real definition
Learn about this topic in these articles:
Plato’s dialectic
- In epistemology: Plato
…designed to elicit a “real definition.” By a real definition Plato means a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that exactly determine the entities to which a given concept applies. The entities to which the concept “being a brother” applies, for example, are determined by the concepts “being male”…
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“Port-Royal Logic”
- In history of logic: The 17th century
Real definitions were descriptive and stated the essential properties in a concept, while nominal definitions were creative and stipulated the conventions by which a linguistic term was to be used.
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rationalism
- In rationalism: Challenges to epistemological rationalism
…follows: (1) positivists have confused real with verbal definition. A verbal definition does indeed state what a word means; but a real definition states what an object is, and the thought of a straight line is the thought of an object, not of words. (2) The positivists have confused conventions…
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