It needs to be kept in mind here that in formulating this argument for the existence of propositions, platonists do not commit to the view that all 'that'-clauses are singular terms that denote propositions.
Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist, formulated this same argument in a universal form when he identified the Achilles heel of socialism.
Now as it's formulated here, this argument doesn't rule out the view that 'that'-clauses refer to mentalese sentence types, but the argument can be extended to rule out that view as well (e.g., one might do this by talking not of an American and a Russian but of two creatures with different internal languages of thought).
In the past, Yoo, working closely with Addington, had helped to formulate the argument that the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, unlike that of all other foreign enemies, was not covered by the Geneva conventions; Yoo had also helped to write the Torture Memo.
Moreover, even when we zero in on arithmetic, there are still many different ways to formulate the argument.
There are no doubt other factors that need to be taken into consideration in the calculation required to formulate the argument from divisiveness.
To formulate the argument from evil in terms of the mere existence of any evil at all is to abstract to the greatest extent possible from detailed information about the evils that are found in the world, and so one is assuming, in effect, that such information cannot be crucial for the argument.
This way of formulating the argument is based on a Platonist view of propositions, according to which there are such things as propositions, which are abstract objects distinct from the sentences that can express them, and which are the fundamental bearers of the truth values.
Nevertheless, a staff officer, Major Giulio Douhet, had seen enough to formulate the arguments that would make him the century's foremost advocate of war from the skies.
I will return later to Pyrrhonian moral skepticism in section 4. Also, although here I will sometimes formulate these arguments in terms of moral truth, they could be restated in ways more congenial to skeptics about moral truth-aptness.
