Bachelors and Analysis
(This is a post by Ali that I'm moving here so it can get more attention. -CT)
Regarding our discussion in the last class about "All bachelors are unmarried male" I think we should note that:
The proposition " All bachelors are unmarried male ", is a kind of a priori conceptual truth which is true by its definition, i.e. its truth does not depend on the external world. So, for finding a counterexample for the analysis containing these kinds of analytic propositions we should not look at the world ( such as unmarried Hats, Robots, Monkeys, dead people and etc.), just as the proposition " 3+5=8" for which we do not need the experience to prove its truth or falsehood.
Regarding our discussion in the last class about "All bachelors are unmarried male" I think we should note that:
The proposition " All bachelors are unmarried male ", is a kind of a priori conceptual truth which is true by its definition, i.e. its truth does not depend on the external world. So, for finding a counterexample for the analysis containing these kinds of analytic propositions we should not look at the world ( such as unmarried Hats, Robots, Monkeys, dead people and etc.), just as the proposition " 3+5=8" for which we do not need the experience to prove its truth or falsehood.
posted by Chris Tillman at 10:32 AM
2 Comments:
(This comment is from Justin. -CT)
I'm feel like what we were doing in class was basically a priori reasoning. It's not like we were finding things in the world and running bachelor experiments on them (many of the things we considered, in fact, presumably don't exist), rather, we were thinking of possible cases and using our reason based understanding of what a bachelor is, to try to understand what we mean when we say the word
Consider the proposition "3+5=8"
Now I can say that if I add 3 drops of water to 5 drops of water in a very small bowl, then the total sum is 1 drop of water instead of 8 drops. If the proposition was not a priori one, maybe we could say that we should amend the analysis as follows:
for all solid objects : 3+5=8
But we know that no cases (neither actual nor possible cases) could deny 3+5=8.
similarly if we know that "all bachelors are unmarried male" is a priori proposition, we have accepted that the "meaning" of right side is within the left side and vise versa.So, we know that there is no counterexample cases (actual or possible) for it.
Post a Comment
<< Home