2022 Theses Bachelor's

Inference and Entitlement

Torborg, Jeffrey Daniel

In virtue of what are we justified in employing certain deductive rules like Modus Ponens? I look at two proposals that sketch an answer to this question, a meaning-based account after the manner of Boghossian (2020), and a broadly pragmatist approach found in Enoch and Schechter (2008). I suggest that each of these suffer weaknesses, and I close with a roughly non-cognitivist moral. That is, I close with the recommendation that settling any fact about MP, even the facts about justification, fails to settle the question whether to employ it.

Keywords: epistemology, metaethics, philosophy of language, Modus Ponens, non-cognitivism