Abstract

Richard Robinson has argued that “no consistent and useful and desirable meaning” can be given to the philosophical terms “corrigible” and “incorrigible” so long as one espouses a bivalent theory of truth with the law of excluded middle operative. The crux of his argument is that the corrigibility-incorrigibility distinction can be shown to be redundant since, in effect, incorrigibility is materially equivalent to truth and corrigibility materially equivalent to falsehood. Robinson understands the correcting of a proposition to consist in “abandoning one's belief in a false proposition and adopting its true contradictory instead. “ But given that it makes no sense to speak of correcting a true proposition, all true propositions are incapable of emendation simply by virtue of their being true, and all incorrigible propositions are by definition true.