Outline Of A Proof That P

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I keep turning up new treasures in my father’s old philosophy papers.  Last time I looked, I found what looked like a lost fragment of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.  My father knew Wittgenstein, so I assumed it was genuine.  Last night I found a dusty old monograph attributed to Saul Kripke.  I reproduced the full text below.  Although unusually short (even when you include its extended footnote), it’s fairly typical of arguments in the tradition of analytic philosophy …                                          

Some philosophers have argued that not-p.  But none of them seems to me to have made a convincing argument against the intuitive view that this is not the case.  Therefore, p.*

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* This outline was prepared hastily—at the editors’ insistence—from a taped transcript of a lecture.  Since I was not given an opportunity to revise the draft before publication, I cannot be held responsible for any lacunae in the published version of the argument, or for any fallacious or garbled inferences resulting from faulty preparation of the manuscript.  Also, the argument now seems to me to have problems which I did not know when I wrote it, but which I cannot discuss here, and which are completely unrelated to any criticisms that have appeared in the literature (or that I have seen in manuscript).  All such criticisms misconstrue the argument.  It will be noted that the present version of the argument seems to presuppose the intuitionistically unacceptable law of double negation.  But the argument can easily be reformulated in a way that avoids employing such an inference rule.  I hope to expand on these matters further in a separate monograph.