The Priority of Propositions. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Logic

ISBN-13: 9783031252280 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 255 str.

María José Frápolli

Opis

This monograph is a defence of the Fregean take on logic. The author argues that Frege´s projects, in logic and philosophy of language, are essentially connected and that the formalist shift produced by the work of Peano, Boole and Schroeder and continued by Hilbert and Tarski is completely alien to Frege's approach in the Begriffsschrift. A central thesis of the book is that judgeable contents, i.e. propositions, are the primary bearers of logical properties, which makes logic embedded in our conceptual system. This approach allows coherent and correct definitions of logical constants, logical consequence, and truth and connects their use to the practices of rational agents in science and everyday life.

Spis treści

Part I: The Pragmatist Basis

Chapter 1. Pragmatism and Metaphysics: The General Background

1. Metaphysics

2. The conceptual articulation of reality

3. Assertion

4. Propositions and the formality of logic

5. Arguments, inferences and argumentations

Chapter 2. Groundbreaking Principles

1. Five principles

2. Two models of propositional individuation

3. Propositional identification

4. Logical propositions

5. Logic as a science

Chapter 3. Semantic and Pragmatic Hints in Frege's Logical Theory

1. Frege’s projects

2. The representation of abstract reality

3. The analysis of discourse

4. Two-factor semantics and the meaning of identity

5. Special notions

Part II: Logical Constants

Chapter 4. Implying, Precluding, and Quantifying Over: Frege's Logical Expressivism

1. Logical expressivism

2. The conditional and negation

3. Negation, incompatibility, falsehood

4. Expressions of quantity and relations between concepts

Chapter 5. Lessons from Inferentialism and Invariantism

1. What is the issue with logical constants?

2. Analytically valid arguments

3. Inferentialist approaches

4. The Erlangen programme

5. Invariant terms of logic

6. A pragmatist excursus

Chapter 6. The Inference-Marker View of Logical Notions: What a Pragmatism Proposal Looks Like

1. The proposal

2. Some consequences of (IMV)

3. Inferential significance

4. Genuine logical notions

Part III: Further Applications of Propositional Priority

Chapter 7. Grue, Tonk, and Russell's Paradox: What Follows from the Principle of Propositional Priority?

1. Paradoxes

2. Goodman’s ‘grue’

3. Prior’s ‘tonk’

4. Russell’s paradox

5. Taking stock

Chapter 8. Visual Arguments: What is at Issue in the Multimodality Debate?

1. Multiple modes

2. Non-linguistic aspects of linguistic communication

3. Sentences, pictures, and relational linguistic pragmatism

4. Affordances

5. Ineffability and conceptual articulation

6. Visual thinking in mathematics

7. Some conclusions

Chapter 9. Truth and Satisfaction: Frege Versus Tarski

1. The scope of Tarski’s proposal

2. Physicalism and the unity of science

3. Correspondence and deflationism

4. Satisfaction

5. Frege on truth and judgeable contents

Chapter 10. Truth Ascriptions as Prosentences: Further Lessons of the Principle of Propositional Priority

1. Why truth is so elusive

2. The pragmatist strategy: Truth ascriptions and the Fregean Principle of Context

3. Proforms

4. Pragmatism, expressivism, and the priority of the proposition

5. The prosentential approach to truth

6. Truth and assertion

O autorze

María J. Frápolli is a Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy I, University of Granada (Spain). From 2006 to 2012, she held the presidency of the Society of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Spain. Currently, she chairs the Spanish Society for Women in Philosophy (Analytic). From 2015 to 2017, Prof. Frápolli held a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie grant at the Department of Philosophy, University College London and, from 2017 to 2020, was Honorary Professor in the same department. She has worked on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics, always from a pragmatist and naturalist standpoint. Some of her books are the following. As author: The Nature of Truth. An Updated Approach to the Meaning of Truth Ascriptions, Springer (2013). As editor: Expressivisms, Knowledge and Truth, Cambridge University Press, (2019); Saying, Meaning, and Referring: Essays on François Recanati’s Philosophy of Language, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire (UK), Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition (2007); and F. P. Ramsey. Critical Reassessments. London (UK), Continuum Studies in British Philosophy, (2005).