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I have been pondering about the following puzzle that I came across in Peacocke’s Being Known. Here is the puzzle.

The Cautious man accepts all the steps in a proof; grant that it is imaginatively obscure how he might come to revise that assessment; grant that there is every reason to believe that whenever the proof is reproduced in a satisfying way, it will lead to the same outcome; but dispute that there is anything in all that which justifies him in claiming to have apprehended any essential connection between basis, process and outcome—in claiming, indeed, of any statement in the vicinity that it ‘cannot but’ be true. (Wright’s formulation of the problem from Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics, p.455)

Is the Cautious man (henceforth CM) coherent in his attitudes?
The point of the story is that if the answer to the above stated question is ‘yes’, then modal discourse is not a fact stating discourse. For, if there were modal facts that determine......

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Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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