A collection of some of Sellars' lectures and articles from 1951 to 1962.

In "The Logical Structure of Linguistic Commitment I" (The Journal of Philosophical Logic 23 (1994), 369-400), we sketch a linguistic theory (inspired by Brandom's Making it Explicit) which includes an "expressivist" account of the implication connective, →: the role of → is to "make explicit" the inferential proprieties among possible commitments which proprieties determine, in part, the significances of sentences. This motivates reading (A → B) as "commitment to A is, in part, commitment to B". Our project is to study (...) the logic of →. LSLC I approximates (A → B) as "anyone committed to A is committed to B", ignoring issues of whether A is relevant to B. The present paper includes considerations of relevance, motivating systems of relevant commitment entailment related to the systems of commitment entailment of LSLC I. We also consider the relevance logics that result from a commitment reading of Fine's semantics for relevance logics, a reading that Fine suggests. (shrink)

What is the logic of entailment? The latter half of the twentieth century has seen, for even the simplest languages, a proliferation of distinct formal entailment systems, each having those willing to defend its status as the answer. Among those defenders, and among the most adamant and mutually critical, are the champions of strict implication and relevance logic. To an outsider, this debate must seem singularly odd. Here we have a group of philosophers who cannot agree on the validity of (...) a simple, easily comprehensible inference scheme. They seem to think that they are not talking past one another---that there is some reality each seeks to describe---for they continue to write articles declaring that the opposing view is wrong. Yet they cannot seem to convince the other side that their view is even remotely plausible, thus leading some to an instrumentalist dismissal of the whole debate.I argue that the defenders of the two systems are right to suggest that something deeper is at issue between them than mere usefulness in particular applied contexts. Once we see what this is, however, we will see that they are, after all, talking past one another. When we succeed in clarifying the crucial underlying issue, we can then succeed in clarifying the crucial distinction between two dimensions of the underlying concept. Both the classicalist and the relevantist, then, will be seen to have accurately captured one dimension of the root concept. (shrink)

What is the logic of entailment? The latter half of the twentieth century has seen, for even the simplest languages, a proliferation of distinct formal entailment systems, each having those willing to defend its status as the answer. Among those defenders, and among the most adamant and mutually critical, are the champions of strict implication and relevance logic. To an outsider, this debate must seem singularly odd. Here we have a group of philosophers who cannot agree on the validity of (...) a simple, easily comprehensible inference scheme. They seem to think that they are not talking past one another---that there is some reality each seeks to describe---for they continue to write articles declaring that the opposing view is wrong. Yet they cannot seem to convince the other side that their view is even remotely plausible, thus leading some to an instrumentalist dismissal of the whole debate.I argue that the defenders of the two systems are right to suggest that something deeper is at issue between them than mere usefulness in particular applied contexts. Once we see what this is, however, we will see that they are, after all, talking past one another. When we succeed in clarifying the crucial underlying issue, we can then succeed in clarifying the crucial distinction between two dimensions of the underlying concept. Both the classicalist and the relevantist, then, will be seen to have accurately captured one dimension of the root concept. (shrink)

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

In spite of a powerful tradition, more than two thousand years old, that in a valid argument the premises must be relevant to the conclusion, twentieth-century logicians neglected the concept of relevance until the publication of Volume I of this monumental work. Since that time relevance logic has achieved an important place in the field of philosophy: Volume II of Entailment brings to a conclusion a powerful and authoritative presentation of the subject by most of the top people working in (...) the area. Originally the aim of Volume II was simply to cover certain topics not treated in the first volume--quantification, for example--or to extend the coverage of certain topics, such as semantics. However, because of the technical progress that has occurred since the publication of the first volume, Volume II now includes other material. The book contains the work of Alasdair Urquhart, who has shown that the principal sentential systems of relevance logic are undecidable, and of Kit Fine, who has demonstrated that, although the first-order systems are incomplete with respect to the conjectured constant domain semantics, they are still complete with respect to a semantics based on "arbitrary objects." Also presented is important work by the other contributing authors, who are Daniel Cohen, Steven Giambrone, Dorothy L. Grover, Anil Gupta, Glen Helman, Errol P. Martin, Michael A. McRobbie, and Stuart Shapiro. Robert G. Wolf's bibliography of 3000 items is a valuable addition to the volume. (shrink)