It seems obvious that for every true contingent proposition there must be something in the world (in the largest sense of “something”) which makes the proposition true. For consider any true contingent proposition and imagine that it is false. We must automatically imagine some difference in the world.
We will disagree as to whether Davidson's ideas flow parallel with Wittgenstein, if you mean by parallel, there is agreement. Just from the little I read in the SEP, I don't get that idea. There are other philosophers who do a much better job of extending Wittgenstein's ideas. — Sam26
I don't understand you. No one is talking about escaping truth. — hypericin
P cannot be the same thing as P is true. — hypericin
For isn't this just a complicated way of saying that P is the truthmaker of 'P' ? But nothing is actually being added. No truth is being made. P is just (taken as) true. — Pie
FWIW, I think it's hard to divorce rationality from anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-classism. It goes with free speech, democracy, and science. — Pie
I never could see much of use in the notion of truthmakers. Can either of you explain what they are for? — Banno
I’d just like to maintain some separation between the way things are in the world and our statements about the way things are in the world, because we might consider some of those statements to be false. It may be redundant whether we say either “P” or “P is true” (iff “P” is true), but it is not redundant to distinguish between P and “P”. — Luke
To me this position - which I generally share - seems to originate from a value system which already holds that reason and progressive politics are synonymous, or flip sides of the same coin. — Tom Storm
How does one make this case in philosophic terms? — Tom Storm
It is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another.
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Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified) — Kant
And it seems to me that this is what Davidson is saying in suggesting we give up our dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality: that there is no such separation between our true statements and the way things are. We "reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false". — Banno
our tribal conceptual norms — Pie
Not one of those paid private teachers, whom the people call sophists and consider to be their rivals in craft, teaches anything other than the convictions that the majority expresses when they are gathered together. Indeed, these are precisely what the sophists call wisdom. It's as if someone were learning the moods and appetites of a huge, strong beast that he's rearing—how to approach and handle it, when it is most difficult to deal with or most gentle and what makes it so, what sounds it utters in either condition, and what sounds soothe or anger it. Having learned all this through tending the beast over a period of time, he calls this knack wisdom, gathers his information together as if it were a craft, and starts to teach it. In truth, he knows nothing about which of these convictions is fine or shameful, good or bad, just or unjust, but he applies all these names in accordance with how the beast reacts—calling what it enjoys good and what angers it bad. He has no other account to give of these terms. And he calls what he is compelled to do just and fine, for he hasn't seen and cannot show anyone else how much compulsion and goodness really differ. — Republic 493a-c
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