SSH 105 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Fallibilism

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Social Sciences and Humanities
• Course: SSH 105
• Professor: Klaas Kraay

Document Summary

Good arguments provide good reasons to believe that their conclusions are true. Imperative sentences - sentences used to give commands such as: tell me the time, feed the dog! Declarative sentences used to describe things about things that are easy to observe and check or about things that are difficult to know. These must be true or false: some gardeners do not use pesticides, there are more than 100 billion insects in the world. A sentence is true only it corresponds to the facts. If a school child 500 years ago said the earth is flat it was true to them that the earth is flat. Thus truth for one society is not necessarily truth for another. We should (cid:396)esist the te(cid:373)ptatio(cid:374) to say that so(cid:373)ethi(cid:374)g is (cid:862)t(cid:396)ue fo(cid:396)(cid:863) someone or some group just because they believe it, or because they believe it with conviction and sincerity, or even because nearly everyone around them believes it.