Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What Do We Mean By Logical Consequence?, Jesse Endo Jenks

Summer Research

In the beginning of the 20th century, many prominent logicians and mathematicians, such as Frege, Russell, Hilbert, and many others, felt that mathematics needed a very rigorous foundation in logic. Many results of the time were motivated by questions about logical truth and logical consequence. The standard approach in the early part of the 20th century was to use a syntactic or proof-theoretic definition of logical consequence. This says that "for one sentence to be a logical consequence of [a set of premises] is simply for that sentence to be derivable from [them] by means of some standard system of …

Scientific Fictionalism And The Problem Of Inconsistency In Nietzsche, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this article, I begin to develop Nietzsche’s scientific fictionalism in order to make headway toward resolving a central interpretive issue in his epistemology. For Nietzsche knowledge claims are falsifications. Presumably, this is a result of his puzzling view that truths are somehow false. I argue that Nietzsche thinks knowledge claims are falsifications because he embraces a scientific fictionalist view according to which inexact representations, which are false, can also be accurate, or true, and that this position is not inconsistent.

Whose Truth?, Seth J. Hale

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Is objective reality verifiable or is all fact merely subjective experience? If the history of humanity has shown anything, it has shown that we are a species intent on explaining our environment and place within it. Most every philosophical pursuit is aimed at some version of this end. Mathematics and the physical sciences attempt to explain the universe by finding consistent order in the workings of nature. The social sciences attempt to explain the human race by finding consistent order in the behaviors of humans and human organizations. Literary and media studies attempt to explain the meanings that humans attach …

Nietzsche's Conception Of Truth: Correspondence, Coherence Or Pragmatist?, Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nearly every common theory of truth has been attributed to Nietzsche, while some commentators have argued that he simply has no theory of truth. This essay argues that Nietzsche’s remarks on truth are better situated within either the coherence or pragmatist theories of truth than the correspondence theory. Nietzsche’s thoughts conflict with the correspondence framework because he believes that the truth conditions of propositions are constitutively dependent on our actions.

Wang Chong, Truth, And Quasi-Pluralism, Lajos L. Brons

Lajos Brons

In (2011) McLeod suggested that the first century Chinese philosopher Wang Chong 王充 may have been a pluralist about truth. In this reply I contest McLeod's interpretation of Wang Chong, and suggest "quasi-pluralism" (albeit more as an alternative to pluralism than as an interpretation of Wang Chong), which combines primitivism about the concept of truth with pluralism about justification.

Engaging The Mental Wars Of Our Times, Jan Van Vliet

Pro Rege

Dr. Jan van Vliet’s paper is an edited version of a talk delivered at the annual meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society, in Washington, D. C., November 15, 2006.

Truth And Falsehood In Plato's Sophist, Michael Oliver Wiitala

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation is a study of the ontological foundations of true and false speech in Plato’s Sophist. Unlike most contemporary scholarship on the Sophist, my dissertation offers a wholistic account of the dialogue, demonstrating that the ontological theory of the “communing” of forms and the theory of true and false speech later in the dialogue entail one another.

As I interpret it, the account of true and false speech in the Sophist is primarily concerned with true and false speech about the forms. As Plato sees it, we can only make true statements about spatio-temporal beings if it …

Truth, Rhetoric, And Critical Thinking, Lajos L. Brons

Lajos Brons

Despite the extraordinary amount of attention critical thinking has received in the last few decades, the teaching and fostering of critical thinking in higher education is largely failing, and critical thinking has become an empty buzzword. However, given its importance as an aim of education, it needs to be “refilled”, but that is possible only after identifying the causes of the current failure, i.e. the obstacles to fostering critical thinking. Three such obstacles are identified in this paper, two actual and one hypothetical: (1) the lack of clarity and agreement about what critical thinking is, (2) current teaching practice, and …

An Existential Proof Of God, Anthony Oscar Malagon

Open Access Dissertations

The following dissertation defends the view that one can have knowledge of God outside of what might be called the realm of objectivity, or objective thought, within which all traditional proofs of God lie. In other words, it will be argued that even if it is conceded that a conclusive proof of God is not possible, one can, nevertheless, be justified in one's belief in God without recourse to the traditional vein of logical-objective proofs. To do so, I call upon the works of Soren Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel, both of whom reject the view that there are any conclusive …

The Hidden Truth Of Owensville, Gerald Messier

Sketches: the Online Creative Arts Journal of Tennessee State University

No abstract provided.

Emerging Truth And The Defeat Of Scientific Racism, Mark Weinstein

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper looks at the attack on scientific racism in the 20th century by a group of social and biological scientists. I will utilize the apparatus of my model of emerging truth to show how even in complex socially conditioned argumentation the ultimate virtue is seeking the truth through increasingly powerful logical connections and deeply embedded warrants.

The Aesthetics Of Ethics, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

The Aesthetics of Ethics

Aristotle On The Truth Of Things, John Thorp

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle on the truth of things

Abstract

Most of Aristotle's texts dealing with truth are unexceptionable: truth belongs only to sentences or beliefs, and it does so in virtue of a correspondence between those sentences or beliefs and the things in the world that they are about. Single words cannot be true, and the things in the world, whether single or compound, cannot be true either. There is however one text, Chapter 10 of Book Theta of the Metaphysics, that breaks with these familiar and comfortable views; it allows that single words or thoughts can be true, and also …

Nietzsche And Heidegger On The Cartesian Atomism Of Thought, Steven Burgess

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation has two main parts. In the first half, I draw out an underlying presupposition of Descartes' philosophy: what I term "atomism of thought." Descartes employs a radical procedure of doubt in order to show that the first principle of his philosophy, the cogito, is an unshakeable foundation of knowledge. In the dialogue that follows his dissemination of the Meditations, Descartes reveals that a whole set of concepts and rational principles innate in our minds are never doubted. These fundamental units of thought are indivisible, distinct, and isolated, and enable the possibility of any rational demonstration. Atoms of …

Logic, Truth And Inquiry (Book Review), G. C. Goddu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Mark Weinstein’s, Logic, Truth and Inquiry is an ambitious and provocative case for a theory of truth and warrant strength that will undergird an “account of argument in the broad sense of current argumentation theory” (p. 12). I begin with a very schematic synopsis of Weinstein’s rich discussion through his six chapters. Weinstein himself notes that his arguments are “frequently presented in broad outline” (p. 1), so my quick sketch will be even broader. I conclude with some brief observations about both what the book leaves unresolved and the merits of Weinstein’s intriguing book.

On The Order Of The Real: Nietzsche And Lacan, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

“The Problem Of Science” In Nietzsche And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

Nietzsche and Heidegger pose important philosophical questions to science and its technological projects. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. More than a thoughtful reflection on science, however, the heart of philosophy is also at stake in …

Nietzsche's Theory Of Cognition: An Interpretation And Defense Of Perspectivism, Justin R. Marquis

Dissertations

Friedrich Nietzsche has long been recognized as a pivotal thinker in the history of moral philosophy, but until the last quarter century his importance for our understanding of the concepts of truth and knowledge had been largely ignored in English-language scholarship. In my dissertation, I add to the growing discussion on Nietzsche's theory of human cognition. While more attention has recently been given to this dimension of Nietzsche's thought, several key aspects have been largely ignored or insufficiently treated including the effects that the ethical or evaluative domain have on the way we cognize the world, the role that radical …

Inflationary Truth-Theoretic Semantics, Michael Brady Horton

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

I argue that satisfaction and reference—and therefore, truth—are multiply realizable properties. I advocate a novel approach motivated by a commitment to the robustness and fruitfulness of truth-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics.

DEFLATIONISM: Philosophers keen on deflating the metaphysical pretensions of truth theories claim that we need not appeal to a substantive truth-property. Recently, however, some philosophers have sought to combine deflationism about truth with the view that our concept of truth or the truth-predicate can play an important role in natural language semantics.

TRUTH-THEORETIC SEMANTICS: The goal of a formal semantic theory of a natural language is to provide …

Problems With Truth: Scope, Mixing, And Truth Pluralism, Christopher Dyer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, I will be taking up the debate between monistic and pluralistic inflationary theories of truth. Truth monism claims that there is one explanatory story which accounts for the truth of all and only true propositions. There seem to be, however, certain domains of discourse wherein monistic theories fail. If monistic theories cannot provide an explanation for how all true propositions are true, then they would not be adequate theories of truth. Truth pluralism is motivated to avoid the scope problem. The pluralist sees that there are as many truth properties as there are domains of discourse. A …

Truly Normative Matters: An Essay On The Value Of Truth, Charles Kamper Floyd Iii

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Is truth valuable? In addressing this question, one must parse it into questions that are more manageable. Is the property of truth only instrumentally valuable, or is it both instrumentally valuable and noninstrumentally valuable? Is the normativity of the concept of truth an intrinsic or extrinsic property of the concept? In addressing the first of these questions, I show that certain arguments are flawed, arguments that purport to show that truth is not valuable in any kind of way. After establishing that it is reasonable to think that the property of truth is valuable, I show how inflationists and deflationists …

A Very Different Kind Of Rule: Credal Rules, Argumentation And Community, James Bradley, Peter Loptson

OSSA Conference Archive

In mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, the relation between cognition and community has been defined primarily in terms of the generalization of the mathematical function (Frege, Russell), especially as a model for the nature of rules (Wittgenstein and followers), which thus come to be under-stood as algorithms. This leads to the elimination of both the reflexive, synthesizing subject (for it is unnec-essary to the algorithmic decision-making procedure installed in the rule), and the intrinsic communal-historical nature of argumentation and belief-formation. Against this approach, I follow R.G. Collingwood’s hitherto unrecognized strategy in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940) and argue that the relation of …

Propositional Quantification, Ryan Christensen

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Ramsey deWned truth in the following way: xz is true if and only if 'pzz(xz = [zpz] & pz). This deWnition is ill-formed in standard Wrst-order logic, so it is normally interpreted using substitutional or some kind of higher-order quanti-Wer. I argue that these quantiWers fail to provide an adequate reading of the deWnition, but that, given certain adjustments, standard objectual quantiWcation does provide an adequate reading.

Credit Theories And The Value Of Knowledge, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

One alleged advantage of credit theories of knowledge is that they are capable of explaining why knowledge is essentially more valuable than mere true belief. I argue that credit theories in fact provide grounds for denying this claim and therefore are incapable of overcoming the 'value problem' in epistemology. Much of the discussion revolves around the question of whether true belief is always epistemically valuable. I also consider to what extent, if any, my main argument should worry credit theorists.

Epistemological Axiology: What Is The Value Of Knowledge?, Eric Walter Thompson

Masters Theses

It is my overall aim in this work to defend the view that knowledge is no more valuable than true belief or empirically adequate belief, and thus is not the primary epistemic good. I engage predominately with Jonathan Kvanvig‟s work for an assessment of the value of knowledge. In turn, I assess the arguments for the value of knowledge for their ability to support the view that knowledge is uniquely valuable. First I will consider an argument which relies on a purported connection between knowledge and proper action. It will then be suggested that arguments tying knowledge to our proper …

Slumdog Philosopher, Richdog Philosopher, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

A dialog concerning God, Necessity and Perfection.

Musical Presence: Towards A New Philosophy Of Music, Charles Ford

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Most recent writings about the philosophy of music have taken an analytic or linguistic approach, focusing on terms such as meaning, metaphor, emotions and expression, invariably from the perspective of the individual listener or composer. This essay seeks to develop an alternative, phenomenological framework for thinking about music by avoiding these terms, and by extrapolating from the writings of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. On the basis of discussions of musical time, its multiple levels of matter, and its internal dialectics, the essay presents a particular understanding of “style” as the primary basis for mediation between production and reception. It concludes …

Plato On Truth And Falsehood, Anne M. Wiles

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The argument of this paper is that Plato's position on medicinal lies is neither dishonest nor inconsistent. When adequately understood in its context, the account Plato gives of truth and falsehood offers valuable insights into the nature of each and the role both play in the moral life of the individual and the state.

An Essay On Names And Truth, By Wolfram Hinzen, Ileana Paul, Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

No abstract provided.

Una Discusión En Torno A La Verdad En Ciencias Y Humanidades, Jorge Gibert-Galassi

jorge gibert-galassi

No abstract provided.