Philosophy Lexicon of Arguments

Command: linguistic expression of an instruction to act. The command has the form of a non-descriptive sentence. It can not be true or false.
Author Item Excerpt Meta data
Prior, Arthur
Books on Amazon
Commands I 66
Command/Relation/Brackets/Prior: ad a) we can eliminate the misconception that a command is a relation between a commanding person and something that is commanded through the right brackets - instead of "X commands us/to close the door" - ""X commands us to/"door close""- where "commands us to" is not a two-digit predicate, but rather an operator which forms a sentence from a name on one side, and an imperative sentence on the other -
I 66
Imperatives/Prior: cannot be treated like indicatives
I 69
Command/Prior: E.g. "There are commands that have never been voiced and will never be voiced" I 69
Command/Prior: "you schould have closed the door before": the past tense does not relate to the content, absurd. "I closed the door before..." - Ban/Negation/Command/Prior: two options: a) "!not-p": "see to it that p does not happen" - b) "not(!p) "something like: "you need not worry about it" - E.g. "Do something" can have two forms: a) "for some p, see to it that p" b) "see to it that (for some p, p)" - probably not equivalent! - E.g. "Make sure that 2 + 2 = 4" is absurd, because commands always serve to bring about facts that do not exist yet - therefore, an instruction cannot be made true like a fact, namely by something that had been the case earlier - therefore, objectivity of ethics compromised

Pri I
A. Prior
Objects of thought Oxford 1971

Pri II
Arthur N. Prior
Papers on Time and Tense 2nd Edition Oxford 2003

> Counter arguments against Prior

Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2017-03-28