Jim Edwards

Best Opinion and Intentional States

Its as if we could grasp the whole use of a word in a flash And that is just what we say we do. That is to say: we sometimes describe what we do in these words. But there is nothing astonishing, nothing queer, about what happens. It becomes queer when we are led to think that the future development must in some way already be present in the act of grasping the use and yet it isnt present For we say that there isnt any doubt that we understand the word, and on the other hand its meaning lies in its use. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 197)

Anti-realist truth and concepts of superassertibility

Crispin Wright offers superassertibility as an anti-realist explication of truth. A statement is superassertible, roughly, if there is a state of information available which warrants it and it is warranted by all achievable enlargements of that state of information. However, it is argued, Wright fails to take account of the fact that many of our test procedures are not ‘sure fire’, even when applied under ideal conditions. An alternative conception of superassertibility is constructed to take this feature into account. However, it is then argued that when this revised concept of superassertibility is taken as the truth predicate of probability statements, statements whose test procedures are paradigmatically not sure fire, then any anti-realist theory of the sense of such probability statements cannot be compositional, in Dummetts sense of ‘compositional’.

Is Tennant Selling Truth Short

What is the relation between truth and warranted assertibility according to a sensible anti-realist? Crispin Wright has argued that even an anti-realist should distinguish truth from warranted assertibility (Wright 1992: Chapter 1). Neil Tennant has responded: Not so (Tennant 1995). Wright had claimed that we cannot construe is true as is warrantedly assertible (hereafter is WA) because the inference pattern

Atomic Realism, Intuitionist Logic and Tarskian Truth

I think without doubt that the thorniest problem for one who wishes to transfer something resembling the intuitionist account of the meanings of mathematical statements to the whole of discourse is what account he can give of tensed statements. (Dummett (1978), p. 368) Let atomic sentences be sentences not containing any of the usual operators of first-order predicate calculi, and let compound sentences be sentences formed from such atomic sentences by applying one or more of the usual operators of first-order predicate calculi. So far, we cannot classify tensed sentences like

The Engines of the Soul.

The problem the knowledge of possibility the senses causation quantity desire belief psychic energy propositional attitudes action.