A Minimalist Solution to Jørgensen's Dilemma

Abstract

This article develops a fresh approach to Jørgensen's Dilemma on the basis of Paul Horwich's "minimalist" view that our notion of truth is implicitly defined by the instances of the equivalence schema "The proposition that p is true if and only if p." The "deflationary" claim that the truth predicate, far from referring to any deep property of propositions, merely plays the logical function of enabling us to take certain attitudes (e.g., acceptance or rejection) towards propositions the content of which we are not completely acquainted with or do not want to state openly is argued to lend powerful support to the claim that normative reasoning is concerned with the "transmission" of truth and falsity in the very sense in which descriptive reasoning is commonly taken to be. This result is all the more valuable since the "minimal" sense in which normative propositions are ascribed the capability of being either true or false involves no questionable ontological commitment to the existence of a "world of norms" as opposed to the familiar world of objects and their properties.

Redrafting the Ontology of Scientific Change

“…Thus, we are facing a choice: either we should change some of our fundamental assumptions about normative propositions, logic, or entailment to accommodate for the possibility of deontic logic, or alternatively we should accept that there can be no deontic logic whatsoever. This is the gist of the so called Jørgensen's dilemma, named after Jørgen Jørgensen who formulated it in 1937 (Jørgensen, 1937; for discussion, see Volpe, 1999;Hilpinen, 2006;McNamara, 2014).…”

Norms and Novelty: Reflections on Legal Knowledge, Norms and Evolutionary Systems

“…If so, the dilemma is solvable without relying on the distinction between norms and propositions on norms, 29 namely on the idea that the former cannot be directly inferred but the latter can. In fact, norms can be directly inferred both in case one claims they have truthvalues (in substantive terms as Georges Kalinowski, 30 or in minimalist terms as Giorgio Volpe 31 ) and in case one argues for a different account of logic (a logic without truth as Carlos Alchourrón and Antonio Martino, 32 or another nonclassical logic as Daniel Mendonca 33 ).…”

New Foundations for Imperative Logic I: Logical Connectives, Consistency, and Quantifiers*

“…5 5 On “Jørgensen's dilemma” see: Alchourrón & Martino 1990: 47; Anderson 1999; Bergström 1962: 1–2, 36; Coyle 2002: 295–6; Espersen 1967: 59–61; Green 1998: 718; Ho 1969: 257; Kalinowski 1972: 58–9; Moutafakis 1975: 55; Ramírez 2003: 3, 17–9, 242–4; Rescher 1966: 75; Ross 1941: 55–6, 1941/1944: 32, 1968: 139–40; Stewart 1997; Volpe 1999; Walter 1996, 1997a, 1997b; Wedeking 1969: 2–3; Weinberger 1957: 103, 1958a: 8–9, 43–4, 1981: 89–90, 1991: 286, 1999; Woleński 1977; Zellner 1971: 13–4. Jørgensen's dilemma is usually formulated only with respect to the third reason (i.e., the one about entailment) that I gave for including prescriptions in the scope of logic.…”