Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

A predicate typically connects with a name to form a sentence, which is either true or false, depending on the name, or, more precisely, by the referent of the name.

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those other which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?

Thus S2's misuse of 'N' may be discovered as soon as the speakers encounter a sentence containing 'N' and such that it would be true in case 'N' were A and false in case 'N' were B.

In order to be able to classify sentences into true and false in a compositional way, we need a much more fine-grained ('auxiliary') classification.

The opposition between truth and falsity means simply a function that assigns truth to the true statements, and falsity to the false ones.

We associate synonymous expressions, but we do so because we want to distinguish between true and false sentences and since synonymy represents the only way to accomplish this compositionally.

Besides, I had ideas of many sensible and corporeal things; for although I might suppose that I was dreaming, and that all which I saw or imagined was false, I could not, nevertheless, deny that the ideas were in reality in my thoughts.

As for the thoughts of many other objects external to me, as of the sky, the earth, light, heat, and a thousand more, I was less at a loss to know whence these came; for since I remarked in them nothing which seemed to render them superior to myself, I could believe that, if these were true, they were dependencies on my own nature, in so far as it possessed a certain perfection, and, if they were false, that I held them from nothing, that is to say, that they were in me because of a certain imperfection of my nature.

Picturesqueness aside, this is to say that the truths of reason are those which could not possibly be false.

Truths which become false under substitution of 'unmarried man' for 'bachelor' are easily constructed with help of 'bachelor of arts' or 'bachelor's buttons.'