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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 The counterfactual account of proposition truth-conditions fails for propositions that are too complex for any finite mind to grasp.

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

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Hanks's counterfactual response grounds truth-conditions in possible tokens: a proposition is true iff, were someone to token it, that token would be true under the relevant conditions.
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    • 2.Some propositions — such as mathematical truths too complicated for any finite mind to grasp — have no possible tokens, not even counterfactual ones.
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    • 3.If there are no possible tokens, the counterfactual account provides no truth-conditions for those propositions.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Gödel's incompleteness theorems establish that arithmetic contains truths no finite formal system can prove, implying some propositions transcend all finite cognitive reach.
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    • 2.A counterfactual conditioned on an impossible antecedent ('were someone to token P') is vacuously true of any consequent, yielding indeterminate rather than determinate truth-conditions.
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    • 3.Determinate truth-conditions require non-vacuous grounding; vacuously true counterfactuals cannot distinguish true propositions from false ones in the ungrasped domain.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Frege's context principle requires that propositional senses exist independently of any cognitive act of grasping, making tokenability irrelevant to propositional identity.
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    • 2.If propositional truth-conditions depend on possible tokening acts, then Fregean sense-independent propositions — accepted widely in anti-psychologistic semantics — are left without truth-conditions by the counterfactual account.
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    • 3.Any account that systematically fails to assign truth-conditions to a recognized class of propositions endorsed by the dominant tradition is explanatorily deficient on its own semantic terms.
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