Logical Nihilism: Could There Be No Logic?*

Russell, Gillian

doi:10.1111/phis.12127

Cited by 56 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Glanzberg [23]). Strawson ([59]: 344) famously summed up the view with the claim that "ordinary language has no exact logic", and similar concerns underlie Russell's [53] recent discussion of logical nihilism, the view according to which there are no universally valid forms of argument.…”

Section: Upshot 3: the Background Logic Problem As Was Highlighted Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Logical Predictivism

Martin

Hjortland

2020

J Philos Logic

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Motivated by weaknesses with traditional accounts of logical epistemology, considerable attention has been paid recently to the view, known as anti-exceptionalism about logic (AEL), that the subject matter and epistemology of logic may not be so different from that of the recognised sciences. One of the most prevalent claims made by advocates of AEL is that theory choice within logic is significantly similar to that within the sciences. This connection with scientific methodology highlights a considerable challenge for the anti-exceptionalist, as two uncontentious claims about scientific theories are that they attempt to explain a target phenomenon and (at least partially) prove their worth through successful predictions. Thus, if this methodological AEL is to be viable, the anti-exceptionalist will need a reasonable account of what phenomena logics are attempting to explain, how they can explain, and in what sense they can be said to issue predictions. This paper makes sense of the anti-exceptionalist proposal with a new account of logical theory choice, logical predictivism, according to which logics are engaged in both a process of prediction and explanation.

show abstract

Section: Upshot 3: the Background Logic Problem As Was Highlighted Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Logical Predictivism

Martin

Hjortland

2020

J Philos Logic

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This is not what Haack refers to as a "logical instrumentalism" in her (1978). Her use of the term picks out something closer to what would today be called a logical nihilism (see (Franks 2015) and (Russell 2018)).…”

Section: Logical Instrumentalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Logical Instrumentalism and Concatenation

Kissel¹

2019

arcp

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Logical pluralism is the theory that there is more than one right logic. Logical instrumentalism is the view that a logic is a correct logic if it can be used to fruitfully pursue some deductive inquiry. Logical instrumentalism is a version of logical pluralism, since more than one logic can be used fruitfully. In this paper, I will show that a logical instrumentalist must accept linear logic as a correct logic, since linear logic is useful for studying natural language syntax. I further show that this means that the logical instrumentalist must accept a wide range of connectives, in particular concatenation. I end by explaining why this is a feature rather than a bug.

show abstract

“…Logical nihilism is the thesis that there are no logical laws. Following Russell (2018), we can understand logical nihilism as the claim that there are no valid inferential schemas. In a language with propositional variables, this claim corresponds to the claim that there is no valid inference such that any formula can be uniformly substituted for propositional variables that are possibly occurring in the inference.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a language with propositional variables, this claim corresponds to the claim that there is no valid inference such that any formula can be uniformly substituted for propositional variables that are possibly occurring in the inference. While some readers may prefer a Fregean notion of a logical law and thus consider only sentential schemas such as ϕ → ϕ as candidates for logical laws (where → is a conditional connective of the language under consideration), we shall here, following Russell (2018), also consider inferential schemas such as ϕ → ψ, ϕ ψ as candidates for logical laws, where is an expression of the metalanguage representing "entails".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…for which the inferential schema ϕ ϕ does not hold. This inferential schema is referred to by Russell (2018) as the law of identity. While this is perhaps not the immediate candidate for a logical law to question when things get tough, there is some recent research on the use of a non-reflexive logic to accommodate self-referential definitions in order to block the set-theoretic and truth-theoretic paradoxes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation