实质蕴涵推理无害？.pdfVIP

VI.—IS MATERIAL IMPLICATION INFERENTIALLY HARMLESS? BY J . 0 . NELSON THE claim is sometimes made that material implication is infer- entially harmless .1 In this paper I shall show that it is not. Bat these statements stand in need of explanation. Material implication is simply a truth-function, having such-and-such truth-values. What can be meant by saying that a truth-func- tion is inferentially harmless—or, pernicious ? What can be meant by saying that anything is inferentially harmless or D o pernicious ? w n l o Suppose that we endow the following terms with the following a d meanings. By the term argument we shall mean any set of e d f statements, including a single statement, which is being used to r o establish the truth or falsity of some other set of statements, m