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Richard Robinson On Incorrigibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

James Ford*
Affiliation:
Laurentian University

Extract

Richard Robinson has argued that “no consistent and useful and desirable meaning” can be given to the philosophical terms “corrigible” and “incorrigible” so long as one espouses a bivalent theory of truth with the law of excluded middle operative. The crux of his argument is that the corrigibility-incorrigibility distinction can be shown to be redundant since, in effect, incorrigibility is materially equivalent to truth and corrigibility materially equivalent to falsehood. Robinson understands the correcting of a proposition to consist in “abandoning one's belief in a false proposition and adopting its true contradictory instead. “ But given that it makes no sense to speak of correcting a true proposition, all true propositions are incapable of emendation simply by virtue of their being true, and all incorrigible propositions are by definition true.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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References

1 Robinson, RichardThe Concept of Incorrigibility,Canadian Journal of Philosophy, I, No.4 (1972). 430.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 428.