•  44
    Disagreement about logic
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (6): 660-682. 2022.
    ABSTRACT What do we disagree about when we disagree about logic? On the face of it, classical and nonclassical logicians disagree about the laws of logic and the nature of logical properties. Yet, sometimes the parties are accused of talking past each other. The worry is that if the parties to the dispute do not mean the same thing with ‘if’, ‘or’, and ‘not’, they fail to have genuine disagreement about the laws in question. After the work of Quine, this objection against genuine disagreement ab…Read more
  •  737
    Evidence in Logic
    with Ben Martin
    In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, Routledge. 2019.
    The historical consensus is that logical evidence is special. Whereas empirical evidence is used to support theories within both the natural and social sciences, logic answers solely to a priori evidence. Further, unlike other areas of research that rely upon a priori evidence, such as mathematics, logical evidence is basic. While we can assume the validity of certain inferences in order to establish truths within mathematics and test scientific theories, logicians cannot use results from mathem…Read more
  •  71
    While anti-exceptionalism about logic is now a popular topic within the philosophy of logic, there’s still a lack of clarity over what the proposal amounts to. currently, it is most common to conceive of AEL as the proposal that logic is continuous with the sciences. Yet, as we show here, this conception of AEL is unhelpful due to both its lack of precision, and its distortion of the current debates. Rather, AEL is better understood as the rejection of certain traditional properties of logic. Th…Read more
  •  5
    Nils Klim-samtalen 2019
    Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 56 (1): 59-67. 2021.
  •  94
    Logical Predictivism
    with Ben Martin
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (2): 285-318. 2020.
    Motivated by weaknesses with traditional accounts of logical epistemology, considerable attention has been paid recently to the view, known as anti-exceptionalism about logic, 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 consider…Read more
  •  89
    Anti-Exceptionalism about Logic
    Australasian Journal of Logic 16 (7): 186. 2019.
    Introduction to this special issue of The Australasian Journal of Logic.
  •  116
    What Counts as Evidence for a Logical Theory?
    Australasian Journal of Logic 16 (7): 250-282. 2019.
    Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the Quinean view that logical theories have no special epistemological status, in particular, they are not self-evident or justified a priori. Instead, logical theories are continuous with scientific theories, and knowledge about logic is as hard-earned as knowledge of physics, economics, and chemistry. Once we reject apriorism about logic, however, we need an alternative account of how logical theories are justified and revised. A number of authors have recent…Read more
  •  84
    Disagreement about logic
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-23. 2020.
    ABSTRACTWhat do we disagree about when we disagree about logic? On the face of it, classical and nonclassical logicians disagree about the laws of logic and the nature of logical properties. Yet, s...
  •  67
    Theories of truth and the maxim of minimal mutilation
    Synthese 199 (Suppl 3): 787-818. 2017.
    Nonclassical theories of truth have in common that they reject principles of classical logic to accommodate an unrestricted truth predicate. However, different nonclassical strategies give up different classical principles. The paper discusses one criterion we might use in theory choice when considering nonclassical rivals: the maxim of minimal mutilation.
  •  438
    Anti-exceptionalism about logic
    Philosophical Studies 174 (3): 631-658. 2017.
    Logic isn’t special. Its theories are continuous with science; its method continuous with scientific method. Logic isn’t a priori, nor are its truths analytic truths. Logical theories are revisable, and if they are revised, they are revised on the same grounds as scientific theories. These are the tenets of anti-exceptionalism about logic. The position is most famously defended by Quine, but has more recent advocates in Maddy, Priest, Russell, and Williamson. Although these authors agree on many…Read more
  •  58
    Speech Acts, Categoricity, and the Meanings of Logical Connectives
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 55 (4): 445-467. 2014.
    In bilateral systems for classical logic, assertion and denial occur as primitive signs on formulas. Such systems lend themselves to an inferentialist story about how truth-conditional content of connectives can be determined by inference rules. In particular, for classical logic there is a bilateral proof system which has a property that Carnap in 1943 called categoricity. We show that categorical systems can be given for any finite many-valued logic using $n$-sided sequent calculus. These syst…Read more
  •  121
    Verbal Disputes in Logic: Against minimalism for logical connectives
    Logique Et Analyse 57 (227): 463-486. 2014.
    Logic, Logical connectives, Verbal disputes, Proof theory, Non-classical logic
  •  274
    Logical Pluralism, Meaning-Variance, and Verbal Disputes
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (2): 355-373. 2013.
    Logical pluralism has been in vogue since JC Beall and Greg Restall 2006 articulated and defended a new pluralist thesis. Recent criticisms such as Priest 2006a and Field 2009 have suggested that there is a relationship between their type of logical pluralism and the meaning-variance thesis for logic. This is the claim, often associated with Quine 1970, that a change of logic entails a change of meaning. Here we explore the connection between logical pluralism and meaning-variance, both in gener…Read more
  •  55
    Note of the Editors
    Erkenntnis 79 (S6): 1-1. 2014.
  •  42
    Varieties of Logic
    Philosophical Quarterly 66 (264): 646-648. 2016.
  •  326
    It is sometimes held that rules of inference determine the meaning of the logical constants: the meaning of, say, conjunction is fully determined by either its introduction or its elimination rules, or both; similarly for the other connectives. In a recent paper, Panu Raatikainen (2008) argues that this view - call it logical inferentialism - is undermined by some "very little known" considerations by Carnap (1943) to the effect that "in a definite sense, it is not true that the standard rules o…Read more
  •  29
    The philosophical discussion about logical constants has only recently moved into the substructural era. While philosophers have spent a lot of time discussing the meaning of logical constants in the context of classical versus intuitionistic logic, very little has been said about the introduction of substruc-tural connectives. Linear logic, affine logic and other substructural logics offer a more fine-grained perspective on basic connectives such as conjunction and disjunction, a perspective whi…Read more
  •  162
    The model-theoretic analysis of the concept of logical consequence has come under heavy criticism in the last couple of decades. The present work looks at an alternative approach to logical consequence where the notion of inference takes center stage. Formally, the model-theoretic framework is exchanged for a proof-theoretic framework. It is argued that contrary to the traditional view, proof-theoretic semantics is not revisionary, and should rather be seen as a formal semantics that can supplem…Read more
  •  1
    Logical Consequence: Its nature, structure, and application
    In Colin R. Caret & Ole T. Hjortland (eds.), Foundations of Logical Consequence, Oxford University Press. 2015.
    Recent work in philosophical logic has taken interesting and unexpected turns. It has seen not only a proliferation of logical systems, but new applications of a wide range of different formal theories to philosophical questions. As a result, philosophers have been forced to revisit the nature and foundation of core logical concepts, chief amongst which is the concept of logical consequence. This essay sets the contributions of the volume in context and identifies how they advance important deba…Read more
  •  142
    Foundations of Logical Consequence (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2015.
    Logical consequence is the relation that obtains between premises and conclusion(s) in a valid argument. Orthodoxy has it that valid arguments are necessarily truth-preserving, but this platitude only raises a number of further questions, such as: how does the truth of premises guarantee the truth of a conclusion, and what constraints does validity impose on rational belief? This volume presents thirteen essays by some of the most important scholars in the field of philosophical logic. The essay…Read more