Styles of reasoning are important devices to understand scientific practice. As I use the concept, a style of reasoning is a pattern of inferential relations that are used to select, interpret, and support evidence for scientific results. In this paper, I defend the view that there is a plurality of styles of reasoning: different domains of science often invoke different styles. I argue that this plurality is an important source of disunity in scientific practice, and it provides additional arguments in (...) support of the disunity claim. I also contrast Ian Hacking’s broad characterization of styles of reasoning with a narrow understanding that I favor. Drawing on examples from molecular biology, chemistry and mathematics, I argue that differences in style of reasoning lead to differences in the way the relevant results are obtained and interpreted. The result is a pluralist view about styles of reasoning that is sensitive to nuances of inferential relations in scientific activity. (shrink)

We investigate a hitherto under-considered avenue of response for the logical pluralist to collapse worries. In particular, we note that standard forms of the collapse arguments seem to require significant order-theoretic assumptions, namely that the collection of admissible logics for the pluralist should be closed under meets and joins. We consider some reasons for rejecting this assumption, noting some prima facie plausible constraints on the class of admissible logics which would lead a pluralist admitting those logics to resist such closure (...) conditions. (shrink)

The most serious objection to Beall and Restall’s case-based logical pluralism is the so-called collapse argument. According to the collapse argument, logical pluralism is not genuinely pluralistic and collapses into a single privileged relation of logical consequence. In response, Caret offered an account of logical contextualism that supposedly maintains the merits of Beall and Restall’s case-based logical pluralism while circumventing the collapse argument. In this paper, I first point out a gap in the collapse argument in that it does not (...) affect pluralists who assume that there is no uniquely strongest admissible consequence relation. This gap, then, is closed by an improved version of the collapse argument, which makes use of Eklund’s classification of types of pluralism. Finally, I discuss how Caret’s logical contextualism cannot hold up against this new formulation of the collapse argument unless implausible assumptions about the contents of normative operators are made. Moreover, by reformulating the collapse argument, I determine the extent to which logical monism and pluralism oppose each other, paving the way for fruitful future discussion. (shrink)

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. The picture that results is not of one singular position, but rather a cluster of often connected positions with distinct motivations, understood in terms of their rejection of clusters of the various traditional properties. In order to show the fruitfulness of this new conception of AEL, we distinguish between two prominent versions of the position, metaphysical and epistemological AEL, and show how the two positions need not stand or fall together. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. A key objection to logical pluralism is that it collapses into monism. The core of the Collapse Objection is that only the pluralist’s strongest logic does any genuine normative work; since a logic must do genuine normative work, this means that the pluralist is really a monist, who is committed to her strongest logic being the one true logic. This paper considers a neglected question in the collapse (...) debate: what is it for a logic to do genuine normative work? As well as having wider upshot for the connection between logic and normativity, grappling with this question provides a new response to the Collapse Objection on behalf of the pluralist. I suggest that we should allow logics to generate pro tanto reasons in a way that bears not just on combinations of attitudes but on how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another. This motivates adopting normative principles that allow the pluralist’s weaker logics to earn their normative keep. Rather than being ad hoc, these principles capture a sense in which good reasoning goes beyond the consistency of an agent’s attitudes. Good reasoning is also concerned with how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. This very general characterization gives rise to a whole family of positions. I argue that not all of them are stable. The main argument in the paper is inspired by considerations known as the “collapse problem”, and it aims at the most popular form of logical pluralism advocated by JC Beall and Greg Restall. I argue that there is a more general argument available that challenges all variants (...) of logical pluralism that meet the following three conditions: that there are at least two correct logical systems characterized in terms of different consequence relations, that there is some sort of rivalry among the correct logics, and that logical consequence is normative. The hypothesis I argue for amounts to conditional claim: If a position satisfies all these conditions, then that position is unstable in the sense that it collapses into competing positions. (shrink)

Starting from a proof-theoretic perspective, where meaning is determined by the inference rules governing logical operators, in this paper we primarily aim at developing a proof-theoretic alternative to the model-theoretic meaning-invariant logical pluralism discussed in Beall and Restall. We will also outline how this framework can be easily extended to include a form of meaning-variant logical pluralism. In this respect, the framework developed in this paper—which we label two-level proof-theoretic pluralism—is much broader in scope than the one discussed in Beall (...) and Restall’s book. (shrink)

This paper scrutinizes the debate over logical pluralism. I hope to make this debate more tractable by addressing the question of motivating data: what would count as strong evidence in favor of logical pluralism? Any research program should be able to answer this question, but when faced with this task, many logical pluralists fall back on brute intuitions. This sets logical pluralism on a weak foundation and makes it seem as if nothing pressing is at stake in the debate. The (...) present paper aims to improve this situation by looking at a promising case study and drawing general lessons about the kind of evidence that would support logical pluralism. I argue that the best motivation for logical pluralism will ultimately be rooted in certain kinds of performative data. (shrink)

The dissertation is in the format of a collection of several academic texts, composed of a two-part presentation and three papers on the topic of conceivability and the epistemology of modality. The presentation is composed of, first, a general introduction to conceivability theses and objections and, second, a discussion of two cases. Following the presentation, Asger provides three papers. The first paper, Pretense and Conceivability: A reply to Roca-Royes, presents a problem and a dilemma for Roca-Royes’ Non-Standard Dilemma for conceivability-based (...) epistemologies of de re modality in which she concludes that conceivability cannot be the whole story of our de re modal knowledge. The second paper, Conceivability Externalized, proposes an externalist conceivability-based epistemology of possibility inspired by Stalnaker. The third paper, Inconceivability as a Guide to Impossibility, considers inconceivability as an epistemic guide to impossibility, aiming to explore and add support to the underexplored thesis that one can justify beliefs about the impossibility of P on the basis of the inconceivability of P. (shrink)

Modal primitivists hold that some modal truths are primitively true. They thus seem to face a special epistemological problem: how can primitive modal truths be known? The epistemological objection has not been adequately developed in the literature. I undertake to develop the objection, and then to argue that the best formulation of the epistemological objection targets all realists about modality, rather than the primitivist alone. Furthermore, the moves available to reductionists in response to the objection are also available to primitivists. (...) I conclude by suggesting that extant theories of the epistemology of modality are not sensitive to the question of primitivism versus reductionism. (shrink)

Logical monists and pluralists disagree about how many correct logics there are; the monists say there is just one, the pluralists that there are more. Could it turn out that both are wrong, and that there is no logic at all?

Quantifier variance faces a number of difficulties. In this paper we first formulate the view as holding that the meanings of the quantifiers may vary, and that languages using different quantifiers may be charitably translated into each other. We then object to the view on the basis of four claims: (i) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning extensionally by changing the domain of quantification; (ii) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning intensionally without collapsing into logical pluralism; (iii) quantifier variance is not an (...) ontological doctrine; (iv) quantifier variance is not compatible with charitable translation and as such is internally inconsistent. In light of these troubles, we recommend the dissolution of quantifier variance and suggest that the view be laid to rest. (shrink)

The article is centered on the question of how best to understand the logical pluralism/logical monism debate. A number of suggestions are brought up and rejected on the ground that they re...

We can distinguish two non-equivalent ways in which a natural language argument can be valid: it can be interpretationally or representationally valid. However, there is just one notion of classical first-order validity for formal languages: truth-preservation in all classical first-order models. To ease the tension, Baumgartner suggests that we should understand interpretational and representational validity as imposing different adequacy conditions on formalizations of natural language arguments. I argue against this proposal. To that end, I first show that Baumgartner’s definition of (...) representational validity is extensionally inadequate. I present a number of natural language arguments that we pre-theoretically hold to be representationally valid, but are not representationally valid according to Baumgartner’s definition. I then point to two further untenable features of Baumgartner’s definitions: according to Baumgartner’s definition of a representationally correct formalization, we cannot arrive at formalizations in a recursive way, and Baumgartner’s definition of representational validity is non-monotonic. I conclude that interpretational and representational validity cannot be understood as merely imposing different adequacy conditions on formalizations. If we want to capture our interpretational and representational intuitions, we need two different formal definitions of validity. (shrink)

A natural language argument may be valid in at least two nonequivalent senses: it may be interpretationally or representationally valid (Etchemendy in The concept of logical consequence. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990). Interpretational and representational validity can both be formally exhibited by classical first-order logic. However, as these two notions of informal validity differ extensionally and first-order logic fixes one determinate extension for the notion of formal validity (or consequence), some arguments must be formalized by unrelated nonequivalent formalizations in order (...) to formally account for their interpretational or representational validity, respectively. As a consequence, arguments must be formalized subject to different criteria of adequate formalization depending on which variant of informal validity is to be revealed. This paper develops different criteria that formalizations of an argument have to satisfy in order to exhibit the latter’s interpretational or representational validity. (shrink)

This paper compares two ways of holding that logic is special among the sciences in that it has no restricted class of entities as its subject matter, but instead concerns all entities alike. One way is Williamson’s explanation of how inquiry into logical consequence and logical truth only superficially concerns the linguistic or conceptual entities that bear these properties. Williamson draws on ideas familiar from deflationism about truth, and his account has been called “deflationary.” I argue that the analogy is (...) misleading. While there’s a broad sense in which Williamson offers a deflationary account of logical inquiry, his view differs from deflationism about truth in being best understood as a form of instrumentalism. By contrast, I elaborate a deflationism about logical properties modeled on deflationism about truth. I defend this expressive device deflationism as an explanation of our use of logical predicates. (shrink)

According to tradition, logic is normative for reasoning. According to many contemporary philosophers of logic, there is more than one correct logic. What is the relationship between these two strands of thought? This paper makes two claims. First, logic is doubly normative for reasoning because, in addition to constraining the combinations of beliefs that we may have, logic also constrains the methods by which we may form them. Second, given that logic is doubly normative for reasoning, a wide array of (...) logical pluralisms are inconsistent with the normativity of logic as they entail contradictory claims about how agents ought to reason. Thus, if logic is normative for reasoning, these pluralisms are untenable. (shrink)

En este trabajo presentaré una forma de evitar los problemas más recurrentes en cierta versión del pluralismo lógico, aquella que defiende que incluso considerando un lenguaje fijo existen múltiples sistemas lógicos legítimos. Para ello, será necesario considerar los puntos de partida del programa pluralista y explicitar los problemas que de ellos surgen, principalmente el Desafío de Quine y el Problema del Colapso. Luego, propondré una modificación respecto de lo que se entiende por consecuencia lógica, para poder considerar una familia de (...) sistemas lógicos, las lógicas mixtas, que abarcan tanto a las lógicas puras como a las impuras. Finalmente, mostraré que con una interpretación razonable del formalismo se puede eludir aquellos problemas a la vez que se respeta el espíritu del programa pluralista. (shrink)

When discussing Logical Pluralism several critics argue that such an open-minded position is untenable. The key to this conclusion is that, given a number of widely accepted assumptions, the pluralist view collapses into Logical Monism. In this paper we show that the arguments usually employed to arrive at this conclusion do not work. The main reason for this is the existence of certain substructural logics which have the same set of valid inferences as Classical Logic—although they are, in a clear (...) sense, non-identical to it. We argue that this phenomenon can be generalized, given the existence of logics which coincide with Classical Logic regarding a number of metainferential levels—although they are, again, clearly different systems. We claim this highlights the need to arrive at a more refined version of the Collapse Argument, which we discuss at the end of the paper. (shrink)

I proffer a success argument for classical logical consequence. I articulate in what sense that notion of consequence should be regarded as the privileged notion for metaphysical inquiry aimed at uncovering the fundamental nature of the world. Classical logic breeds necessitism. I use necessitism to produce problems for both ontological naturalism and atheism.

Logical Pluralists maintain that there is more than one genuine/true logical consequence relation. This paper seeks to understand what the position could amount to and some of the challenges faced by its formulation and defence. I consider in detail Beall and Restall’s Logical Pluralism—which seeks to accommodate radically different logics by stressing the way that they each fit a general form, the Generalised Tarski Thesis (GTT)—arguing against the claim that different instances of GTT are admissible precisifications of logical consequence. I (...) then consider what it is to endorse a logic within a pluralist framework and criticise the options Beall and Restall entertain. A case study involving many-valued logics is examined. I next turn to issues of the applications of different logics and questions of which logic a pluralist should use in particular contexts. A dilemma regarding the applicability of admissible logics is tackled and it is argued that application is a red herring in relation to both understanding and defending a plausible form of logical pluralism. In the final section, I consider other ways to be and not to be a logical pluralist by examining analogous positions in debates over religious pluralism: this, I maintain, illustrates further limitations and challenges for a very general logical pluralism. Certain less wide-ranging pluralist positions are more plausible in both cases, I suggest, but assessment of those positions needs to be undertaken on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

I argue that Beall and Restall's logical pluralism fails. Beall–Restall pluralism is the claim that there are different, equally correct logical consequence relations in a single language. Their position fails for two, related, reasons: first, it relies on an unmotivated conception of the ‘settled core’ of consequence: they believe that truth-preservation, necessity, formality and normativity are ‘settled’ features of logical consequence and that any relation satisfying these criteria is a logical consequence relation. I consider historical evidence and argue that their (...) position relies on an unmotivated conception of the settled features of logical consequence. There are many features that are just as settled but which are inconsistent with pluralism. Second, I argue that Beall–Restall pluralism fails to hold in a single language with a single selection of logical constants, which they require for the position to be distinct from Carnap's. I consider various ways in which Beall and Restall can resist this meaning variance, particularly for negation, but argue that the strongest way relies on an unmotivated conception of the settled features of the logical constants. (shrink)

The application of paraconsistent logics to theological contradictions is a fascinating move. Jc Beall’s (J Anal Theol, 7(1): 400–439, 2019) paper entitled ‘Christ—A Contradiction: A Defense of ‘Contradictory Christology’ is a notable example. Beall proposes a solution to the fundamental problem of Christology. His solution aims at making the case, and defending the viability of, what he has termed, ‘Contradictory Christology’. There are at least two essential components of Beall’s ‘Contradictory Christology’. These include the dogmatic statements of Chalcedon and FDE (...) logic. The first is the theological contradiction in question. The second is the type of paraconsistent logic. Both components are integral to a contradictory theology in general. I argue that there can be no such thing as an Islamic contradictory theology. I make the case by establishing two points. These points correspond to both integral components of a contradictory theology in general. The first is that an Islamic theological contradiction does not entail an actual (logical) contradiction. The second is that FDE logic, including alternative sub-classical systems of logic, are not adequate in tolerating an Islamic theological contradiction. (shrink)

According to modalism, modality is primitive. In this paper, we examine the implications of this view for modal epistemology, and articulate a modalist account of modal knowledge. First, we discuss a theoretical utility argument used by David Lewis in support of his claim that there is a plurality of concrete worlds. We reject this argument, and show how to dispense with possible worlds altogether. We proceed to account for modal knowledge in modalist terms.

The application of paraconsistent logics to theological contradictions is a fascinating move. Jc Beall’s (J Anal Theol, 7(1): 400–439, 2019) paper entitled ‘Christ—A Contradiction: A Defense of ‘Contradictory Christology’ is a notable example. Beall proposes a solution to the fundamental problem of Christology. His solution aims at making the case, and defending the viability of, what he has termed, ‘Contradictory Christology’. There are at least two essential components of Beall’s ‘Contradictory Christology’. These include the dogmatic statements of Chalcedon and FDE (...) logic. The first is the theological contradiction in question. The second is the type of paraconsistent logic. Both components are integral to a contradictory theology in general. I argue that there can be no such thing as an Islamic contradictory theology. I make the case by establishing two points. These points correspond to both integral components of a contradictory theology in general. The first is that an Islamic theological contradiction does not entail an actual (logical) contradiction. The second is that FDE logic, including alternative sub-classical systems of logic, are not adequate in tolerating an Islamic theological contradiction. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that logical pluralism is not compatible with the normativity of logic. They developed different versions of the collapse argument: if two logics are correct, then the weaker one will be normatively irrelevant. In this paper, I argue that the collapse argument is based on a controversial premise: the assumption that every logic can be characterized by the same bridge principle. I provide a solution to the collapse argument based on the modification of this premise, maintaining both (...) logical pluralism and the normativity of logic. (shrink)