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Constructivism and Epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Colin Phillips
Colin Phillips
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Extract

A picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false (Tractates Logico-Philosophicus, 2.21).

What does this agreement consist in, if not in the fact that what is evidence in these language games speaks for our proposition? (On Certainty, 203).

The purpose of this paper is to outline a constructivist account of the notion of sense and to indicate why such an account is to be preferred to that given by classical semantics.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 53 , Issue 203 , January 1978 , pp. 51 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1978

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References

1 Heyting, A., Intuitionism: An Introduction, p. 98.Google Scholar

2 Some of the things I say about ‘evidence’ were suggested to me by Blackburn, Simon's discussion of ‘reasons’ in his Reason and Prediction (Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. In most respects however our views are very different.

3 In ‘Criteria: A New Foundation for Semantics’, Ratio (1974), 187.Google Scholar

4 See Hacker, P. M., Insight and Illusion: Wittgenstein on Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Experience (Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1972), chapter IX.Google Scholar

5 Philosophical Investigations, §350.Google Scholar

6 This argument is due to Lyon, A.—see his article ‘Criteria and Evidence’ Mind (1974).Google Scholar

7 I would like to thank Gareth Watkins and Jack Skorupski with whom I have discussed some of the ideas in this paper, and Gordon Baker for giving me permission to read his unpublished D.Phil, thesis on ‘The Logic of Vagueness’. The extent of my debt to Michael Dummett's works will be obvious.