Читать книгу The Philosopher's Toolkit - Julian Baggini, Julian Baggini - Страница 67

As we have defined them, axioms would seem to be pretty powerful premises. Once, however, you consider the types of axiom that there are, their power seems to be somewhat diminished. One type of axiom comprises premises that are true by definition. Perhaps because so few great philosophers have been married, the example of ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’ is usually offered as the paradigmatic example of definitional truths. The problem is that no argument is going to be able to run very far with such an axiom. Axioms of this sort are purely tautological, that is to say, ‘unmarried men’ merely restates in different words the meaning that is already contained in ‘bachelor’. (This sort of proposition is sometimes called – following Immanuel Kant – an ‘analytic’ proposition. See 4.3.) They are therefore spectacularly uninformative sentences (except to someone who doesn’t know what ‘bachelor’ means). So, they are unlikely to help yield informative conclusions in an argument.