There Are Brute Necessities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10688577 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bruno Whittle (0000-0002-5374-0286, Corpus Christi College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue | 238 |
| Pages | 149-159 |
| Publication date | 2010-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2009.595.x |
| OpenAlex | W2068843571 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
A necessarily true sentence is ‘brute’ if it does not rigidly refer to anything and if it cannot be reduced to a logical truth. The question of whether there are brute necessities is an extremely natural one. Cian Dorr has recently argued for far‐reaching metaphysical claims on the basis of the principle that there are no brute necessities: he initially argued that there are no non‐symmetric relations, and later that there are no abstract objects at all. I argue that there are nominalistically acceptable brute necessities, and that Dorr's arguments thus fail. My argument is an application of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem
Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Linguistics · Mathematical economics · Metaphysics · Natural (archaeology) · Sentence · History · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Mathematics · Medicine · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2022 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |