Research
Against the Unrestricted Applicability of Disjunction Elimination
Author:
Marcel Jahn
About Marcel
I wish to thank Wesley H. Holliday, Olivier Roy, Bryan W. Roberts, Sven Neth, Ronja Zschoche and the participants of the 5th LSE-UBT Student Philosophy Conference.
Abstract
In this paper I argue that the disjunction elimination rule presupposes the principle that a true disjunction contains at least one true disjunct. However, in some contexts such as super valuationism or quantum logic, we have good reasons to reject this principle. Hence, disjunction elimination is restricted in at least one respect: it is not applicable to dis-junctions for which this principle does not hold. The insight that disjunction elimination presupposes the principle that a true disjunction contains at least one true disjunct is applied to two arguments which argue for this very principle. I show that these arguments are rule-circular since they rest on disjunction elimination. I claim that rule-circularity better explains why the arguments fail than the explanations provided by Rumfitt (2015), which, for instance, rely on controversial principles about truth.
How to Cite:
Jahn, M., 2017. Against the Unrestricted Applicability of Disjunction Elimination. Rerum Causae, 9(2), pp.92–111.
Published on
01 Jul 2017.
Peer Reviewed
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