Showing posts with label conditions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conditions. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Analyses: a hypothesis

In philosophy journals, one occasionally sees things like this:

Necessarily, x is an F if and only if x satisfies each of the following n conditions:
(i) ...
(ii) ...
(iii) ...
(iv) ...
...
I hypothesize that every philosophical claim of this form that has ever been made in print by a Western philosopher with the number of conditions n greater than or equal to 4 is:
  1. false, and/or
  2. stipulative, and/or
  3. circular, and/or
  4. redundant.
By "circular" I mean that Fness is implicitly or explicitly found in the conditions. By "redundant" I mean that one of the conditions is entailed by the others.

My evidence for the hypothesis is inductive. I have never seen a correct, non-stipulative, non-circular and non-redundant set of necessary and sufficient conditions for anything philosophical where there are more than three conditions.

It could be that the hypothesis is false. Is there a counterexample?