salmon (2008) Argues That Nominalists Cannot Plausibly Deny mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Numbers and Propositions Versus Nominalists: Yellow Cards for Salmon & Soames

Urbaniak

2012

Erkenn

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“…10 Cf. Horwich 1990, Quine 1990, Soames 1999 realism and relativism | 71 a variant of the skeptical challenge. The objection is often raised that if the truth of a belief does not in any way depend on an internal trait of it, such as its epistemic status, but only on a relation to something external, a transcendent fact in the objective world, then the tie between justification and truth is severed.…”

Section: Realism and Relativism | 67mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Problem of Relativism in the Sociology of (Scientific) Knowledge

Schantz¹,

Seidel²

2011

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-3-86838-126-9 2011 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) Notes on Contributers| 11 Background and Divergent Sources of Relativism in the Sociology of (Scientific) KnowledgeIt is no exaggeration to claim that it was above all twentieth century work in the philosophy of science and the sociology of (scientific) knowledge that set the scene for a flourishing of relativist (and constructivist) claims. To be sure, cognitive relativism is by no means a new doctrine. Rather, it is one of the oldest topics in philosophy. Since Plato presented his arguments against Protagoras' claim that man is the measure of all things in the Theaetetus, the discussion of relativist doctrines gave rise to fruitful and heated argument. However, by and large in the history of philosophy cognitive relativists are hard to find.This situation changed dramatically in the last century. Of course, just as in the case of the early sophists there are sociological and historical explanations for this rise of relativist thought in certain quarters -so there are good sociological and historical explanations for the refusal of relativist thought in other quarters. 1 But there is also a philosophical explanation for this change -an explanation by the changes of thought in epistemology and the philosophy of science itself.In the middle of the last century by now classical figures in philosophy 1 This should be -and is -also accepted by those very critical of relativist sociology of knowledge. Thus, e. g., Richard Fumerton, who argues for a return to a traditional form of foundationalism, rhetorically asks: "I am a confirmed foundationalist and I studied at Brown -just a coincidence?" (Fumerton 2010, p. 103). Introduction richard schantz and markus seidel12 | richard schantz and markus seidel with quite disparate background proposed ideas that might seem to promote relativist theses: Willard van Orman Quine, Thomas S. Kuhn and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Thus, Quine in his masterpiece Two Dogmas of Empiricism attacked the radical empiricist doctrine of reductionism, according to which scientific discourse can be defined in terms of observation and logico-mathematical auxiliaries by claiming that "our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body" 2 . This confirmational holism gives rise to his famous thesis of the underdetermination of theory by the data that has been used hitherto prominently in relativist argumentation. If, as Quine maintains, "any statement can be held true come what may" 3 , then -so many relativists argue -which one in fact ...

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“…Car la variation correspondante du paradoxe sorite serait trop rapide, comme cela a été noté par Sorensen (1988) 15 . Et l'on peut penser, en outre, selon les remarques de Scott Soames (1999), que certains prédicats vagues ne sont pas susceptibles de donner lieu à une version correspondante du paradoxe sorite. C'est ce qui semble bien être le cas pour la notion de surprise associée à 7-SEP(II).…”

Section: « Why Not Blame the Whole Puzzle On The Vagueness Of "Can Knunclassified

Une analyse dichotomique du paradoxe de l’examen-surprise

Franceschi

2005

philoso

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Je présenterai dans ce qui suit un cadre conceptuel nouveau pour résoudre le « paradoxe de l’examen-surprise » (surprise examination paradox, soit SEP), en ce sens qu’il réorganise en les adaptant plusieurs éléments de solution décrits dans la littérature. La solution proposée ici repose sur les éléments essentiels suivants : a) une distinction entre analyse moniste et dichotomique du paradoxe ; b) l’introduction d’une définition matricielle, qui sert de support à différentes variations du paradoxe ; c) la distinction entre une définition conjointe et disjointe des cas de surprise et de non-surprise conduisant à deux notions structurellement distinctes de surprise.This paper proposes a new framework to solve the surprise examination paradox. I survey preliminary the main contributions to the literature related to the paradox. I introduce then a distinction between a monist and a dichotomic analysis of the paradox. With the help of a matrix notation, I also present a dichotomy that leads to distinguish two basically and structurally different notions of surprise, which are respectively based on a conjoint and a disjoint structure. I describe then how Quine’s solution applies to the version of the paradox corresponding to the conjoint structure. Lastly, I expose a solution to the paradox based on the disjoint structure

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Understanding Truth

Cited by 481 publications

References 0 publications

Numbers and Propositions Versus Nominalists: Yellow Cards for Salmon & Soames

Numbers and Propositions Versus Nominalists: Yellow Cards for Salmon & Soames

The Problem of Relativism in the Sociology of (Scientific) Knowledge

Une analyse dichotomique du paradoxe de l’examen-surprise

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