truth etc mar 2007

[...]... time On that conception, the present is a stretch of time and not an instant or a Timeless Truths 15 durationless moment But it is not a stretch between the past and the future; for there is no gap between past and future Rather, it a composite stretch, a stretch consisting of a piece of the past and a contiguous piece of the future According to a late grammarian, there are three times—but according... Those texts deal with truths about the future: present truth about the future requires present causes For truths about the past, parity of reasoning will suggest that present truth requires present effects And for truths about the present? Well, they are there in front of us, too late to have causes and too soon to have effects So a first shot at a general thesis about present truth might look like... that assertibles may pass some part of their careers without a truth- value The aggressive version requires that they pass the whole of time either in the company of one truth- value or in the 20 Truth company of the other The version which I propose as Chrysippean is betwixt and between If Chrysippus strained every sinew to persuade us of the truth of his thesis, then the thesis must have been disputed—or... then what is it? Some philosophers have suggested that it has a third truth- value: it is indeterminate, or neutral, or possible, or the like No such notion is found in any ancient text, where there are precisely two truth- values, truth and falsity An item which is neither true nor false does not have a filmy third value—it has no truth- value at all Questions and commands and prayers and hypotheses are... times The fact that such tenses are used freely in ascriptions of truth and falsity creates a presumption in favour of timed truth- values And the presumption is corroborated by several associated facts—for example, by the fact that temporal adverbs are readily attached to ‘be true’ and ‘be false’ TIMELESS TRUTHS Timed ascriptions of truth and falsity are normal in English and in Greek and in Latin... need to refer to the phenomenon which the grammarians call sequence of tenses; but I shall note that in Everything Oscar said was witty the tense of ‘was’ is determined by the tense of ‘said’—the sentence does not suggest that his remarks have lost their salt And in the same way the past tense of ‘was’ in Whatever Aristotle said was true does not put his truths in the past Uncomplicated and seemingly... at least, from one language to another But one thing is plain: tenses do not always signal time So the third premiss of the argument for timed truth is false: to be sure, ascriptions of truth and falsity are generally tensed; but it may not be inferred that truth and falsity are timed Nonetheless, whatever may be said of the present tense, which tends to be a maid-of-all-work, the past tense and the... thesis claims that every assertible must have one and only one of the two truthvalues Inclusive disjunction was known to ancient logic and to ancient grammar But the exclusive variety was the normal case, and it was defined as follows: ¹ contendit omnes nervos Chrysippus ut persuadeat omne ἀξίωμα aut verum esse aut falsum 2 Truth A sound disjunction announces that one of the items in it is sound and... individual item.) The colour-values of individual items are timed Are the truth- values of individual items timeless, like arithmetical properties, or timed, like colour-values? The Principle of Bivalence works—or is generally taken to work—with timeless notions of truth and falsity In the Chrysippean thesis—and in ancient logic quite generally truth- values are timed: you may ask when, or for how long, an item... verb in Two and two make four is present in tense and indicates the present time—but here the present time is forever The view that in truth there are only two times was accepted by the grammarians—if we believe Choeroboscus: You must know that according to the grammarians, the present is extended For it indicates a sort of extension compared to what the philosophers call an instantaneous time, as . 2005 Contents 1Truth 1 A principle of bivalence—Times and tenses—Timeless truths—Bivalence disputed Truth and causation—Changing truth- values—Sayings which cease to exist—Sentences Truth, time,.