For Part I of this discussion, and the first six examples, see here. Recall that my concern is to show via a variety of examples that the eliminativist-reductivist distinction is useful and important and indeed indispensable for clear thinking about a number of topics.
7. Truth is warranted assertibility. Someone who makes this claim presumably intends to inform us about the nature of truth on the presupposition that there is truth. He is saying: there is truth all right; and what it is is warranted assertibility. But I say: if truth is warranted assertibility, then there is no truth. The italicized claim, no matter what the intentions of a person who makes it, amounts to a denial of truth. This example, as it seems to me, is 'on all fours' (as the Brits say) with the Feuerbach example and the 'properties are sets' example. Just as a property is not the sort of entity that could be identified with a set, truth is not the sort of property that could be identified with warranted assertibility (even at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry.) These three claims are all of them eliminativist.
8. Truth is relative. Ditto. Truth is not the sort of property that could be relative: if you know what truth is then you know that truth is absolute. So if you say that truth is relative, then you are either confusing truth with some other property (e.g. the property of being believed by someone) or you are willy-nilly denying the very existence of truth. If you understand the concept of God, then you understand that God cannot be an anthropomorphic projection. And if you understand the concept of truth, then you understand that truth cannot be relative to anything, whatever your favorite index of relativization might be, whether individuals, social classes, historical epochs . . . .
See Truth is Absolute! Part One. Part Two.
9. The morally obligatory is that which God commands. In stark contrast to the two foregoing examples, this example cannot be given an eliminativist reading. The very concept of truth disallows truth's relativization. But there is nothing in the concept of moral obligation to disallow the identification of the morally obligatory with that which God commands. But here we need to make a distinction.
You will have noticed that identity is a symmetrical relation: if x = y, then y = x. But reduction is asymmetrical: if x reduces to y, then y does not reduce to x. Therefore, an identification is not the same as a reductive identification or reduction. 'Hesperus = Phosphorus' is an identity claim but not a reductive claim: the claim is not that Hesperus reduces to Phosphorus, as if Phosphorus were the fundamental reality and Hesperus the less fundamental, or perhaps a mere appearance of Phosphorus. But 'Table salt = NaCl' is a reduction of what is less fundamental to what is more fundamental.
Now what about our italicized claim? There are problems with reading it as a left-to-right reduction. The morally obligatory is what we morally ought to do; but what we ought to do cannot be reduced to what anyone commands, not even if the commander is morally perfect. The normative oughtness of an act or act-ommission cannot be reduced the mere fact that someone commands it, even if the commander always commands all and only what one ought to do. So one could argue that the italicized claim, if construed as a reduction of the morally obligatory to what God commands, collapses into an elimination of the morally obligatory. Be we needn't take it as a reduction; we can take it as a nonreductive identification. Accordingly, being morally obligatory and being commanded by God are the same property in reality even though they are conceptually distinct.
But even if you don't agree with the details of my analysis, I think you must agree to distinguish among eliminative claims, reductive identity claims, and nonreductive identity claims.
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