The opening lines of the SEP article on logical pluralism acknowledge that the idea seems crazy at first glance, but that it becomes more plausible on further examination. I found myself getting more of a handle on it when reading the objections to it. It's all pretty technical, and that's not really something I'm super familiar with, but I did get that logical pluralism isn't taking anything away from the regular logic.

Neither of the two most cited arguments for pluralism, Beale and Restall or Shapiro argue that trivial logics should be considered correct.

Beale and Restall only endorse a few sub-classical logics and Shapiro based his "eclectic pluralism" on use cases in mathematics.

Pluralism is not the position that all logics are correct. It is the position that more than one is.

The position that any logic is correct is more in line with nihilism, although the nihilist will simply reject the idea of a correct logic.

Read what? Obviously I can't read the sources I just quoted since they disagree with you.

I mean, on your view that "virtually all logicians embrace deflationary theories of truth," don't you think it is a little strange that:

A. They largely responded to a survey rejecting that position and;
B. That the most used introductory text book for logic in the English speaking world begins by discussing validity in terms of true conclusions or relating formalism to states of affairs on its opening pages, with nary a single mention of deflation in the whole text?

If by dissolving all things and having only a single universal process you mean 'reductionism', there is no risk associated with using the view of physicalism, in my opinion.

Actually, I was thinking of mereological nihilism, that there are no true part whole relations, and that arrangements of them are ultimately arbitrary. Thus, the world contains no cats, trees, stars, etc. These only exist in the mind. There are only a few fundemental fields (perhaps unifiable, in which case there is just one thing). This seems to make "saying true things about things" virtually impossible.

I would say reductionism is problematic though, at least in its most popular form, as smallism—i.e. the belief that all facts about larger wholes are totally explainable in terms of facts about smaller composite parts, and that "smaller = more fundemental."

There is no prima facie reason for this to be true. Bigism, where all parts are only definable in terms of wholes, works just as well and flows better with information theoretic accounts of nature, QFT, and process metaphysics. But then there also isn't good empirical evidence for reductionism either. How many reductions have been successful? Thermodynamics to statistical mechanics is the canonical example and I (having asked this question many times in many places) don't know if there is a single other example. More than a century from the high water mark of reductionism, chemistry, even the basics of molecular structure, still hasn't been reduced to physics. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it does seem like it shouldn't be something that is assumed to be true until proven otherwise (in part because it is probably unfalsifiable).

There is an interesting section in either the SEP article on the philosophy of chemistry or on emergence that references a good paper on how quantum phenomena:

1. Don't jive at all well with the early, conventional accounts of emergence but also;
2. Don't jive well with reductionist accounts either

My guess, which is mostly based on how other "problems in the sciences," have progressed, is that the terms currently applied need to be radically rethought. That's just a guess though.

You can certainly argue for nihilism from robust deflation, but the position that it is obvious or widely accepted that validity and logical consequence "have nothing to do with truth," is belied by a look at any introductory text on logic.

You could refer to the open source ForAllX (which is very much focused on formalism), but which still defines consequence in its opening pages thus:

"For the conclusion to be a consequence of the Ppremises, the truth of the premises must guarantee the truth of the conclusion. If there is a counterexample, the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion."


Or you could look at a more advanced text like the Routledge Philosophical Logic, which distinguishes between "truth simpliciter" and a "relativized notion of truth: truth in a model," and how the latter was historically developed from as a means of capturing the former.

Notions of truth outside formalism are called on all the time though. For instance, this highly cited piece by Priest (one of the major figures on dialtheism) on paradoxes of material implication.

The notion of validity that comes out of the orthodox account is a strangely perverse one according to which any rule whose conclusion is a logical truth Is valid and, conversely, any rule whose premises contain a contradiction is valid. By a process that does not fall far short of indoctrination most logicians have now had their sensibilities dulled to these glaring anomalies. However, this is possible only because logicians have also forgotten that logic isa normative subject: it is supposed to provide an account of correct reasoning. When seen in this light the full force of these absurdities can be appreciated. Anyone who actually reasoned from an arbitrary premise to, e.g., the infinity of prime numbers, would not last long in an undergraduate mathematics course.

Is it arbitrary?

See:

Surely, there's an idea of rationality and proper reasoning in general discourse, e.g. we say that we are rationally warranted to hold some beliefs but not others, that we can jointly hold some beliefs but that holding others jointly would be inconsistent, and so on. To deny this would be one of the most fringe positions one could possibly take on anything. And this idea also includes that of in some sense 'proper' and 'improper' inferences (deliberately avoiding the word valid for now). We are supposed to 'accept' some arguments of the form '{premises}, therefore conclusion', that someone might tell us at work, at the family dinner, in politics, but not others. So there's a notion of some consequence relation between propositions that sometimes holds and sometimes doesn't.

The question then simply is whether there is a logic, including in the specific sense of some formal system, whose consequence relation coincides with that of proper reasoning in ordinary discourse, such that we could for example turn to it and use it to settle the validity of an argument in ordinary discourse, period. If there's exactly one such system that gets the job done, that's monism, if there are multiple that have equal claim to something like that, that's pluralism, and if something like that simply doesn't exist, that's nihilism

I do not think it's plausible to say that trivial logics in which everything expressible can be proven true are only arbitrarily bad for inference for instance. Do you disagree?

And can one have correct purposes, or can one's purposes be defined arbitrarily? The purpose here is to capture natural language understandings of good reasoning and valid argument. Is:

"You've got the appropriate logic if it fits your purposes with regard to a specific domain."

The vernacular understanding of what is meant by "good/correct reasoning?"

I feel like the response I linked answers this pretty well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/ggklhq/what_are_the_arguments_against_logical_pluralism/

First think about the historic development of logic starting with Aristotle, the idea of what logic is supposed to do for us, and the pre-theoretical idea of validity. What is the definition that absolutely every student who takes a course in (formal or informal) logic or critical thinking (or reads a Wikipedia article) learns? Usually, something along the lines of "an argument is valid iff it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false". And why did people think this is an important concept? I don't want to talk about Aristotle on my own, so I rely on John Corocan here:

"Every non-repetitive demonstration produces or confirms knowledge of (the truth of) its conclusion for every person who comprehends the demonstration. Persuasion merely produces opinion. Aristotle presented a general truth-and-consequence conception of demonstration meant to apply to all demonstrations. According to him, a demonstration is an extended argumentation that begins with premises known to be truths and involves a chain of reasoning showing by deductively evident steps that its conclusion is a consequence of its premises. In short, a demonstration is a deduction whose premises are known to be true. For Aristotle, starting with premises known to be true and a conclusion not known to be true, the knower demonstrates the conclusion by deducing it from the premises—thereby acquiring knowledge of the conclusion."

The last sentence is probably the most interesting one here: thereby acquiring knowledge of the conclusion. Of course, that's how we typically think about logic, long before we think about verification of program correctness, multi-agent systems, games, and 5 million other use cases for dozens of logics these days.

But on a first view, that makes the idea that there is more than one accurate account of logical consequence and that they are equally correct, somewhat problematic. There's a challenge sometimes referred to as "Priest's challenge" by Read and Restall. Imagine there are two equally correct accounts of logical validity, L and K. We agree/know that a set of premises S is true. According to L, p follows from S, according to K it doesn't. Just like most people, the most popular logical pluralists are not relativists about truth, and K and L here are allegedly accurate accounts of validity, not of truth. Further, they don't deny that the most important objective of any logical system is to describe an account for logical consequence. So is p true or not?

To say "it depends" seems unsatisfying. Firstly, it's not clear what that's supposed to mean. Does the set of premises S guarantee the conclusion in the sense of validity or not? The pre-theoretical idea of validity doesn't appear to be relativistic, and the best-known pluralists aren't relativists about truth. The answer "Yes, p is true. K doesn't say it's not true, it just doesn't confirm that it is so. L confirms it" on the other hand, seems to contradict the claim that K and L are equally good accounts of logical consequence. If L tells us more without being incorrect, then L seems better than K.

Closely related to that is the concern about the normative status of logic. Many logicians and philosophers of logic held that logic is normative - it informs us how we ought to reason. That was certainly part of the intellectual background of the development of logic. A word used for logical principles or axioms by German mathematicians like Frege or Zermelo was "Denkgesetz" - a law of thought. Given the pre-theoretical idea of validity, in combination with conceptualizing logical laws as laws of thought, we shouldn't be surprised that one standard articulation of what it means to be a law of logic was that a principle must hold in complete generality - domain independent. Even pluralists have acknowledged that all of that is in obvious conflict.

So, there's quite a bit of explaining to do for the pluralist, as their conception of logic deviates significantly from how people have historically thought about logic and validity for the last 2300 years, even what it means to be a logic in the first place.

The monist's position, on the other hand, is rather 'standard': It seems to follow more naturally from nothing but the conceptualization of validity and logic. They don't have much explaining to do here. The opposite doesn't really hold, or to a lower degree: Many of the things that seem to be prima facie troubling for the monist, must likewise be answered by the pluralist. For example, maybe we want to ask the monist "There's only one true logic? How would you find out what logic that is, and what does this even mean?" This might be a legitimate question, but it needs to be answered by the pluralist as well. Neither Restall & Beall nor Shapiro hold that literally any possible logic (alphabet, formation rules, deductive apparatus) that we can write on a piece of paper is a 'true logic' in their sense.

It's about the appropriateness of a logic in mirroring natural language notions of logical consequence and validity.

How is validity defined in most natural language explanations? Something like: "an argument is valid if the truth of the premises logically guarantees the truth of the conclusion."

To say something "follows from" or is "entailed by" something else in natural language is to make a statement about the relationship between the truth of the first claim and the truth of the second.

Entailment has variously been described in terms of sentences, facts, states of affairs, etc.

It seems a bit much to say that notions of "reasoning in the vernacular," re validity and entailment have "nothing to do with truth."

For instance, the metaphysical argument for monism of Sider has "nothing to do with truth?"

What is "appropriateness" then?

"Correct" in that quote basically means appropriate. It has nothing to do with truth.

The preceding paragraph actually deals with just your conception of logic.

In order to answer the question about what makes a logic correct one has to address the prior question about what logic is about, i.e., the subject matter of logic. There is one view of logic, according to which a logic is specified by giving a consequence relation for any abstract formal language. There is nothing else to logic. This conception of logic trivializes the debate

Or for more detail on different ways to define correctness:

Some would argue that logic is about natural language reasoning or vernacular reasoning (e.g., Graham Priest has most clearly articulated this view). If that is the case, then the correct logic is the one that correctly captures/represents the consequence relation in natural language or the consequence relation instantiated by reasoning in the vernacular. If there is no single consequence relation of the relevant sort, then one might be led to pluralism. If there is no consequence relation discoverable in natural language, one might be led to nihilism, etc.

Part of what the monism/pluralism/nihilism debate is about, however, is how to conceive of logic. Arguably, despite what I said above, this debate cannot be conducted entirely independently of the background problem about the correct conception of logic. Some pluralists would deny that logic is only or primarily about the consequence relation in natural language or about vernacular reasoning. Logics should model the consequence relation of any legitimate mathematical theory, leaving room for many "correct logics" which get the job done since there are, arguably, many legitimate mathematical theories (this is Shapiro's view).

This is not the purely abstract conception of logic, according to which logic just means pure logic - logics as models of any possible formal language whatsoever. But it is also not the more traditional view, according to which logic should be applied to vernacular reasoning before one can speak of correct logics, either. I say that the latter is the more traditional view because, arguably, in the history of logic, it was typical to assume that logic is normative for human reasoning and not about modeling any possible language whatsoever, mathematical or other.

There are yet other views, according to which logic should represent the logical structure of the fundamental language which carves nature at its joints (Ted Sider's view). That would be one way to cash out the ontological approach to the "application of logic."

I would just add that the background assumption for looking at natural language and scientific discourse seems to be that reasoning here deals with some notion of truth qua truth (even if we think the notion ambiguous ).

Nihilism states there's no logical laws. Pluralism states there are more than no logical laws, and more than one logical law. Though "law", by the pluralist, is funny here. My thought is that "law" is stipulative -- my suspicion being that all arguments for a logic must beg the question the only way to evaluate a logic is to develop and utilize it in some fashion.

I think thinking in terms of "laws" is probably unhelpful here and I have never seen a monist argument that tries to define itself in this way. If by laws we mean "true for all existing logics," then there are clearly no such laws. The monist doesn't argue that such laws "hold in generality," except insofar as they hold for "correct logic" (as they variously define it; note also that most monists embrace many logics, the question is more about consequence). So, Russell's paper is fine overall, but I think this part has just confused people because it's easy to read it in a way that seems to make the answer trivial. But based on the fact that even pluralists themselves very often claim that they are in the minority, it should give us pause if monism seems very obviously false.

I'm thinking that the monist thinks there is, at the end of the day (ultimately?), only one set of logical laws that cohere together. The pluralist can accept laws insofar that they are limited in a non-lawlike(logical inference rule that fits within the logic) fashion. The nihilist states that all logical so-called laws are matters of preference -- something like a poetry of rhyme, but with ideas.

This is the right intuition from my understanding.

I asked this question in some venues that are more restrictive about who can answer questions and here are the replies (pace Banno, no one found this question leading or question begging):

Surely, there's an idea of rationality and proper reasoning in general discourse, e.g. we say that we are rationally warranted to hold some beliefs but not others, that we can jointly hold some beliefs but that holding others jointly would be inconsistent, and so on. To deny this would be one of the most fringe positions one could possibly take on anything. And this idea also includes that of in some sense 'proper' and 'improper' inferences (deliberately avoiding the word valid for now). We are supposed to 'accept' some arguments of the form '{premises}, therefore conclusion', that someone might tell us at work, at the family dinner, in politics, but not others. So there's a notion of some consequence relation between propositions that sometimes holds and sometimes doesn't.

The question then simply is whether there is a logic, including in the specific sense of some formal system, whose consequence relation coincides with that of proper reasoning in ordinary discourse, such that we could for example turn to it and use it to settle the validity of an argument in ordinary discourse, period. If there's exactly one such system that gets the job done, that's monism, if there are multiple that have equal claim to something like that, that's pluralism, and if something like that simply doesn't exist, that's nihilism

This is in line with how G&P and Priest define their arguments for monism and how B&R define their argument for pluralism (i.e. with reference to natural language). These are, of course, far more technical as they try to make these notions more precise, but that's the basic jist.


In terms of what constitutes "correct" logics, people do have other answers aside from using natural language as a target. Some use scientific discourse/formal theories, etc. It isn't cut and dry, which is why you frequently find appeals to popularity and more ambiguous "plausibility" arguments. Just for a good outlier example, some logics are trivial. One can prove anything expressible in them. They might have a notion of satisfaction, but there is clearly a plausibility issue when a system that allows you to prove anything is said to have correct rules for "truth-preservation."

But some people frame logic as a normative practice, as being about what we "ought" to affirm. Others, influenced by Wittgenstein, think of it in terms of assertability criteria. This response gets at that:

There are two interwining ways to cash out the phrase "correct logic":

Deontologically, as in there being propositions of e.g. the form, "If it is judged that A, and if it is judged that (if A then B), then it ought to be judged that B." Now, it would not be that there was only one correct logic in the sense of there being only one strictly commanded rule or pattern of inference, but we would claim that only one system of patterns of inference featured such "oughts," and either no other system featured "oughts" but at best only "mays" (you may infer this from that...) or the other systems would in some sense be forbidden.

Ontologically, as in thinking that objective/external reality is itself structured like a complex interlocking set of propositions, which proposition-like entities we usually call by the name of facts. Then some one completely correct logic would be one consisting in all and only inference rules reflected from the interrelations between possible facts.

Deontologically, pluralism is best understood as what we might call "permissivism," i.e. any acknowledged system of logic is permissible. (A pluralist doesn't actually have to acknowledge every system that the word "logic" is applied to, though they are less and less a pluralist, the more and more they limit the range of their acknowledgements.) This is subtly, but genuinely, distinct from logical relativism, which would be that different systems "ought" to be applied to different topics.

Ontologically, the pluralist is going to be the one who thinks that objective/external reality is chaotic or random enough to support all sorts of anomalies and fluxes with respect to the relations between its constituent facts. (Logical nihilism, or rather logical asemanticism, seems more accurate in this context, though, if it is not accurate to think that reality is structured according to any completely specifiable system of logic at all. Or maybe there are a few rules that are universal as such, i.e. exactly those pertaining to universal quantification, if this be doable in an unrestricted way.)

I think part of the confusion is that, just as idealism is much more popular on TPF than in metaphysics as a discipline, highly deflationary conceptions of logic's subject matter are also much more common. But one might agree to a deflation of truth for the purposes of doing logic without embracing any robust notion of deflation, e.g. that "on 9/11 the Pentagon was struck by an airliner not a cruise missile," is true or false in a sense transcending any formal construct or social practice. Maybe not, I only know of two surveys on this question, but they do seem to bear this out, as does the way authors actually talk about non-classical logics (i.e. they spend a lot of time making plausibility arguments, which are superfluous of logic is just about formalism).

To quote B&R:

there is more than one sense in which arguments may be deductively valid, that these senses are equally good, and equally deserving of the name deductive validity”.

The response here is quite good too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/ggklhq/what_are_the_arguments_against_logical_pluralism/

Yes, I think you're correct, one can think of correspondence in a looser sense and I think it is in this looser sense that it remains so popular amongst philosophers. And one can add notions of pragmatism, coherence, or identity to the correspondence view without necessarily altering its core intuition.

You can reject the metaphysical axioms I've stated: I haven't claimed they are logically necessary. But I do think they are a better explanation than the alternatives, and I think I've shown that. We can discuss that further, once you accept the coherence of the framework I've stated.

Ok, from your initial post I thought you were making the claim that this was logically necessary, as in tautological.

Does it follow? IDK, maybe. Those are pretty complex terms in the premises and metaphysical necessity can be defined in various ways.

Do I find it convincing? No. I mean, suppose there was a breakthrough in cosmology that showed strong evidence that the universe was cyclical, that the Big Bang would be followed by an infinite series of other Big Bangs. Would you still want to push the brute fact line?

But cosmology has had many sea changes in the past century, and many presumed "brute facts" have turned out to have explanations (or at least have plausible theories explaining them that need more observational data to bear out). Black Hole Cosmology has some legs, it fits the data, but it would suppose an explicable cause prior to the Big Bang. Eternal varieties of cosmic inflation suppose the universe is without beginning or end, as does Penrose's cyclical universe. In Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis the universe and its attributes are intelligible and explicable. I don't see metaphysics as having much of a role here in deciding the issue as simply brute fact.

It seems to me like the inverse of more the simplistic theistic arguments on the origins of the universe TBH. Each bottom out in the ineffable and unintelligible while making broad pronouncements on open empirical questions in the natural sciences that have promising leads.

Anyhow, this is pretty off topic so I'll leave it there.

Trump is up 65% to 35% in the betting markets (which have a solid track record) and ahead in swing state polling. If he outperforms his polling like he did in the last elections he will win all the swing states and it's even conceivable he could win the popular vote (hell, it's within the margin of error for some polls).

Of course, the absolute funniest situation is one where Trump wins the popular vote and loses the Electoral College, since the cognitive dissonance will be overwhelming.

But maybe he won't outperform his polls the same way. I sometimes wonder if there is a "punishment effect" in polls where supporters of a candidate they are unhappy with lie about who they support as consequence free way to voice dissent. This seems at least plausible to me because primary voters are vocal about doing this, and they sometimes do it in large numbers (e.g. over the Gaza War this cycle). So perhaps Harris can make it a short night. I sort of doubt it though.

Ok, can you give a definition in the plural?

Just to be clear, for other folk, Tim's question is loaded precisely becasue the notion that there is a "correct logic" for which a definition might be provided is exactly what is denied by both logical pluralism and nihilism.

Well no, the most cited monograph on pluralism, Beale and Restall, says there are multiple "correct/genuine" logics. The opening sentence of Russell's article for SEP on Logical Pluralism is: "Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic."

If pluralism denied that there were any correct logics, how would it be distinguishable from nihilism exactly?

Anyhow, this is really not a "gotcha question." Or it shouldn't be.

Yes, I am aware you can copy and paste. You apparently cannot define what the term "correct logic" used in definitions of the problem in all these papers means though.

Ok, so you cannot define logical monism or pluralism.

I'm not asking you to give a philosophical account, I'm asking you to show you have a basic understanding of the topic. It's an outline... "of what?"


I don't buy into trope nominalism, but I can explain what it is. You seem unable to do this for the positions under discussion.

On the opening pages of their respective books, for the most obvious example.

Do you really need to check new sources and not the papers you yourself cited in this thread? Where those lines in the opening paragraphs just an incomprehensible muddle to you?

You will not, for example, find a definition of "Correct Logic" in the Open Logic text. But you will find definitions of validity, satisfaction, truth and so on. These are the terms used by logicians when doing logic.

No, but you do see the term all over articles written by logicians on the topic of logical pluralism vs monism vs nihilism. Beale and Restall define their pluralism in these terms for instance (and as there being "multiple true logics"), Paseau and Griffith's define their monism in these terms.

No clue?

I have to say, the inability to answer strikes as akin to someone staking out a position in favor of nominalism and being unable to even define what a universal is. One need not think universals exist, or even be able to give a "philosophically adequate account" of them to defend nominalism of course, but it seems necessary to understand what is generally meant by the concept to even understand the basics of the debate. This is similar.

:up:

It's fairly straightforward to demonstrate that truth can't be analyzed in that way.

BTW, I agree with you here. I feel like there have been knock down arguments against correspondence for millennia at this point, e.g. Plotinus asks how one might step outside one's beliefs and experiences to compare them with the world. Yet it has trucked along nonetheless.

But I think this has to do more with vague commitments to realism. Maybe not though, truth-maker theories (facts, states of affairs, etc.) seem pretty popular.

What makes you think this?

Lots of reading, graduate school experience, that sources like IEP and SEP will state this as uncontroversial and people like to complain if they get things wrong, the polling data, etc.

Are you thinking of correspondence narrowly as just Bertrand Russell's work, Moore, etc? That might be the disconnect. The term gets used broadly for all theories that attempt to explain truth in something like a corresponding relationship to reality, e.g. "it is currently raining outside," is true if water is falling from the sky outside.

Either the folks who responded that they accept correspondence theory didn't understand the question, or they interpreted "correspondence" in some creative way.

Might it be that you are thinking of the question in too narrow a way and not they collectively misunderstanding it?

Correspondence is not accepted by anyone who's familiar with the topic. It's fairly straightforward to demonstrate that truth can't be analyzed in that way.

Which topic? It remains the most popular conception in metaphysics, of that I'm quite confident.

What's the demonstration?

Ok, but to be clear, it's not anonymous, it's just confidential. That is how they're able to do longitudinal analysis. Actually, IIRC people could make their answers public, but the data is not easily searchable because you just get a list of names.

Well, the 2009 survey results are pretty similar and those were based on the academic departments/sub-departments people work in at the top programs from Philosophical Gourmet Report. If there was a sampling error in the broader 2020 population, it just seems like it would vary more from the broader polling

English speaking (not necessarily as a first language) academic philosophers from around the world.

This doesn't seem that implausible to me. I have used a few intro logic textbooks and intermediate ones and none talk about deflation or normative interpretations of logic except as quick asides (if at all). Plus, mathematics, which seems adjacent, seems to have the similar responses for this and related topics.

You might be interested in the question on classical or non-classical logics or the one on nominalism vs Platonism on abstract objects.

Another interesting trend is that the further you go back in time for speciality era the less people think philosophy "makes progress."

It's a survey done in 2009 and 2020

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/

You can see all the questions and correlations. On this topic, it isn't that surprising. If people accept deflation on truth they tend to be more open to anti-realisms of other varieties as well, moral, causal, etc. (Presumably because one can argue from one form of anti-realism to others in some cases, but I also think one's conception of "the human good," the "good life" and "freedom" play into this distinction).

I suppose one interesting thing is that correspondence still enjoys a majority for specialists in logic (versus about a quarter for deflation). It is similar for epistemology, and then correspondence does better in metaphysics (+60%) while deflation actually enjoys a small advantage for people specializing in Continental philosophy.

My favorite question is: What is the aim of philosophy (which is most important?): happiness, understanding, truth/knowledge, wisdom, or goodness/justice?

To which the ancient and medieval philosopher replies: "those are all the same thing!" :rofl:

Spontaneous generation" connotes coming into existence after a time at which it did not exist. Rather, an initial state just entails existing uncaused, with no point of time at which it does not exist.

No it doesn't, per your own explanation. There is a state before which there are no prior states. Call it S1. Now you claim that some thing or things had an S1 for no reason at all. They existed in S1 having not existed in any prior states. Now, why can't anything else have an S1, starting to exist when it has existed in no prior state, for "no reason at all?"

You are trying to read some prior time before S1 back in, which is a strawman.

Anyhow, you have entirely ignored the question of why any certain thing should begin to exist in S1 rather than any other.

This seems to me like a God of the Gaps solve it all to be honest.

There hasn't been any serious attempt to go back to correspondence theory. It's defunct.

In post-modern programs maybe, but that itself is a "camp" that appears to be in significant decline (the "Spirit of 68," having lost its resonance I suppose, or maybe condemning itself through birthing the modern globalized world and neoliberalism). I imagine deflation would fair significantly worse amongst scientists and the general public than it does amongst philosophers (polled below).

Anyhow, there are many options aside from correspondence.

Cheshire would prefer to see us start from where we are, here in the world, with our problems in view instead of down in a brain-vat

Well, historically, this is how logic was developed (both Aristotlean and the parallel Stoic development).

Questions of truth sit in the bucket of "metaphysics," and generally lie external to logic. Obviously, they are related, since we have the questions: "what does it mean to reason from true premises to necessarily true conclusions," or "what are we preserving in truth-preserving arguments?" But, in general, the claim isn't that a logic is defining truth, except instrumentally.

This is why there were charges from Putnam and others that STT was "philosophically sterile."



What's absurd about it? Contradictions allow you to demonstrate anything through disjunctive syllogism. The rules that allow for this seem very innocuous and disjunctive syllogism appears highly reliable when put to practical applications. Further, without very careful and recent work, removing LNC seemed to require removing the Law of Identity and LEM, and thus seemed to result in there being no necessarily truth-preserving inferences at all (no logic).

So, you have these issues on the one hand, and on the other the question of "can something both be and not be in exactly the same way without qualification." The intuitive answer seems to be "no," normally when we say something both is and is-not we qualify these statements (e.g. "President of the USA can be predicated of Trump as well as its negation, in a qualified sense, because he is a former, but not current president — let's hope this example ages well lol).

We might challenge the principle, but I don't think it's prima facie absurd. It's at the very least instructive, as with Curry Paradoxes.

Might you be conflating foundationalism with monism here? Hegel has a circular and fallibalist epistemology, but it is monist. Artistotle thinks that "what is best know to us," our starting point, are concrete particulars, the "many." But what are "best known in themselves," are unifying, generating principles (the unifying "one(s), which virtually contain the many. Nor is Aristotle particularly rigid; he admonishes us not to expect explanations that are more detailed than the topic area under discussion allows in the ethics (pace analytics who have tried to quantify "moral goodness"). Both have a monistic theory of logic/Logos, but neither are foundationalists.

St. Thomas Aquinas would be another example. He allows for different tools and acts of thought relevant to different subjects, but proposes that they are all unified. He doesn't seek a foundation to "build up from," though, proposing sense wonder, not LNC, as the first principle of science/philosophy.

I think you might have logical, metaphysical, and nomological (physical) necessity mixed up.

"The universes spontaneous generation is a brute fact," does not seem to be of the mold "all triangles have three sides," A = B and B = C, thus A = C.

If it was a logical necessity we probably wouldn't call it a brute fact.

As for metaphysical necessity, it just seems hard to argue that in all possible worlds the universe must both have a begining and its beginning must be unexplainable. Plenty of physicists think the universe is cyclical and thus without beginning or end, and it seems hard for metaphysics to convincingly settle this question. If we had strong empirical support for a cyclical universe would we still insist on this? (see the post to Tom above on how brute fact explanations are always abandoned when competition arrives).

But the larger issue I see is that this only deals with efficient cause from some time zero. But why does the universe progress from state to state as it does? Why did it have the initial conditions it did? If these are all brute facts then isn't everything that has ever happened necessary and all possible worlds identical with our own? But this seems to be a hard case to make. You have modal collapse, every true statement is necessarily true.

Plus, if things can just start existing, for no reason at all, why don't we ever see anything else just randomly start to exist? Is it also a brute fact that spontaneous brute existence only occurs once? And it only produces whatever we happen to observed? That just seems a little too convenient.

Well no, it's how she defines the entire problem, and it's how she defines it in her introduction on nihilism. It's also how Clarke-Doane defines it, and C&P , and SEP, etc. CD cites the following paper as representative on its opening page: "Logical monism is the view that there is only one correct logic or, alternatively, the view that there is only one genuine consequence relation, only one right answer to the question." SEP opens with: "Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. Logics are theories of validity: they tell us which argument forms are valid. " Or in defining pluralism: "Logical pluralism takes many forms, but the most philosophically interesting and controversial versions hold that more than one logic can be correct, that is: logics L1 and l2 can disagree about which arguments are valid, and both can be getting things right."

No idea at all?

If you want to make use of the term, then you can set out what you take it to mean.

It's the term used to define the problem. I have tried explaining what people mean by it and you have acted like this is unfathomable. So I am curious exactly what you think you're reading about or discussing when you bring up this topic?

What do you think the term "correct logic" means in Russell's papers, G&P, Clarke-Doane's paper, etc.? I know you don't like the term, but you refused to elaborate on what you think means.

If "correctness" was simply satisfaction there wouldn't be any debate.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say "correct" in describing a logic.

Just to be clear, this isn't my term, but the term employed through much of the literature on this topic, including the papers discussed earlier in this thread.

However, I suppose the response would be: Are there not inference rules that allow us to move from true premises to true conclusions, such that if our premises are true our conclusion will be as well? If so, then it seems there are "correct" logics. Unless we want to say that all inference rules lead to true conclusions, making the distinction meaningless (this seems hard to defend), or that no inference rules lead us from true premises to true conclusions (this also seems hard to defend, for how would one show that such an argument makes legitimate inferences?)



I'm not sure how this would be question begging. Logic deals with valid inference, how we get from true premises to true conclusions—truth preservation. Presumably, it doesn't define truth itself, so the criteria for determining which inference rules (if any) preserve truth in which contexts (if any) is external.

The question for logic, IMO, is not "How does one move from true premises to true conclusions?" -- I'd say that's a question for epistemology more broadly -- but rather logic is the study of validity. The big difference here from even introductory logic books is that the truth of the premises aren't relevant, which I'm sure you know already -- the moon being made of green cheese and all that.

So we don't care if the premises are true or not. We only care that if they are true, due to the form of inferences, that the conclusion must be true.

How would you define validity?

"A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid," is the textbook answer from IEP. The textbooks I've used give the same definition.

Stanford's open introduction to logic puts it thus: "Valid: an argument is valid if and only if it is necessary that if all of the premises are true, then the conclusion is true; if all the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true; it is impossible that all the premises are true and the conclusion is false."

I am aware that some scholars have tried to redefine validity in normative terms, e.g. that it is "what we should or shouldn't accept." The Clarke-Doane paper Banno shared is from this camp. However, I have never seen such a view presented that does not assume a deflationary account of truth, that "truth " as most people think of it, does not exist.

Well, that's a fine argument to have. But it gets to the point I tried to make to Banno and fdrake that one cannot retreat into formalism and ignore discussions of truth on this topic. If it would be question begging to assume that logic is about truth-preservation then it would be equally question begging to say that truth depends on / is defined by normative or formal contexts. If the latter is accepted, then of course nihilism is true (or rather true relative to some contexts and false relative to others, depending on our normative games.)

Now the arguments for deflation are abductive (what would it even mean to "prove" such a thesis?) But like I said before, it's hard to think of things it's easier to make a strong abductive argument for than: "in many cases what is true does not depend entirely on how we choose to speak or which formal system we use. It is true that if you dip your hand in boiling water you will be burned in a sense that transcends social practice or formalism." And if we take logic to be wholly normative, e.g. "you ought not stick your hand in boiling water if you don't want to be burned," it seems that we will still have the question "why ought we not do this?" The answer: "because it is true that boiling water causes burns," seems like the most plausible one, but then we are back to truth.

So we don't care if the premises are true or not. We only care that if they are true, due to the form of inferences, that the conclusion must be true.

Yes, this is soundness versus validity. However, this distinction need not (and normally isn't) taken to imply that logic isn't about truth-preservation. The debate is about the rules of truth preservation, not about the truth of any particular premises in an argument.

I'm not sure the entailment relationship ends up being any more stable than the LNC or the principle of explosion. Pick your hinge and flip it!

Well, that's at least normally how it has been defined and it's been defined that way because the mainstream view of logic is that it is (largely) the study of validity, with validity being about truth preservation—i.e., how one goes from true premises to necessarily true conclusions. Obviously if we redefine validity this might make less sense.

But I think there is maybe a misunderstanding here because if you remove LNC you are changing the logical consequence relationship. What follows from what (the logical consequence or entailment relationship) depends on LNC, LEM, relevance conditions for implication, etc. The nihilist claims this relationship is empty, nothing follows from anything else (in any correct sense, i.e. ensuring truth preservation).

Me too. However, I also think the sense of "contradiction" here is quite far from that invoked by religiously motivated dialetheism or those motivated largely by problems of self-reference. It's quite different. But to 's point, I am not sure how much this carries over to Marx. I have read a lot of Marxists but not much Marx, so I am not really in a position to have a strong opinion on that front.

At any rate, Hegel affirms LNC in its usual contexts, but I think it's fair to call him a monist if anyone is. The role he has for logic is deeply ontological.

Correct, although not everything in the Logic follows the formula of "thing" → "negation" → "negation of negation," some get a good deal more complex.

I think Pinkard is right that Hegel is in some sense very Aristotlean (even if I think Pinkard generally deflates Hegel for modern tastes). Hegel wants to track down the necessity in everything, the intelligibility of concepts. In his book on Hegel, Robert Wallace uses "red" as an example. We don't just have "red" implying "~red," but rather red implies the entire category of color and the things that can be colored (primarily light; nothing is red in total darkness).

Hegel describes the determinateness of quality as involving both “reality” and “negation.” These are the successors, within determinate being, of being and nothing (WL 5: 118/GW 21:98–99,29–35/111). What Hegel seems to have specifically in mind, in connection with “negation,” is that qualities are organized in what we might call a conceptual space, such that being one particular quality is not being the other qualities that are conceptually related to it. Being the quality, “red,” for example, is not just being a conceptually indeterminate “something or other,” knowable only by direct inspection; rather, it is being something that belongs in the conceptual space of color, and thus it is not being the color,“blue,”the color,“yellow,”and soon. In this way, the identity of the quality, “red,” essentially involves reference to what that quality is not:It essentially involves “negation.”6 Hegel sometimes refers to this dependence of quality on other qualities as “alteration” (WL 5:127/GW 21:106,8–9/118;EL§92,A), but it’s important to remember that in this initial context of quality as such, there is nothing analogous to time(or space) in which literal alteration could take place, so the term should be understood as referring to a relationship of logical dependency rather than to one of temporal sequence or transformation, as such.

Under the heading of “reality,”in contrast to“negation,”Hegel seems to want to capture a thought shared by philosophers such as John Duns Scotus, F. H. Jacobi, and C. S. Peirce, who stress an irreducible brute “this-ness,” or haecceitas, distinct from any relatedness or subsumption, as essential to reality. It seems to them that what a particular determinate being or quality is should just be a fact about it, rather than being a fact about how it relates to innumerable other determinate beings or qualities.7 Hegel’s introduction of “negation” alongside of “reality” makes it clear that “reality” (as something like “this-ness”) is not without problems, but that doesn’t cause him to abandon it. Working its problems out will, in effect, be the motor of the Logic as a whole.

If Hegel were asked: Why should we be concerned about this “reality” of determinate being? Why couldn’t we just accept the notion that all qualities are interdependent, defined by their relations to other qualities, “all the way down,” with no remainder (and that all of them are thereby equally “real” or equally “unreal”)?– his answer would be that if something could be what it is by virtue of itself, rather than solely by virtue of its relations to other things, it would clearly be more real, when taken by itself, than something that depends on its relations to other things to make it what it is. This is not to say that the thing that depends on other things is, in any sense, illusory– the “reality” that we’re talking about here is not contrasted with illusion, but with depending on others to determine what one is. Something that makes itself what it is has greater self-sufficiency than something that doesn’t do this, and this self-sufficiency is likely to be among the things that we think of when we think of “reality.” If it is among the things we think of, this could be because we’re aware that “reality”– like the word that Hegel uses, which is real, “realitat”– is derived from the Latin res, or “thing,” so that it contrasts not only with illusion but with anything that is less independent or self-sufficient than a thing.

Robert Wallace - Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God

You can see the strong Aristotelian bent in the last paragraph. But Hegel, living in a time where atomism is ascendant, cannot leave things as "unpacked" as Aristotle does with his vaguer concepts that cover more ground. However, maybe Big Heg should have listened to Slick A's advice in the Ethics re "don't demand that your explanations be more exact than your subject matter allows."

It's about the number of correct logics (i.e. logics that ensure true conclusions follow from true premises). In general, it's a position about applied logic, which is why monists and pluralists often justify their demarcation of correct logic(s) in terms of natural language, scientific discourse, etc. Nihlism would, by contrast, say there are no correct logics (and also no incorrect ones). This is not to say that reasoning is entirely arbitrary, presumably there are some standards for what constitutes appropriate reasoning. But there is no logical consequence relationship that is appropriate or correct for any particular topic. So, for instance, the intuitionist and his rival in mathematics are both wrong in that neither are "right."

You could think of this as similar to how there are very many geometries, and unfathomably many possible ones. One can identify what "follows" from their axioms according to whatever logical consequence relationship one cares to use, but this doesn't necessitate that the geometry of the physical world is infinitely variable or that it lacks any "correct" geometries. We tend to think that there would be just one geometry for physics (at least physicists normally do), or that, if there were many, there would be morphisms between them. The claims of the monist in particular are roughly analagous to the claims of the physicist re geometry. For instance, when Gisin recommends intuitionist mathematics for quantum mechanics, he does not mean to suggest that this is merely interesting or useful, but that it in some way better conforms to physics itself in ens reale, not just ens rationis.

Normally it gets framed in terms of the entailment relationship. This avoids unhelpful "counterexamples," like competing geometries that use some different axioms, but nonetheless have the same underlying entailment relationship. These are unhelpful because the question isn't about "what specifically is true/can be known to be true given different axioms" but rather "how does one move from true premises to true conclusions." This is why monists might also allow for multiple logics that are "correct," the "correct logic" being more a "weakest true logic."

So, is a fine example of the basic intuition at work in rejecting some logics for some contexts (pluralism) or holding to one logic as truth-preserving (monism) vis-á-vis natural language, a metaphysical notion of truth, etc.

And 's "a thing can't really be otherwise or not," would be a similar sort of reasoning. Dialetheism is normally argued for in the context of paradoxes related to self-reference (as has been the case in this thread). I think critics would argue that these are no more mysterious than our ability to say things that aren't true (which perhaps IS mysterious). At any rate, the "actual" true contradictions that get thrown out, in the SEP article for example, etc. tend to be far less convincing. For example, "you are either in a room or out, but when you are moving out of a room, at one point you will be in, out, both, or neither."

I don't think Hegel is really a good example here because the Absolute is the whole process of its coming into being, in which contradiction is resolved, and contradictions contain their own resolution. It's examples of contradiction, being's collapse into nothing, etc. are very much unlike the standard examples meant to define dialetheism.

Isn't the 'brute fact' at the end of this one a necessary being or a circularity

Not all necessary facts are brute facts and not all circles are vicious circles.

As for merit, no one accepts "it's a brute fact, some things simply are for no reason at all," if they have any sort of a good answer. We won't accept it in the vast majority of cases, an airplane crashing, our tire being flat, the death of a relative, etc. We might not be able to figure out why these things happened, but we don't thereby assume they happened "for no reason at all."

The proffering up of brute fact claims strikes me as primarily a manifestation of the inability to acknowledge mystery. Lots of things have been said to be brute facts. The Big Bang was said to be a brute fact, yet now we have a fairly popular theory of inflation that falls prior to it and explains many observations, so the brute fact view no longer looks acceptable. The extremely low entropy of the early universe gets thrown out often as a "brute fact," but no doubt if any of the theories that attempt to actually explain it bear out, hardly anyone will bother trying to assert that it is "simply is." It's the sort of explanation that always collapses as soon as a real explanation arrives on the scene. And people have an extremely bad track record of judging what will prove "absolutely inexplicable."

I mean, what are we to do if we do accept the brute explanation, cease all inquiry?

Yes. If they weren't, then all forms of naturalism would be false.

I am not sure of this. The Physics, from which we get the term "nature" and other early forms of naturalism focus on "things acting the way they do because of what they are, i.e. because of their 'nature.'" So there are no extrinsic laws governing things and their behaviors, there is merely the natures of beings (however defined—in the Aristotlean tradition "being a being" is said primarily of organic wholes and only analogously of artifacts or accidental wholes such as rocks) and the nature of the cosmos as an ordered whole. Neither is there any chance or randomness in the sense of something being undetermined or uncaused, rather chance is the confluence of different (relatively) discrete natures acting according to their ends (Etienne Gilson's book notes how losing this conception had major consequences for understanding natural selection).

And in Hegel, we see the same denial of extrinsic laws. But it seems to me that this is now a fairly popular conception of what underpins scientific "laws"—laws are just descriptions or approximations of how things behave according to what they are. The "laws of nature" can be located squarely in ens rationis; they are an abstraction of the intellect, whereas natures are ens reale.

Of course. But What's wrong with that?

Well, in a comparison of ontologies I suppose it might be considered question begging. Or on the question of "how might physicalism best be reconceived or reformed," it also seems to include problematic presuppositions.

What makes you think that? I'm referring to David Armstrong's ontology- which accounts for everything that (unarguaby) objectively exists.

The idea that intelligibility and truth can be placed squarely into our consideration of the human mind, and not the study of being qua being.

To me, it seems fair to question if the intelligibility of the world and the beings in it can be sui generis creation of minds. Rather, might it be that minds are simply able to access this intelligibility?

Please elaborate. I don't see how any sort of dualism fits into physicalism.

Physicalism is monist, yes. But representionalism makes it so that we have to always ask "what of our understanding of the world is 'really real' and what is just the creation of the mind? Is light of such and such a color really light of such and such a wavelength? But then does color, number, and even the concept of "wave" have any correspondence to "the world in itself?"

See Tom's post above: "I don't know what this means. I wonder if meaning and reason are human constructions or frameworks, how can we know that they are a part of 'reality' - whatever that might be." But of course, if all reason, cause, quiddity, intelligibility, etc. are only on the mind side of the mind-world ledger, then we don't know anything about this "physical world" "as it really is." (See Kant on knowledge of the noumena).

This is the problem that led the anti-metaphysical movement to simply abandon any metaphysics, to claim that we simply deal with "reasoning about empirical facts," and leave off any metaphysical notion attached to the "physical."

Representationalism wed to physicalism makes it such that phenomenal awareness is mere appearance, whereas reality is the "objective," requiring a "view from nowhere." No doubt there are various solutions proposed to this problem (I have yet to see one I'd consider successful that doesn't simply abandon representationalism), but this problem has probably been the dominant issue of modern philosophy.

This is an unresolved dualism to the extent that representationalism's epistemic challenges cannot be overcome, leaving a hard dividing line between the subjective "in here" and the objective "out there," despite the system ostensibly being monist. Being is one... yet it is cleaved distinctly in two.

:up:

I started a thread once on how Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument(s) seem like they could simply be dismissed as question begging by the "Language of Thought"/Augustinian folks, but I didn't get much interest.



Well, that certainly seems to be much of it. What is x and what is only x by analogy is a similar sort of question.

For instance, semiotics has been brought up here. But on the wider Augustinian/Peircrean view of semiotics, all sorts of things are semiotic, so that isn't all that informative on as to language.