July
23, 2017 Sunday
Bedtime
story
De Dicto and De Re
Modal
scope fallacy is a fallacy of necessity wherein unnecessary emphasis is placed
on the conclusion.
Let
me state this with an example.
(a)
All Hindus consider cow a sacred animal.
(b)
Rama is a Hindu.
Therefore
the conclusion (c) is Rama cannot eat beef.
Let
me show you where the fallacy of necessity is being made here.
Just
because Rama is a Hindu and he really DOES consider cow to be sacred and even
perhaps he has never eaten beef, does not necessarily mean that Rama cannot eat
beef.
Or
he will not eat beef.
It
is possible that he can be made to eat beef out of sheer necessity if he
happens to be in a place where his kind of diet is hard to get.
Or
perhaps he changes his religion to Islam and then he is no more obliged to
consider cow as a sacred animal.
Or
in the rarest of the rare cases, he developed a taste for those delicious
sinful and harmful American hamburgers.
Within
the formal logic there arrived a new subtopic that is known as modal logic.
The
term modal refers to a specific word in a statement that qualifies it.
For
example, when a Hindu will tell you “I am a vegetarian” he means that he is generally
a vegetarian.
It
is quite possible that this Hindu eats dairy products including eggs that he
does not consider to be meat products and hence considers them to be vegetarian
products.
The
word “generally” then is a modal for the sentence “I am a vegetarian”.
In
modal logic, there is a distinction to be made between two types of scopes or
necessities.
It
can either be de dicto or de re.
These
are Latin terms where the term de dicto
means “about what is said” and de re
means “about the thing.”
So
let us look at the point of “Rama cannot eat beef” in terms of de dicto and de re.
According
to the de dicto necessity, Rama
simply cannot eat beef by virtue of just being a Hindu.
Being
a Hindu is the sole property that is needed to debar him from eating beef and
to assume him to be doing so.
This
de dicto necessity stands flimsy to
the reasoning of any logical person.
But
now see it from the point of de re
necessity.
De re looks at the whole
situation and comes to the conclusion that no matter how things would have
gone, Rama would not eat beef.
It
assumes that Rama is a hard-core Hindu, that he would die rather than eat beef
and that developing a taste for anything of bovine flesh origin is untenable
for a Hindu.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Advertisements
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment