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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Carnap's claimed ontological neutrality is a sham.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Carnap holds that external questions about which framework to adopt are answered by pragmatic decisions based on efficiency, fruitfulness, and utility with respect to the aims of discourse.
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    • 2.If the underlying aim of discourse is predicting the flow of sense data, then sense data are presupposed as the ultimate furniture of the world.
      ?

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    • 3.Presupposing sense data as the ultimate furniture of the world is a substantive anti-realist metaphysical commitment.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Carnap's framework pluralism implicitly privileges linguistic frameworks that carve reality at empirically testable joints, encoding verificationism as a meta-level ontological constraint.
      ?

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    • 2.Verificationism is not a neutral methodological tool but a substantive metaphysical thesis about what kinds of entities can meaningfully exist, as Quine argues in 'Two Dogmas.'
      ?

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    • 3.A position that embeds a contested metaphysical thesis at the level of framework selection cannot coherently claim neutrality about ontology at any level.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Carnap's internal/external distinction itself presupposes that reality divides neatly into framework-relative and framework-independent questions, which is a substantive ontological thesis.
      ?

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    • 2.Thomasson and other neo-Carnapians acknowledge that the very act of individuating linguistic frameworks requires prior commitments about what kinds of things can serve as referents.
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    • 3.Any meta-ontological architecture that must individuate frameworks by their referential domains has already taken a stand on what the world contains before the first pragmatic decision is made.
      ?

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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.