Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-cnmwb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T12:07:33.843Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

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

2 Ibid., p. 428.