Between meaning and essence : explaining necessary truth
An explanation of why some truths are necessarily true needs to make intelligible how it is that a truth is guaranteed to be true. The thesis argues that a promising starting point for an explanation of necessity can be found in Kant's containmentaccount of analyticity, for it explains how the truth of a judgment is guaranteed by its structure and the relationship between its constituents. This, however, can merely be a starting point for a general explanation of necessary truth, for it is both too narrow, and presupposes a contentious view of concepts. The thesis thus explores how the general strategy, explaining necessary truth by certain relationships between the constituents of representations, can be expanded to cover further necessary truths, for example a posteriori necessities and essentialist claims. It is argued that the explanation can be generalized by focussing on what it is that constitutes reference between representations and the objects they represent as well as how these representations come together to form truth-evaluable representations. Necessary truth, on this account, is a property of truth-evaluable representations which a representation has in virtue of the appropriate relationship
Schieder-Hestermann, Jakob
Between meaning and essence : explaining necessary truth. An explanation of why some truths are necessarily true needs to make intelligible how it is that a truth is guaranteed to be true. The thesis argues that a promising starting point for an explanation of necessity can be found in Kant's containmentaccount of analyticity, for it explains how the truth of a judgment is guaranteed by its structure and the relationship between its constituents. This, however, can merely be a starting point for a general explanation of necessary truth, for it is both too narrow, and presupposes a contentious view of concepts. The thesis thus explores how the general strategy, explaining necessary truth by certain relationships between the constituents of representations, can be expanded to cover further necessary truths, for example a posteriori necessities and essentialist claims. It is argued that the explanation can be generalized by focussing on what it is that constitutes reference between representations and the objects they represent as well as how these representations come together to form truth-evaluable representations. Necessary truth, on this account, is a property of truth-evaluable representations which a representation has in virtue of the appropriate relationship
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