Truth

Give five examples necessary truths explaining why your propositions must be so

no.

We imagine what's forth coming, for the truth is before it can be.

The OP's request sounds like a introduction to philosophy course assignment. If so, the following might be an appropriate response.

Nowadays, many, if not most, philosophers hold that any so-called necessary truths are trivial truths expressed as definitions or so-called analytical truths. (Trivial in the sense that they have no empirical import.) E.g., "A bachelor is an unmarried male," or "Twins are two in number."

Although not everyone agrees with Quine, Quines' "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" more or less described fatal problems with the traditional notions of necessary and a priori truth.

The traditional account given by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason involving the synthetic a priori and the analytic a priori is often still taught in beginning philosophy classes. Wikipedia's summary is a good short summary of these kinds of statements.

Most philosophers claim with Hume that there are no empirical statements that are necessarily true; even so, some believe statements like "Table salt is NaCl" qualify as a necessarily true a posteriori statement.

The OP's request sounds like a introduction to philosophy course assignment. If so, the following might be an appropriate response.

Nowadays, many, if not most, philosophers hold that any so-called necessary truths are trivial truths expressed as definitions or so-called analytical truths. (Trivial in the sense that they have no empirical import.) E.g., "A bachelor is an unmarried male," or "Twins are two in number."

Hmm, well, this raises the question as to whether mathematics is synthetic or not. Surely, if we posit the literal existence of numbers and their relations, it would seem that the propositions which derive from them would be necessarily true, that is, true in all possible worlds. If they do exist necessarily, it wouldn't be trivial like analytic propositions.

Mathematics is one system that describes certain abstract properties of nature. Some properties of nature cannot be measured, i.e. feelings, therefore mathematics is not true of the whole of nature, even although it may be true of number.


If the OP is fishing for ideas for which she has not worked I hope that my contribution whether or not it's worthy will advance her thinking.

What is a necessary truth? Please give me an example K.F.S and I will try to think of some.

What is a necessary truth? Please give me an example K.F.S and I will try to think of some.

A necessary truth is one which cannot be false in any possible world. A possible world just being a possible description of how the world could have been. For instance, there is a possible world in which Plato was not a philosopher, but there isn't a possible world in which 9 is a prime number.

I'm still thinking this might take awhile.

The truth is you need a good army to tell anyone the truth.
It must be masculine; every time you even suggest it everyone reacts like you are a rapist.

Give five examples necessary truths explaining why your propositions must be so

1) Anything that is impossible cannot be accomplished.
2) An infinite quality cannot be obtained.
3) Probabilities cannot be known until all possibilities are known.
4) What anything actually is cannot also be what that thing actually isn't.
5) The only thing that is truly relative is Relativity.

1) true by definition
2) true by definition
3) dependent knowledge
4) true by definition
5) it is only a relative measure that yields a relative truth.

Fhbradley, I got one. A person is never in the exact same place from conception to death.

Ex. One might say a baby in the womb is still in the womb the next day so they must be in the exact same place but becuase of the motion of the earth around the sun and the sun around the galaxy no one is ever in the same place.

I'm sure this truth could use some refining but it is an absolute truth. That applies to everything. Nothing is ever in the exact same place.

necessary / contingent

Distinction between kinds of truth. Necessary truth is a feature of any statement that it would be contradictory to deny. (Contradictions themselves are necessarily false.) Contingent truths (or falsehoods) happen to be true (or false), but might have been otherwise. Thus, for example:

"Squares have four sides." is necessary. "Stop signs are hexagonal." is contingent. "Pentagons are round." is contradictory.

This distinction was traditionally associated (before Kant and Kripke) with the distinctions between a priori and a posteriori knowledge and the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgment. Necessity may also be defined de dicto in terms of the formal logical property of tautology.

The question posed in the OP is no doubt a homework question. I wont do your home work but I will help you. The list of necessary truths is a long one. I wont bother to list any. I would suggest using shapes and numbers, they are an unarguably necessary truth gold mine. It would suffice to say that anything that is an alternate way of communicating an idea with the same meaning is a necessary truth. ie in the above example: a 4 sided shape with equal side is the same thing as a square.

Previous posters have said enough on the OP.

With the school house out of the way now, lets have fun perhaps.

For the purposes of communication we must accept the groundwork of necessary truths. In reality though, necessary truths are a misnomer. Speaking literally, there exist no statements that are true in all cases. Example: A square has 4 = sides, or does it? Please show me a square, bring it to me and I will show you that its sides are ≠ with my electron microscope, a square is just an idea, they exist only in our minds for the purposes of everyday communication with others. Necessary truth is just a context of communication. This is all stated in fancy philosophy words in the above definition if you don't understand what I'm saying; read the last sentence carefully.

Give five examples necessary truths explaining why your propositions must be so

Proposition: Most philosophers will never understand truth!

1) most philosophers doesn't have sufficient understanding and knowledge in psychology, physics and neurology to comprehend complex matters.

2) complex matters are often counterintuitive, thus they will most likely resort to compulsery comprehension and only let beautiful rethorics and selfish inner desires rule their selective understanding.

3) it is within our human nature, to have a "society" where the few will rule the many, but not be superior in all aspects, why we can have mutual benefits of eachother's skills.

4) by ruling the many, the few needs a bit of demagogery, why the many needs to be blind to absolute truth, and fall victim to deception.

5) we may gain understanding of more complex matters over time, but the many will not bother gaining understanding of all knowledge, therefore the few can still maintain superior knowledge over the many.

Following are a couple of them, I can think of.
1) Death
2) Truth itself must be true