In
analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United Sta ...
, the paradigm case argument is an argument which is applied as a rebuttal to the claim that certain concepts, such as
free will
Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actio ...
or
knowledge
Knowledge can be defined as awareness of facts or as practical skills, and may also refer to familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often defined as true belief that is distinc ...
are meaningless. The paradigm case argument is that if a term, such as "knowledge", is regularly applied to some cases and not to others, then that term (and the concept it refers to) cannot truly be undefined, as it clearly has some kind of definition in practice.
The argument is so named because it often takes the form of pointing out a ''paradigm case''—a case which unambiguously falls under the common definition of the term, and so can be taken as a definite instance of the supposedly non-existent concept.
This argument was commonly applied during the flourishing of
linguistic philosophy.
References
Analytic philosophy
Philosophical arguments
Semantics
Philosophy of language
External links
''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy''
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