Abstract

Introduces the criticisms put forward by philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty to the idea that one thing might represent another: that thoughts, utterances, and inscriptions are said to have content by virtue of their power to represent reality; and that those that do the job accurately are true, they correspond to the facts, or mirror reality—they are representations of reality. The author then outlines the deductive proof that he will present in the book to show that Davidson's and Rorty's criticisms are unfounded. The content of the proof is based on the work of Kurt Gödel and W. V. Quine, and demonstrates conclusively that any supposedly non‐truth‐functional operation must satisfy an exacting logical condition in order to avoid collapsing into a truth‐function, and any theory of facts, states of affairs, situations, or propositions must satisfy a corresponding condition if such entities are not to collapse into a unity. The three main sections of the chapter: examine the case against representations made by Davidson and Rorty, including Davidson's notorious argument against facts; discuss Rorty's critique of representational philosophy ; and consider collapsing arguments that discredit the existence of facts, as put forward by Gottlob Frege, and developed by Alonzo Church, Quine, Davidson, and Gödel. The last section of the chapter outlines the structure of the book.