The Implicit Commitments Thesis (ICT) states that in accepting a formal theory $$\textrm{S}$$ S, one is implicitly committed to additional statements, such as $$\textrm{S}$$ S ’s consistency. ICT aligns with the intuition that accepting $$\textrm{S}$$ S without acknowledging its consistency is epistemically problematic. However, there is ongoing debate over ICT’s validity in all cases. Dean (2015) argued that ICT should be rejected because it clashes with the idea of epistemic stability. Additio…
Read moreThe Implicit Commitments Thesis (ICT) states that in accepting a formal theory $$\textrm{S}$$ S, one is implicitly committed to additional statements, such as $$\textrm{S}$$ S ’s consistency. ICT aligns with the intuition that accepting $$\textrm{S}$$ S without acknowledging its consistency is epistemically problematic. However, there is ongoing debate over ICT’s validity in all cases. Dean (2015) argued that ICT should be rejected because it clashes with the idea of epistemic stability. Additionally, the epistemological basis for considering consistency statements as implicit commitments remains underexplored. This paper addresses these issues by analyzing ICT’s epistemological and conceptual underpinnings. First, it examines putative counterexamples like finitism and first-orderism and argues that they do not undermine ICT’s general applicability. Then, it introduces an intuitive epistemic norm that supports the implicit acceptance of consistency within ICT’s framework.
