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    Carmelics

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

    It is not the case that 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

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 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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