Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

406 GLOSSARY
truth, double:
truth, necessary:
universals:
There has been much debate about the meaning of the
terms ‘agreement’ and ‘fact’ in this context.
the thesis, associated with Averroism (q.v.) and
rejected by many Catholic theologians, that a
proposition can be true in philosophy and false in
religion, and conversely. The thesis was prompted by
the fact that some propositions (e.g. that the world is
eternal) drawn from Aristotle conflicted with
propositions based on the Bible or the Koran.
see ‘a priori’.
it has been argued that universal terms, such as
‘triangle’, can have meaning only if there exist in
some way entities which are called ‘universals’, e.g.
the triangle as such, or triangularity. ‘Conceptualism’
is the thesis that such entities exist only in the way
that concepts exist; ‘realism’ is the thesis that
universals have a real existence. ‘Nominalism’ is the
thesis that universal terms are just words which are
applied to a number of things.
verification, principle of: also called the ‘principle of verifiability’. This term
has two senses, (a) It can refer to a criterion of
meaning; according to this, a proposition is factually
significant if, and only if, it can be verified in
principle, (b) The term can also be applied to a theory
of the nature of meaning; this states that the meaning
of a proposition is the method of verifying it.