Applied Logic without Psychologism

✍ Scribed by Gregory Wheeler

• Book ID: 106538983
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 260 KB
• Volume: 88
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0039-3215
• DOI: 10.1007/s11225-008-9095-8

✦ Synopsis

Logic is a celebrated representation language because of its formal generality. But there are two senses in which a logic may be considered general, one that concerns a technical ability to discriminate between different types of individuals, and another that concerns constitutive norms for reasoning as such. This essay embraces the former, permutation-invariance conception of logic and rejects the latter, Fregean conception of logic. The question of how to apply logic under this pure invariantist view is addressed, and a methodology is given. The pure invariantist view is contrasted with logical pluralism, and a methodology for applied logic is demonstrated in remarks on a variety of issues concerning non-monotonic logic and non-monotonic inference, including Charles Morgan's impossibility results for non-monotonic logic, David Makinson's normative constraints for non-monotonic inference, and Igor Douven and Timothy Williamson's proposed formal constraints on rational acceptance.