Abstract
What makes arguments from self-refutation particularly attractive to many philosophers is that they seem specially decisive in philosophical controversies. Arguments from self-refutation eliminate positions as untenable without appeal to any claims other than those made in the position attacked in that way; nothing other than what is contained within the self-refutating position is used to show its inadequacy. The danger of begging the question is thus circumvented, and the proponent of a position successfully attacked in this way has no further philosophical moves he can make from within his position; he must alter or abandon it. Arguments from self-refutation, if successful, are thus conclusive stopping points in the dialectic of philosophic controversy. They establish limits beyond which that dialectic cannot go, beyond which significant philosophic controversy is impossible.
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Notes
See Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., Germain Grisez, and Olaf Tollefsen, Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument,University of Notre Dame Press, 1976, esp. pp. 181–185 for the role of self-referential arguments in philosophical controversy, and Chapter 5 for an analysis of self-refuting statements.
See Boyle, Grisez, and Tollefsen, pp. 40–47, for an example.
Mary Hesse, “The Strong Thesis of Sociology of Science,” in Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science,Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 29–60. All other references to this article will appear in the text.
James Marshall, Michael Peters, and Miles Shepeard, “Self-Refutation Arguments Against Young’s Epistemology,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 13 (1981) 49.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Tollefsen, O. (1987). The Equivocation Defense of Cognitive Relativism. In: Bartlett, S.J., Suber, P. (eds) Self-Reference. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3551-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3551-8_12
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