In my most recent post, I argued for the coherence of analyticity by proposing that concepts are things that exist out there in the real world (i.e. are mind independent). I’ve come to rethink this ontology of concepts.
analyticity
Truth by Convention or Truth by Description?
What are the laws of logic, and are they universal? Are the laws of logic something that exists “out there” and our symbolic and syntactical conventions merely a way of describing it? Or do our logical propositions and assertions dictate the truth? This may seem like an easy question to answer, but not everyone agrees.
Intensionality and Phenomenology
When we speak of a property or trait instantiated by an object, we take two assumptions into account: the object in question has a property Bo which causes it to interact with the surrounding world in a particular way, and the perceiver has the property Bp which causes them to perceive those interactions in a particular way. This is an asymmetric relationship between perceiver and perceived.
Conceptual Engineering of PhenomIntensioNominalism (PIN): A Foundational Theory of Meaning
The colloquial way of defining what it means for a statement to be true is that it corresponds to reality: if I say “it is raining” and it’s also the case that it’s raining, then what I said is true; if I say “it is raining” and it’s not the case that it’s raining, then what I said is false. This is an extensional truth condition – the extension of the proposition must be the case in reality for the statement to be true. But is this really how truth works? In what follows, I am riffing on some ideas floating around in my head, so feel free to point out any problems so as to help me clarify my thoughts.