Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The central theme of semanticsW is (contingent) truth, and consequently reference (for reference is what is needed to compositionally yield truth).

On the other hand, even the most diehard realist has to assume that there are some contingent facts that elicit which meaning an individual expression has. We do not discover meaning by an 'intellectual trip' into a realm of abstracta where we would see them attached to expressions; but rather by observing and recording certain concreta.

Gradual emergence implies that later stages had to build on earlier ones in the contingent fashion characteristic of natural selection, resulting in a system that is better than what existed before but not necessarily optimal on first principles (Bickerton, 1990; Givon, 1995; Jackendoff, 2002).

Stalnaker's analysis starts with the idea that although sentences such as 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' express necessary truths, they are sometimes used to convey contingent information about the world.

Stalnaker (1978) analyzes this contingent information as the diagonal proposition associated with an utterance.

So although my utterance of 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' expresses a necessary proposition in the ordinary sense, it is associated with a contingent diagonal proposition.

If one follows Kripke, then (2) expresses a contingent proposition.

Davies and Humberstone note that 'P iff AP' is contingent but knowable a priori.

They suggest that although the sentence is contingent, there is an intuitive sense in which it is necessary: intuitively, no matter which world turns out to be the actual world, 'P iff AP' will be true.

Likewise, for a contingent empirical truth P, AP will be necessary, but there is an intuitive sense in which it is contingent: intuitively, there are some worlds such that if those worlds had been actual, then AP would have been false.