Jaroslav Peregrin

The relationships between logic and natural language are multiverse. On the one hand, logic is a theory of argumentation, proving and giving reasons, and such activities are primarily carried out in natural language. This means that logic is, in a certain loose sense, about natural language. On the other hand, logic has found it useful to develop its own linguistic means which sometimes in a sense compete with those of natural language. This has led to the situation where the systems of logic can be taken as interesting "models" of various aspects of natural language. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â The alliance of logic and linguistics has flowered especially from the beginning of the seventies, when scholars like Montague, Lewis, Cresswell, Partee and others showed how semantics of natural language can be explicated with the help certain suitable logical calculi and the corresponding model theory. (Montague went so far as to claim that in view of this, there is no principal difference between natural and formal languages - but this is, as far as I can see, rather misguiding.) Since that time, the interdisciplinary movement of formal semantics (associating not only linguists and logicians, but also philosophers, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and others) has yielded a rich repertoire of formal theories of natural language, some of them (like Hintikka's game-theoretical semantics or the dynamic logic of Groenendijk and Stokhof) being based directly on logic, others (like the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry or DRT of Kamp) exploiting different formal strategies. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Moreover, although the enterprise of formal semantics (i.e. of modeling natural language semantics by means of certain formal structures) seems to be the principal point of contact between linguistics and logic, there are also other cooperative enterprises. One of the most fruitful ones seems to be the logical analysis of syntax, which has resulted from elaboration of what was originally called categorial grammar. (However, even this enterprise can be seen as importantly stimulated by Montague.) Â Â Â Â Â Â Â All in all, the region in which logic and theoretical linguistics overlap has grown both in size and fertility..

While the traditional view was that in order to understand language and our linguistic practices we must explain meaning, the 'pragmatic turn' emerging within the writings of various philosohpers of the second half of the twentieth century caused a basic change of the perspective: the tendency is to concentrate directly on explaining the linguistic practices and leave the need for explaining meaning to emerge (or, as the case may be, not to emerge) subsequently. I argue that after this turn we should explain the peculiar kinds of 'meaningfulness' that characterizes our expressions in terms of what Sellars called "pattern governed behavior". Furthermore, I argue that the turn should not make us discard meanings, but only to reappraise them: to see them as the roles of expressions vis-à-vis the rules that govern our language games.

Filosofové odedávna snili o jazyce, který by byl z hlediska řešení těch problémů, se kterými se potýkají (případně všech lidských problémů vůbec), vhodnější než jazyk, jímž nás obdařila příroda. Mnozí z nich si představovali, že filosofické problémy vznikají zčásti nebo zcela v důsledku toho, že přirozený jazyk není dostatečně přesným prostředkem vyjádření našich idejí a myšlenek - a že by se tedy vše spravilo, kdyby byl k dispozici jazyk, jehož výrazivo by bylo s našim myšlením - případně s naším světem - v dokonalém souladu. Podle tohoto názoru je tím, co filosof (ale i vědec) potřebuje, jakási „abeceda lidských myšlenek“, která by nám umožnila „pomocí spojení jejích písmen a analýzy slov, která se z nich skládají, objevit a posoudit všechno ostatní“ (Leibniz) K tomu, aby se taková „abeceda“ dala vytvořit, ovšem zbývala jedna ‘maličkost’: bylo třeba posbírat a zinventarizovat všechny naše myšlenky a ideje, zjistit, pro které vyjádření nemáme, případně které vyjadřujeme nějak ‘nevhodně’, a tyto nedostatky a nesrovnalosti odstranit. Problém byl ovšem v tom, že nikdo neměl nejmenší ponětí, jak tohle udělat: a Leibnizův projekt calculu philosophicu, stejně tak jako jiné podobné nápady, zůstal navždy pouhou utopií.

Metaphysics is usually understood as the investigation of being qua being and of its ultimate categories. Given this characterization, it may be hard to grasp why anyone might wish to oppose metaphysics, why anyone might claim that metaphysics ”leads the philosopher into complete darkness” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p.18)? What could be so misleading about the investigation of the most abstract vestiges of being? One source of disparagement towards metaphysics, of course, stems from the relativist conviction that there is no absolute being, and hence nor are there any ultimate categories of being. Another ‘reason’ for some philosophers of this century (notably Carnap) to reject metaphysics appeared to consist in their reinterpretation of the word ”metaphysics”, in effect, simply as ”nonsensical philosophy”. However neither of these reasons seems to be the Wittgensteinian one. The way I propose to envisage this reason takes us back to Plato with his distinction between Being and Becoming (echoed, in one or another form, within the conceptions of so many subsequent philosophers). It is the distinction between the ‘higher’ realm of ideas with its crisp, eternal truths, and the ‘lower’ realm of appearances in which anything appears only as a fuzzy and transient reflection of something from the higher realm. The original message harbored in this Platonistic picture is clearly that the vast and hardly graspable flux of appearances shelters something firm and invariable, something potentially fully capturable by human reason which can then use it as a prism to comprehend and understand the everchanging phenomena. However, as I will claim, the picture of a ‘higher’ reality behind phenomena is dangerous in that it can delude a philosopher into feeling that he can solve empirical questions by a quasiempirical investigation of a non-empirical realm: a ‘metaphysical reality’.

Summary. I do not think there is one true answer to the question What is logic?. There are, clearly, good and less good answers, and there are answers which are plainly wrong; but the term 'logic' has been employed, throughout the history of the subject matter, in such diverse ways that no single one of the uses can be said to be the correct one. However, even among the answers which are acceptable on historico-semantical grounds there are still, without doubt, good and less good ones, in the sense of more and less useful. In this paper, I will argue for a certain, rather narrow conception of logic; and I am going to argue that it is not only an acceptable answer, but also one which is more useful and fruitful than its alternatives

Normativity is one of the keywords of contemporary philosophical discussions. It is clear that philosophy has to do not only with theories, but also with norms (especially in ethics); but more and more current philosophers are busy arguing that, in addition, those parts of philosophy where norms are prima facie not in high focus, such as philosophy of language or philosophy of mind, have kinds of "normative dimensions". However, not everybody subscribes to this enthusiasm for normativity. Within philosophy, there is, for example, an ongoing fierce discussion between 'normativists' and 'anti-normativists' about the normativity of meaning1 . A similar, thought I think both much broader and much deeper discussion concerning normativity has been launched within the context of philosophical and scientific accounts for human societies. Should we, explaining how a society works, merely state the facts concerning the behavior of the members of the society in the way natural scientists describe the behavior of ants in an anthill, or how they describe the 'behavior' of particles in an atom, or do we, over and above this, need to take a recourse to some 'normative facts'? This dispute, of course, partly reincarnates of traditional debate about the differences between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften as we know it from Dilthey, Schleimermacher or Max Weber; in this very specific form it, however, acquires a rather 2 transparent shape, in which it seems it might be resolvable by critical scrutiny . The current dispute is fuelled by the anti-normativists' rejection of normativism as the general claim that to account for human societies (and their products, such as meanings), we need to account for something over and above ordinary, causal, scientific facts; whereas the 'normativists' argue that to have a truly explanatory account of human societies, human languages or human practices we cannot make do stating what there is – that in some sense we need to say something about what ought to be..

While most theoreticians of meaning in the first half of the twentieth century subscribed to a representational theory (viewing meanings as entities stood for by the expressions), the second half of the century was marked by the rise of various versions of use-theories of meaning. The roots of this ‘pragmatist turn’ are detectable in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, the Oxford speech act theorists (Austin, Grice) and the American neopragmatists (Quine, Sellars). Though it is now rather popular (and sometimes even fashionable) to invoke the use-theory of meaning, it is by far not so popular to inquire what such a theory really is. In this paper we try to give at least a part of the answer, whereby we find out that the usual conception of such a theory is unsatisfactory. We propose that for an improvement we must, together with Wittgenstein and Sellars, conceive language as a (tool of a) rule-based activity, which enables us to replace the concept of disposition, usually constituting the backbone of the use-theory, by the concept of propriety. The resulting normative version of the use-theory then becomes the investigation of the rules which expressions acquire vis-`a-vis the rules of the relevant language games – especially of the rules of inference.

Logic, it is often held, is primarily concerned with reasoning; and the conviction that logic and reasoning are two sides of the same coin nowadays usually equates with the conviction that logic spells out some directives for the "right" management of beliefs. In this paper I put forward an alternative view, based on seeing rules of logic rules as constitutive rules, not instructing us how to reason, but rather providing us with certain vehicles or in terms of which to reason. This also emphasizes the social nature of beliefs: they are entities forged in a social mold, formed by rules originating from social argumentative practices

The paper presents an argument against a "metaphysical" conception of logic according to which logic spells out a specific kind of mathematical structure that is somehow inherently related to our factual reasoning. In contrast, it is argued that it is always an empirical question as to whether a given mathematical structure really does captures a principle of reasoning. (More generally, it is argued that it is not meaningful to replace an empirical investigation of a thing by an investigation of its a priori analyzable structure without paying due attention to the question of whether it really is the structure of the thing in question.) It is proposed to elucidate the situation by distinguishing two essentially different realms with which our reason must deal: "the realm of the natural", constituted by the things of our empirical world, and "the realm of the formal", constituted by the structures that we use as "prisms" to view, to make sense of, and to reconstruct the world. It is suggested that this vantage point may throw light on many foundational problems of logic