Rights and Justified Claims

Abstract

Professor White reminds us that the fact that a claim has been made does not imply the truth of the proposition which is its content; nor, conversely, does the truth of a proposition imply the occurrence of the relevant claim. These denials of inferrability, from the fact of a claim to a proposition and vice versa, will hold even when the propositional content of the claim concerns rights. The topic of the proposition is irrelevant to the fact that inferrability in either direction does not exist between the occurrence of a claim and its proposition. The source of the independence of an occurrent claim from its propositional content is that each has different criteria for its truth-values. Claims have occurred, if some act was performed which constituted such an event as a claim, while the propositional content clearly, but perhaps unfortunately, has truth criteria other than that.