Vladimir Svoboda

This article strives to provide an original conceptual frame- work that should open a way to clarification of general philosophical debates on rules and norms. It makes a clear distinction between rules understood as social facts grounded on specific relation- ships between social subjects and rules understood as linguistic entities. Norms are taken as specific social rules and divided into three different types: social constitutive norms, particular constitutive norms, and institutional norms. Attention is also devoted to relation between normality and normativity, to the role of permissions and to specific features of technological ‘rules’. In the last part of the article the outlined conceptual apparatus is employed for analysis of two passages from Wittgenstein’s Investigations.

In 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge', Donald Davidson argues that it is not possible for us to be massively mistaken in our beliefs. The argument is based on the possibility of an omniscient interpreter who uses the method of radical interpretation to attribute beliefs, since an omniscient interpreter who uses this method will attribute largely true beliefs to those he is inteipreting. In this paper we investigate some of the assumptions behind this argument, and we argue that these assumptions are incompatible with Davidson's view that the object of a belief is its cause. If Davidson wants to keep his interpretationist theory of mind, he should therefore abandon that view.

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.

This article strives to provide an original conceptual frame- work that should open a way to clarification of general philosophical debates on rules and norms . It makes a clear distinction between rules (and norms) understood as social facts grounded on specific relation- ships between social subjects and rules (norms) understood as linguistic entities. Norms are taken as specific social rules and divided into three different types: social constitutive norms, particular constitutive norms, and institutional norms . Attention is also devoted to relation between normality and normativity, to the role of permissions and to specific features of technological ‘rules’ . In the last part of the article the outlined conceptual apparatus is employed for analysis of two passages from Wittgenstein’s Investigations.

Though, at first sight, logical formalization of natural language sentences and arguments might look like an unproblematic enterprise, the criteria of its success are far from clear and, surprisingly, there have only been a few attempts at making them explicit. This paper provides a picture of the enterprise of logical formalization that does not conceive of it as a kind of translation from one language (a natural one) into another language (a logical one), but rather as a construction of a 'map' of (a piece of) the 'inferential landscape' of the natural language. The criteria that appear to govern the enterprise are labeled as those of reliability, ambitiousness, transparency and parsimony. These criteria, it is argued, do not provide for an excavation of a ready-made logical structure, but rather help us achieve a "reflective equilibrium" between the normative authority of logic and the answerability of logic to a natural language

Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory.

What do we learn when we find out that an argument is logically incorrect? If logically incorrect means the same as not logically correct, which in turn means not having a valid logical form, it seems that we do not learn anything too useful—an argument which is logically incorrect can still be conclusive. Thus, it seems that it makes sense to fix a stronger interpretation of the term under which a logically incorrect argument is guaranteed to be wrong. In this paper, we show that pinpointing this stronger sense is much trickier than one would expect; but eventually we reach an explication of the notion of logical incorrectness which we find non-trivial and viable.

Philosophers like G.H. von Wright and D. Makinson have pointed to serious challenges regarding the foundations of deontic logic. In this paper, I suggest that to deal successfully with these challenges a reconsideration of the research program of the discipline is useful. Some problems that have troubled this particular field of logical study for decades may disappear or appear more tractable if we view them from the perspective of a language game introduced by D. Lewis involving three characters: the Master, the Slave and the Kibitzer. The adoption of this perspective opens a natural approach to a new layout of the domain of deontic studies. I propose dividing deontic logic into six sub-areas which are distinguished by their focus on the different idioms typical of the individual players, by conceiving the language game as either being static or as dynamic and by the aims of the logical inquiry. What kind of insights the proposed perspective provides is illustrated by an analysis of the so-called Ross paradox—a problem that has troubled deontic logic since its origins and, though it was many times pronounced solved, still keeps coming back ‘alive and kicking’.

The paper turns attention to some very general questions that concern the nature of logic – it deals with the problem of the identity of logic. It suggests that we can view the notion of value as one through which we can approach the elusive issues which surround the question of the nature of logic. The first part of the paper addresses the question of the value of logic as a discipline. In other words – it aims at answering the question what is (or could/should be) the benefit of exercising logic. The second part focuses on the question of what role values play (or could/should play) ‘inside’ of logic. It suggests that the elusive and general term “value” can perhaps turn out quite useful in the project of delineation of the realm of logic. The conclusion can be formulated in the provocative slogan: logic can be seen as a kind of general formal theory of values.

The article addresses two closely related questions: What are the criteria of adequacy of logical formalization of natural language arguments, and what gives logic the authority to decide which arguments are good and which are bad? Our point of departure is the criticism of the conception of logical formalization put forth, in a recent paper, by M. Baumgartner and T. Lampert. We argue that their account of formalization as a kind of semantic analysis brings about more problems than it solves. We also argue that the criteria of adequate formalization need not be based on truth conditions associated with logical formulas; in our view, they are better based on structural (inferential) grounds. We then put forward our own version of the criteria. The upshot of the discussion that follows is that the quest for an adequate formalization in a suitable logical language is best conceived of as the search for a Goodmanian reflective equilibrium