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Example Of Imperative Logic

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A dilemma has been raised by Gorgen Gorgensen pertinent to the possibility of imperative logic. Imperative sentence such as ‘shut the door’ is neither true nor false. It makes no sense to ask of an imperative sentence whether it is true or false, they are not truth-apt. Hence imperatives can be considered neither premises nor conclusions of an argument. But, despite this fact, we can construct imperative argument. These two reverse conditions pose a dilemma as Gorgensen puts it ‘So we have the following puzzle: According to a generally accepted definition of logical inference only sentences which are capable of true or false can function as premises or conclusion in an inference, nevertheless it seems evident that a conclusion in the imperative mood may be drawn from two premises one of which or both of which are in the imperative mood. How is this puzzle to be dealt with?’(Gorgensen: 1938: 289) The dilemma here is between the followings: (C1) validity requires the premises and conclusion of an argument must be truth-apt, that is there are no valid arguments containing imperatives, and (C2) there are valid arguments containing imperatives. Let us …show more content…

E.g. ‘The house is on fire’ becomes ‘Fire’, and without losing its functional quality of being true or false…A command is here regarded as simply the more serious ellipsis of omitting the entire penalty clause of the described class of disjunctions, again without sacrificing the truth rules of a disjunction which, however, remain clear, of course, only if the penalty is understood. ‘Run’, then, is permitted to be considered true if the exhorted one stays and burns, where the indicative ‘you run’ would be false.” (Bohnert: 1945: 303) Hare admits that his endeavor is a good one to reduce imperatives into indicatives. But this reduction is limited to only simple imperative word like ‘run’ or simple imperative sentence like ‘go

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