Abstract

Chs. 7 set out and clean the formal tools that are needed in the remaining chapters to prove that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The previous chapter clarified what is meant by such terms as ‘extensions’, ‘extensionality’ and ‘scope’, and this one separates various inference principles common in extensional logic. The six sections of the chapter are: Introductory Remarks; A Principle of Substitutivity for Material Equivalents; A Principle of Substitutivity for Singular Terms; A Principle of Substitutivity for Logical Equivalents; An Inference Principle Involving ‘Exportation’; and A Principle of Substitutivity for Definite Descriptions.