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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Free logic (Lambert, van Fraassen) demonstrates that propositions with empty singular terms need not receive a truth value at all, rendering them neither true nor false.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Denying truth values to empty-term propositions abandons the classical principle of bivalence without sufficient reason—gaps multiply logical complexity.
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    • 2.Frege's solution (treating empty terms as presupposition failures) handles the same cases while preserving compositional semantics and standard logic.
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    • 3.Truth-value gaps create problems for negation: if 'Pegasus exists' lacks truth value, what of 'Pegasus does not exist'? Trivalent logic introduces new ad hoc rules.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Classical logic forces a false dilemma: sentences with empty terms must be true or false, but this conflicts with semantic intuitions about reference failure.
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    • 2.Truth-value gaps preserve the intuitive difference between meaningful but non-denoting utterances (like 'Sherlock Holmes is clever') and genuine nonsense.
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    • 3.Free logic avoids the unintuitive consequence that all statements about non-existent objects are automatically false or require logical revision.
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