Various attempts at demarcating logic were undertaken, many of them based on specific understandi... more Various attempts at demarcating logic were undertaken, many of them based on specific understanding of how logical knowledge is formal and not material. MacFarlane has persuasively shown that general idea of formality of logic can be understood in various ways. I take two of the accounts of formality, namely the requirement of conservativity and schematicity of logical vocabulary, into consideration and study to what degree they could be considered as either necessary or sufficient conditions for logical-ity of some piece of vocabulary. Finding both notion unsatisfactory, as they stand, I propose combining them and envisage a hierarchy of logical-ity of of expressions of a given language. Such a hierarchy is complicated and not linear, yet still offers a valuable explication of both the range and pragmatic significance of logic, if we combine it with logical expressivism. The problem of deciding which logic is the true logic or which logics actually are logics appears to be both fundamental and ridiculous at the same time. On the one hand, it seems strange that there should be actually more true logics, even to us who are already quite used to the fact that there are lots of systems, be their syntactically or semantically described, which bear the name of logic. Logic should be something really certain, should it not? It should even be the measure of rationality, the very basis of it. Should we doubt about logic, hardly any knowledge can really be acquired, it might seem. On the other hand, put so plainly and blankly, the question seems somewhat odd. What should the criteria of correctness of logic be? As I said, we are quite used to the fact that we can change something in the logic we are already familiar with and still get something which appears to be not a bit less reasonable as logic. Furthermore, if logic is to be the most certain of disciplines which in a way as much as establishes the very practice of reasoning, it seems impossible to give it some sort of a justification or foundation. The real problem, I would say, lies nevertheless in the incompleteness of the question. Or, if you want, in the ambiguity of the word logic. We can use it to simply mean any of the particular systems, we are familiar with, say the classical propositional logic, the intuitionist logic, the modal logic S5 etc. In order to give the question a meaning, we thus obviously must have a conception of logic at hand which is at least partially independent of the actual shapes of the systems we know. We need to have criteria for the recognition of logicality.
Various attempts at demarcating logic were undertaken, many of them based on specific understandi... more Various attempts at demarcating logic were undertaken, many of them based on specific understanding of how logical knowledge is formal and not material. MacFarlane has persuasively shown that general idea of formality of logic can be understood in various ways. I take two of the accounts of formality, namely the requirement of conservativity and schematicity of logical vocabulary, into consideration and study to what degree they could be considered as either necessary or sufficient conditions for logical-ity of some piece of vocabulary. Finding both notion unsatisfactory, as they stand, I propose combining them and envisage a hierarchy of logical-ity of of expressions of a given language. Such a hierarchy is complicated and not linear, yet still offers a valuable explication of both the range and pragmatic significance of logic, if we combine it with logical expressivism. The problem of deciding which logic is the true logic or which logics actually are logics appears to be both fundamental and ridiculous at the same time. On the one hand, it seems strange that there should be actually more true logics, even to us who are already quite used to the fact that there are lots of systems, be their syntactically or semantically described, which bear the name of logic. Logic should be something really certain, should it not? It should even be the measure of rationality, the very basis of it. Should we doubt about logic, hardly any knowledge can really be acquired, it might seem. On the other hand, put so plainly and blankly, the question seems somewhat odd. What should the criteria of correctness of logic be? As I said, we are quite used to the fact that we can change something in the logic we are already familiar with and still get something which appears to be not a bit less reasonable as logic. Furthermore, if logic is to be the most certain of disciplines which in a way as much as establishes the very practice of reasoning, it seems impossible to give it some sort of a justification or foundation. The real problem, I would say, lies nevertheless in the incompleteness of the question. Or, if you want, in the ambiguity of the word logic. We can use it to simply mean any of the particular systems, we are familiar with, say the classical propositional logic, the intuitionist logic, the modal logic S5 etc. In order to give the question a meaning, we thus obviously must have a conception of logic at hand which is at least partially independent of the actual shapes of the systems we know. We need to have criteria for the recognition of logicality.
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