Читать книгу The Philosopher's Toolkit - Julian Baggini, Julian Baggini - Страница 80

Certainty is often defined as a kind of feeling or mental state (perhaps as a state in which the mind believes some X without any doubt at all). But defining certainty this way offers only a psychological account of the concept, and a psychological account fails to define when we are properly warranted in feeling this way. A more philosophical account of certainty would therefore add something about that sort of warrant – perhaps with the idea that a proposition may be properly accepted as certainly true when it is impossible for it to be false; alternatively, it may be properly accepted as certainly false when it is impossible for it to be true. Sometimes propositions that are certain in this way are called necessarily true and necessarily false (1.12).