Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

For example, 'I am here now' has a propositional content that is true in only some worlds, but its character yields a proposition that is true in all contexts of utterance.

Having admitted images, we may say that the word "box," in the absence of the box, is caused by an image of the box. This may or may not be true—in fact, it is true in some cases but not in others.

There is little reason to doubt that what is true of lower organisms is true of humans as well.

If our question is, exactly when are self-locating statements and beliefs true, then the answer is clear and unproblematic: A statement of the form "I am F" is true, when said or thought by X, if and only if X is F.

What is true of animals, as regards instinct and habit, is equally true of men.

But if we did not know that all which we possess of real and true proceeds from a Perfect and Infinite Being, however clear and distinct our ideas might be, we should have no ground on that account for the assurance that they possessed the perfection of being true.

This poses a problem for the biologist, since, if true, it is an example of true “emergence” – the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organisation.

For example, the primary intension of 'there is water in the glass' will be true at some scenarios and false at others, and the utterance will be true iff the primary intension is true at the scenario of the utterance (roughly, if the glass picked out by the individual at the center of the scenario contains the dominant watery stuff in the environment around the center).

A memory is "accurate" when it is both precise and true, i.e. in the above instance, if it was Jones I met. It is precise even if it is false, provided some very definite occurrence would have been required to make it true.

This mode of stating the nature of the objective reference of a proposition is necessitated by the circumstance that there are true and false propositions, but not true and false facts.