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    Quine's criterion of ontological commitment gives us prin... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Propositions have parts that correspond to functions, specifically conditional functions that map arguments onto special values reflecting truth or falsity.

    Quine's criterion of ontological commitment gives us principled grounds to reject abstract truth-values as unnecessary posits in a parsimonious semantic theory.

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    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Quine's criterion commits us only to entities quantified over in our best scientific theories; truth-values aren't so quantified.
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    • 2.We can explain truth-conditions using only physical facts and linguistic conventions, making abstract truth-values metaphysically redundant.
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    • 3.Parsimony favors theories minimizing ontological commitments; eliminating truth-values achieves this without explanatory loss.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against
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    • 1.Logic and mathematics seem to quantify over abstract objects; rejecting them undermines the formalization Quine himself endorsed.
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    • 2.Truth-value realism better explains why some sentences are determinately true/false independent of our epistemic access or conventions.
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    • 3.Quine's own canonical notation (first-order logic with variables) arguably commits us to abstract propositions or semantic values implicitly.
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    Truth & Knowledge1 linkedPhilosophy of Language1 linked

    Related

    Logic and mathematics seem to quantify over abstract objects; rejecting them und...Parsimony favors theories minimizing ontological commitments; eliminating truth-...Propositions have parts that correspond to functions, specifically conditional f...Quine's criterion commits us only to entities quantified over in our best scient...
    +3 moreShow less
    Quine's own canonical notation (first-order logic with variables) arguably commi...Truth-value realism better explains why some sentences are determinately true/fa...We can explain truth-conditions using only physical facts and linguistic convent...

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    2 (1 for, 1 against)
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