Quotes About Propositions

Now obviously the propositions of the system have reference to matters of empirical fact; if they did not, they could have no claim to be called scientific.

All the propositions of ontology are Temporal propositions. Their truths unveil structures and possibilities of being in the light of Temporality. All ontological propositions have the character of Temporal truth, veritas temporalis.

While many propositions are untrue, in order to be classified as a Great Untruth, an idea must meet three criteria: It contradicts ancient wisdom (ideas found widely in the wisdom literatures of many cultures). It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being. It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.

It is not realistic to put legal constraints on war powers. Law works through general prospective rules that apply to a range of factual situations. International relations and national security are too fluid and unpredictable to be governed by a set of legal propositions that command general assent secured in advance. Laws governing war make us feel more secure but they don't actually make us more secure

Replying two weeks later he states his opinion of Fermat's Last Theorem. "I am very much obliged for your news concerning the Paris prize. But I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.

The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [...].

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

propositional statements

reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions.

Humans construct an understanding of the world that is very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them. They package their experience into objects and events. They assemble these objects and events into propositions, which they take to be characterisations of real and possible worlds. The characterisations are highly schematic: they pick out some aspects of a situation and ignore others, allowing the same situation to be construed in multiple ways.

The fear structure is viewed as a program (in the sense of a computer program) for escaping or avoiding danger and includes several kinds of stored propositions: It includes propositions about threats—when the threat signal (CS) occurs, a bad thing (US) follows; propositions about physiological changes—when the CS occurs, I sweat and my heart beats faster; propositions

Pessimism's propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke.

Not that the propositions of geometry are only approximately true, but that they remain absolutely true in regard to that Euclidean space which has been so long regarded as being the physical space of our experience.

atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated (after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted each other and exhausted their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously.

The notion that a term can be modified arises from neglect to observe the eternal self-identity of all terms and all logical concepts, which alone form the constituents of propositions.* What is called modification consists merely in having at one time, but not at another, some specific relation to some other specific term; but the term which sometimes has and sometimes has not the relation in question must be unchanged, otherwise it would not be that term which had ceased to have the relation.

The key to our problem lies in mathematical induction. It will be remembered that, in Chapter I., this was the fifth of the five primitive propositions which we laid down about the natural numbers. It stated that any property which belongs to 0, and to the successor of any number which has the property, belongs to all the natural numbers. This was then presented as a principle, but we shall now adopt it as a definition.

The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.

Peano. He showed that the entire theory of the natural numbers could be derived from three primitive ideas and five primitive propositions in addition to those of pure logic.

The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form-in other words, that every fact consists of some thing having some quality-has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science and daily life.

[T]hey are the offspring of experience... instinct with blood and breath and vitality.... They are not propositions, conceived in the understanding and addressed to life, but propositions born of life itself, and addressed to the heart. They were not conceived in the minds of the great few, but they sprang from the life of the people.

The first hint of what is to come occurs near the end of Luther's obscurity. In September 1517 the dutiful Johann Rhau-Grunenberg publishes a one-page broadsheet by Luther with a boring title: A Disputation against Scholastic Theology. In his broadsheet, Luther ironically lists concise propositions to be argued over—a central practice of scholasticism—in order to criticize scholasticism itself, sort of like a poet writing a poem to criticize poetry.

Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.

Intuitive minds, on the contrary, being thus accustomed to judge at a single glance, are so astonished when they are presented with propositions of which they understand nothing, and the way to which is through definitions and axioms so sterile, and which they are not accustomed to see thus in detail, that they are repelled and disheartened.

T. H. Huxley's formulation was The foundation of morality is to … give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.