Conservatism for Will is the defense of an a priori truth asserted as "self-evident" by the founding fathers: that all men are created equal, and each has a "natural right" to do as he pleases with himself and his own property, and any government is tasked purely for the maintenance of such freedom.
|
|
The French mathematician Henri Poincaré was among the first to articulate a conventionalist view. Poincaré's use of non-Euclidean geometries in his work on differential equations convinced him that Euclidean geometry should not be regarded as a priori truth. He held that axioms in geometry should be chosen for the results they produce, not for their apparent coherence with human intuitions about the physical world.
|
|
The French mathematician Henri Poincaré was among the first to articulate a conventionalist view. Poincaré's use of non-Euclidean geometries in his work on differential equations convinced him that Euclidean geometry should not be regarded as an a priori truth. He held that axioms in geometry should be chosen for the results they produce, not for their apparent coherence with – possibly flawed – human intuitions about the physical world.
|
|
Thus, the mind's innate constants cross the tongs of Hume's fork and lay Newton's universal gravitation as a priori truth. yet knowledge of things in themselves impossible. Safeguarding science, then, Kant paradoxically stripped it of scientific realism. Aborting Francis Bacon's inductivist mission to dissolve the veil of appearance to uncover the noumena—metaphysical view of nature's ultimate truths—Kant's transcendental idealism tasked science with simply modeling patterns of phenomena.
|
|
Richard Swinburne argues for simplicity on logical grounds: According to Swinburne, since our choice of theory cannot be determined by data (see Underdetermination and Duhem–Quine thesis), we must rely on some criterion to determine which theory to use. Since it is absurd to have no logical method for settling on one hypothesis amongst an infinite number of equally data- compliant hypotheses, we should choose the simplest theory: "Either science is irrational [in the way it judges theories and predictions probable] or the principle of simplicity is a fundamental synthetic a priori truth." (Swinburne 1997).
|
|
Whereas synthetic statements hold meanings to refer to states of facts, contingencies. Finding it impossible to know objects as they truly are in themselves, however, Kant concluded that the philosopher's task should not be to try to peer behind the veil of appearance to view the noumena, but simply that of handling phenomena. Reasoning that the mind must contain its own categories for organizing sense data, making experience of space and time possible, Kant concluded that the uniformity of nature was an a priori truth. A class of synthetic statements that was not contingent but true by necessity, was then synthetic a priori.
|
|
Nowadays the material is available freely on the Internet.elämänkatsomustieto As a thinker, Hartikainen supports atheism and ontological materialism. He favours the words 'reality research', 'realityconception' (conception of reality) and 'lifeconception' as better alternatives for words 'science', 'world view' and 'philosophy of life' (life stance). He supports Finnish physicist Kari Enqvist's view, that emergence means 'coarsening' and the losing of information relating to the description of reality (examples: statistical thermodynamics, classical electrodynamics, thinking of an animal etc.) Hartikainen is a modern logical empiricist and he recommends not using words "a priori truth" and saying "correct by definition" or "derivable from axioms" instead.
|
|
The philosophical impetus behind Frege's logicist programme from the Grundlagen der Arithmetik onwards was in part his dissatisfaction with the epistemological and ontological commitments of then-extant accounts of the natural numbers, and his conviction that Kant's use of truths about the natural numbers as examples of synthetic a priori truth was incorrect. This started a period of expansion for logicism, with Dedekind and Frege as its main exponents. However, this initial phase of the logicist programme was brought into crisis with the discovery of the classical paradoxes of set theory (Cantor 1896, Zermelo and Russell 1900–1901). Frege gave up on the project after Russell recognized and communicated his paradox identifying an inconsistency in Frege's system set out in the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.
|
|
Kaplan goes on to use this semantic scheme to explain phenomena concerning the relationship between necessary and a priori truth. An utterance is said to be necessarily true if, and only if the content it expresses is true in every possible circumstance; while an utterance is said to be true a priori if, and only if it expresses, in each context, a content that is true in the circumstances that context is part of. So, "I am here now" is true a priori because each of the indexical expressions used ('I', 'here', 'now') directly refer to the speaker, location, and time of utterance. But the utterance is not necessarily true, because any given speaker might have been in at a different place at that time, given different circumstances of evaluation.
|
|
During her mid-twenties, she spent a period of two years not looking in mirrors; though initially this was done as part of a questioning of attachment to appearance, it led her to believe that sense of self can be distorted through a focus on physical appearance. After her doctorate, Horowitz went to the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) from 1977–8 as an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow, before teaching variously at Vassar College (instructor/assistant professor of philosophy 1974–78), New York University (assistant professor of philosophy, 1978–83) and Purchase State College, State University of New York (visiting assistant professor of philosophy, 1983-4). She returned to Pittsburgh in 1985 as a visiting assistant professor; that same year, she published "A Priori Truth" in The Journal of Philosophy, an article which was included in volume VIII of the Philosopher's Annual as one of the year's best philosophy papers. She became an assistant professor on the faculty at Pitt the following year.
|
|