On Approaches to Resolve Chisholm’s Paradox: A Critique

This paper focuses on Chisholm’s paradox and offers to resolve some ambiguities concerning a philosophical comparative analysis using two logical frameworks in which the paradox can be formalized. In the standard system of deontic logic, the Chisholm paradox is one of the most interesting and challenging paradoxes among all. The paradox, ever since its discovery, has been shown to affect many if not most deontic systems. Various approaches like Van Fraassen’s dyadic deontic approach, Peter L. Mott’s counterfactual conditional approach etc. were formulated to avoid inconsistency in the formal representation of Chisholm set of sentences. The aim of this paper is to focus on the ambiguities in the above approaches and to highlight a serious problem in the attempt of Judith Wagner while resolving the paradox. Judith Wagner argued that Peter L. Mott’s solution is unsatisfactory as it allows for general factual detachment. Here, we argue that Wagner’s solution faces serious challenges when it comes to fulfilling minimal adequacy conditions, and shifting the operator can only temporarily fix the problem. In this paper, first, we discuss the approaches and then attempt to highlight the respective ambiguities in them.