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    Carmelics

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

    It is not the case that The sentence 'Barack Obama is a Democrat' is true and 'Barack Obama is a Republican' is false.

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

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Party membership is a social-institutional fact constituted by collective intentionality, not a mind-independent property that extensions can track (Searle 1995).
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    • 2.Predicates like 'is a Democrat' have no determinate extension absent the background of evolving social practices, making truth-conditions context-sensitive rather than fixed (Wittgenstein, PI §201).
      ?

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    • 3.If the social institution of the Democratic Party dissolved or radically transformed, the truth-value of the sentence would shift without any change in Obama's intrinsic properties, undermining the referentialist account.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Hilary Putnam's model-theoretic argument shows that for any consistent theory, there are multiple admissible interpretations mapping its terms to extensions, making 'Barack Obama is a Democrat' true under one model and false under another (Putnam 1980).
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.No internal or causal constraint uniquely fixes which model is the intended one, so the claim that the sentence has a determinate truth-value presupposes a metaphysical realism that cannot be internally justified.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The reference of 'is a Democrat' is a function that returns true when given as input an object that is a member of the Democratic party.
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    • 2.The reference of 'is a Republican' is a function that returns true when given as input an object that is a member of the Republican party.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.Barack Obama is a member of the Democratic party and is not a member of the Republican party.
      ?

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