Jaroslav Peregrin

What is structuralism? The stock To explain why we should see Quine can translate the natives’ gavagai either as answer is that it is the brainas a structuralist, I would like to revive rabbit or as undetached rabbit’s part, so he child of Ferdinand de his widely discussed thought experican translate his peers’ rabbit either as Saussure, later fostered by Levi-Strauss, ment, featuring a field linguist decipherrabbit or as undetached rabbit’s part. Hence Foucault, Derrida and their allies. But I ing an unknown language spoken by the cultural relativism appears to muthink we have only to confront the ausnatives somewhere in the middle of tate into an “individual relativism”, a terely scientific style of Saussure’s Course nowhere. On hearing the natives exkind of solipsistic skepticism in which de linguistique générale with that of the claiming “Gavagai!” whenever they see a we can be certain neither that we underwritings of the French structuralists to rabbit, the linguist records in his notestand the natives, nor even that we unrecognise an essential discontinuity. The book the tentative translation hypothderstand each other! French philosophers have developed esis gavagai = rabbit. Next, Quine asks us However this is not a conclusion only certain consequences of Saussure’s to imagine another linguist, who, ob- Quine would be willing to draw. He teaching; and, moreover, in a rather nonserving the same behaviour of the same does not say that we cannot understand Saussurean way. natives, proposes the hypothesis gavagai each other (nor even that we cannot un- In my recent book I put forward the = undetached rabbit’s part. Quine then conderstand the natives): that we can is conalternative thesis that the kind of strucsiders ways of deciding which of the tinually testified to by the indubitable turalism advanced by Saussure is in fact two linguists is correct, and concludes, successes of our communication. For present implicitly in the writings of to the astonishment of many readers, Quine, there is no other measure of unpeople not normally associated with the that there is no feasible way to decide; derstanding, save the smoothness and term, namely the (post)analytic phiand hence that both linguists are corfruitfulness of linguistic interaction, the losophers such as Willard Van Orman rect..

There have been, I am afraid, almost as many answers to the question what is logic? as there have been logicians. However, if logic is not to be an obscure "science of everything", we must assume that the majority of the various answers share a common core which does offer a reasonable delimitation of the subject matter of logic. To probe this core, let us start from the answer given by Gottlob Frege (1918/9), the person probably most responsible for modern logic: the subject matter of logic is "truth", and especially its "laws"1. How should we understand the concept of "laws of truth"? The underlying point clearly is that the truth/falsity of our statements is partly a contingent and partly a necessary, lawful matter: that "Paris is in France" is true is a contingent matter, whereas that "Paris is in France or it is not in France" is true is a necessary matter (let us, for the time being, leave aside the Quinean scruples regarding the delimitation of necessarily true statements). Logic,then, should focus on the statements that are true as a matter of law (i.e. necessarily), or, more generally, the truth of which "lawfully depends" on some other statements (i.e. which are true as a matter of law provided these other statements are true). This renders Fregean laws of truth as, in general, a matter of "lawful truth-dependence" - i.e. of entailment or inference (again, let us now disregard any possible difference between these two concepts). This yields a conception of logic as a theory of entailment or inference, a conception which looms behind many other specifications of the subject matter of logic and which, I think, is ultimately correct. However, we can also see the logician – and this is the view we will stick to here – as trying to separate true sentences from false ones; or, equivalently, to map sentences onto truth and falsity. Let us first consider the case of a non-empirical language with a single, definite truth valuation – like the language of Peano arithmetic..

Abstrakt. Co je to myšlenka? Všichni se asi shodneme na tom, že každý z nás lidí si myslí různé věci, že všichni máme všelijaké myšlenky, a že právě toto naše myšlení je tím, co nás lidi odlišuje od ostatních tvorů a věcí, na které můžeme v našem světě narazit. Co to ale taková myšlenka je, jak vypadá a co dělá? A jak vůbec lze na takto položenou otázku odpovídat; je to věc empirického výzkumu, nebo snad něčeho jiného (třeba fenomenologické introspekce)? V tomto článku hájíme tezi, že empirické zkoumání mysli (na rozdíl od zkoumání mozku) podstatným způsobem předpokládá pojmovou analýzu, která je doménou filosofie.

In a memorable paper, Donald Davidson (1986, p. 446) insists that "there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed". I have always taken this as an exaggeration, albeit an apt exaggeration that might be philosophically helpful. Now when it comes to predication, what I would have expected to hear from the same author would be along the lines of "there is no such thing as predication ... ". But instead of this I hear something very different (Davidson, 2005, p. 77): [I]f we do not understand predication, we do not understand how any sentence works, nor can we account for the structure of the simplest thought that is expressible in language. At one time there was much discussion of what was called the "unity of proposition"; it is just this unity that a theory of predication must explain. The philosophy of language lacks its most important chapter without such a theory, the philosophy of mind is missing its crucial first step if it cannot describe the nature of judgment; and it is woeful if metaphysics cannot say how a substance is related to its attributes. I find myself at odds with just about everything written in this paragraph; and what is worse, my disagreement stems from a notion of language which I believe I have acquired also by reading Davidson. Reading this passage, I desperately sought for an indication that it was leading up to some catch, and not meant to be taken at face value. But, alas, I am afraid there is none. To avoid misunderstanding: I see nothing wrong in understanding predication as a clearly delimited linguistic phenomenon. We put together one kind of expression, which we have come to call the subject, with a different kind of expression, called the predicate, possibly..

Knihu Kritika depolitizovaného rozumu (podtitul Úvahy (nejen) o nové normalizaci, Václav Bělohradský a kol., Grimmus, Všeň 2010) jsem si kupoval s vědomím, že s její- mi autory se asi nebudu ve všem shodovat, nicméně také s přesvědčením, že problém, na který poukazuje její název, je skutečně závažný, a s nadějí, že se o něm třeba dozvím něco z úhlu pohledu, který mi není vlastní, a tak se mi podaří ho nahlédnout plastičtěji. Bohužel jsem zjistil, že název knihy je pouze krycí; že nejde o boj s depolitizací rozumu, ale naopak o zčásti otevřený a zčásti partyzánský boj proti skutečné politizaci, tj. proti demokratické- mu prostředí, ve kterém se otázky zá- kladního směřování společnosti mohly stát předmětem politických diskuzí a politických střetů, ve jménu absolutizace určitých velice konkrétních, pokud ne pří- mo politických, pak ideologických názorů. Jak říkám, jsem přesvědčený, že problém depolitizace rozumu tu skutečně je. Lidé, zdá se mi, skutečně mají čím dál více pocit, že všechna rozhodnutí jsou na nějakých těch odbornících, jimž do toho nejenom není potřeba mluvit, ale ani by se jim do toho mluvit nemělo. Máme stát zadlužovat? To přece musejí říci ekonomové. Mají se zakazovat politické strany? To my nevíme, ale vědět to musejí politologové či sociologové. Je potrat vražda, nebo medicínský zákrok? To by nám měli říci biologové, filozofové nebo bůhvíkdo, ale hlavně někdo, kdo to dokáže vyčíst z příslušných faktů.

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’.

Doing Worlds with Words throws light on the problem of meaning as the meeting point of linguistics, logic and philosophy, and critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of elucidating the nature of meaning by means of formal logic, model theory and model-theoretical semantics. The main thrust of the book is to show that it is misguided to understand model theory metaphysically and so to try to base formal semantics on something like formal metaphysics; rather, the book states that model theory and similar tools of the analysis of language should be understood as capturing the semantically relevant, especially inferential, structure of language. From this vantage point, the reader gains a new light on many of the traditional concepts and problems of logic and philosophy of language, such as meaning, reference, truth and the nature of formal logic.

Abstrakt. Když se řekne Ludwig Wittgenstein, vybaví se člověku, který to jméno už někdy slyšel, nejspíše termín jazyková hra. Tento termín si Wittgenstein vybral, aby se v rámci své pozdní filosofie distancoval od určitého druhu názorů na jazyk (druhu, kterého byly i jeho vlastní ranější filosofické názory). Chtěl jeho pomocí zdůraznit různorodost lidských aktivit, které se opírají o jazyk. Avšak ač to Wittgenstein úplně explicitně neříká, zdá se mi že je tu něco podstatného, co je podle něj pro jazykové hry charakteristické, a to je role pravidel v rámci jejich konstituce. Tomu napovídá rozsah pozornosti, kterou Wittgenstein věnuje fenoménu pravidla ve Filosofických zkoumáních. Podle mne tedy můžeme říci, že jazyková hra je v typickém případě hrou - více či méně - 'řízenou' pravidly. Způsob, jakým se jazyková hra 'řídí' pravidly, se však v některých zásadních ohledech liší od způsobu, jakým se pravidly řídí hry, ke kterým občas naše jazykové hry přirovnáváme (šachy, fotbal ap.) Pravidla jazykových her jsou implicitní, vágní a do jisté míry otevřená. Přitom pravidla hry nám obvykle otevírají nějaký nový prostor - a v případě jazykových her je to prostor, kterému se dá říkat prostor smysluplnosti. Myslím ovšem, že skutečnou roli pravidel v rámci jazykových her Wittgenstein v rámci Filosofických zkoumání trochu zamlžuje; a cílem tohoto textu bude ji vyjasnit.

Vuvodnim rocniku ORGANONu Pavel Cmorej ve svych @@piton lch z logicjce syntaxe predvadel, jak je prirozeny jazyk mozne nahlizet prismatem 'standardni' logiky. Historicky ovsem neexistuje jedna logika,ale ruzne logicke systemy, ktere spolu castecne soupeii (tak jako treba klasicka a intuicionisticka logika), castecne jeden druhy rozsiruji (Iako treba klasicky vyrokovy a klasicky predikatovy pocet) ci se navzajem doplnuji (Iako napriklad modalni a temporalni logika). To co je v logice obecne prijimano za standard, je fakticky vysledkem interakce a soutezeni ruznych neustale vznikajicich systemu

The entire development of modern logic is characterized by various forms of confrontation of what has come to be called proof theory with what has earned the label of model theory. For a long time the widely accepted view was that while model theory captures directly what logical formalisms are about, proof theory is merely our technical means of getting some incomplete grip on this; but in recent decades the situation has altered. Not only did proof theory expand into new realms, generalizing the concept of proof in various directions; many philosophers also realized that meaning may be seen as primarily consisting in certain rules rather than in language-world links. However, the possibility of construing meaning as an inferential role is often seen as essentially compromised by the limits of prooftheoretical means. The aim of this paper is to sort out the cluster of problems besetting logical inferentialism by disentangling and clarifying one of them, namely determining the power of various inferential frameworks as measured by that of explicitly semantic ones

It is a common wisdom that whereas consequence or entailment is a semantic concept, provability is a syntactic concept. However, what exactly does this mean? What is provability? In the traditional, intuitive sense, to prove something is to demonstrate its truth, and indeed the Latin word for proof is demonstratio. Hence in this sense, we cannot prove something unless it is true. Now in the course of his well known proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic, Gödel showed that provability within the axiomatic system of Peano arithmetic (PA) can be reconstructed as a number-theoretic predicate Pr and he showed that within the system there exists a statement G so that..

Wenn es aber Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, und niemand wird bezweifeln, daß er seine Daseinsberechtigung hat, dann muß es auch etwas geben, das man Möglichkeitssinn nennen kann. Wer ihn besitzt, sagt beispielsweise nicht: Hier ist dies oder das geschehen, wird geschehen, muß geschehen; sondern er erfindet: Hier könnte, sollte oder müßte geschehn; und wenn man ihm von irgend etwas erklärt, daß es so sei, wie es sei, dann denkt er: Nun, es könnte wahrscheinlich auch anders sein. So ließe sich der Möglichkeitssinn geradezu als die Fähigkeit definieren, alles, was ebensogut sein könnte, zu denken und das, was ist, nicht wichtiger zu nehmen als das, was nicht ist.

The proof of correctness and completeness of a logical calculus w.r.t. a given semantics can be read as telling us that the tautologies (or, more gen erally, the relation of consequence) specified in a model theoretic way can be equally well specified in a proof theoretic way, by means of the calculus (as the theorems, resp. the relation of inferability of the calculus). Thus we know that both for the classical propositional calculus and for the clas sical predicate calculus theorems and tautologies represent two sides of the same coin. We also know that the relation of inference as instituted by any of the common axiom systems of the classical propositional calculus coin cides with the relation of consequence defined in terms of the truth tables; whereas the situation is a little bit more complicated w.r.t. the classical predicate calculus (the coincidence occurs if we restrict ourselves to closed ∀xFx is inferable from Fx without being its conse formulas; otherwise..

It seems that the theories of language of the present century can be classified into two basic groups. The approaches of the first group perceive language as a mathematical structure and understand any theory of language as a kind of application of mathematics or logic. Their ideological background is furnished by logical positivism and analytical philosophy (esp. by Russell, Carnap, Wittgenstein and their followers); and their practical output is Chomskian formal syntax and subsequent formal semantics. The approaches of the other group do not approve of formalization and consider a theory of language closer to psychology than to mathematics. The specific position within this group is occupied by the so-called structuralists (de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Derrida)

After putting forward his celebrated deflationary theory of truth (Horwich, 1998a), Paul Horwich added a compatible theory of meaning (Horwich, 1998b). I am calling also this latter theory deflationism (although it may be a slightly misleading name in that, as Paul himself notes, his theory of meaning is deflationary more in the sense of being forced by the deflationary theory of truth than of being particularly deflationary in itself). In contrast, what I call inferentialism is the theory of meaning which I am going to advocate here – the view, in a nutshell, that meaning is a matter of inferential role. Various versions of this theory have been defended by Wilfried Sellars, Robert Brandom and a couple of other philosophers including myself. And the thesis I wish to present in this paper – to put it as a provocation right off – is that Paul is an inferentialist led astray

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language.