Logical Disagreement

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-106
Author(s):  
Anandi Hattiangadi

This chapter investigates what we disagree about when we disagree about logic, on the assumption that judgments of logical validity are normative. If logic is normative, then the popular anti-realist thesis that there are no normative facts or properties generalizes—it entails that there are no logical facts or properties. When faced with this anti-realism, it is tempting to endorse a pluralist thesis, according to which two people who disagree about the validity of an argument can both say something true. This chapter explores the limitations of three prominent forms of pluralism: contextualism, relativism, and expressivism. It argues that none of these forms of pluralism gives an adequate account of what we disagree about when we disagree about logic.

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-126
Author(s):  
Ivan L. Lyubimov

This paper examines the evolution of academic and applied approaches to analyze the problem of economic growth since the mid-XX century. For quite an extended period of time, these views were corresponding to universalist economic policies taking no adequate account of particularities and limitations that a certain catching-up economy embodied. New approaches analyzing the problems of economic growth, on the contrary, individualize growth diagnostics, structural transformation and the organization of reforms processes for the emerging economies. We argue that individualist approaches might be potentially more effective than the universalist ones for solving the problem of slow economic growth.


Author(s):  
Huaping Lu-Adler

This book is both a history of philosophy of logic told from the Kantian viewpoint and a reconstruction of Kant’s theory of logic from a historical perspective. Kant’s theory represents a turning point in a history of philosophical debates over the following questions: (1) Is logic a science, instrument, standard of assessment, or mixture of these? (2) If logic is a science, what is the subject matter that differentiates it from other sciences, particularly metaphysics? (3) If logic is a necessary instrument to all philosophical inquiries, how is it so entitled? (4) If logic is both a science and an instrument, how are these two roles related? Kant’s answer to these questions centers on three distinctions: general versus particular logic, pure versus applied logic, pure general logic versus transcendental logic. The true meaning and significance of each distinction becomes clear, this book argues, only if we consider two factors. First, Kant was mindful of various historical views on how logic relates to other branches of philosophy (viz. metaphysics and physics) and to the workings of common human understanding. Second, he first coined “transcendental logic” while struggling to secure metaphysics as a proper “science,” and this conceptual innovation would in turn have profound implications for his mature theory of logic. Against this backdrop, the book reassesses the place of Kant’s theory in the history of philosophy of logic and highlights certain issues that are still debated today, such as normativity of logic and the challenges posed by logical pluralism.


Author(s):  
Philip Tew

This chapter studies the comic novel. If British and Irish culture in the post-war decades underwent some radical social and political upheavals, the novel registered and critiqued these transformations in part through the development of a particular comic mode. Comedy in British and Irish novels published from 1940 to 1973 often turned around the difficult intersection of class and nation. Alongside this overarching attention to class and nation, a number of other recurrent motifs can be traced in the comic novel of the period, such as the representation of cultural commodification, the decline of traditional values, and the emergence of new forms of youth culture. In the context of such widespread changes to the narratives that shaped public life, the comic novel expressed an ironic scepticism concerning the capacity of any cultural narrative to offer an adequate account of contemporary identities.


Author(s):  
Andrew Kehler ◽  
Jonathan Cohen

A bedrock principle in pragmatics is that the linguistic signals produced by speakers generally underdetermine the meanings that are communicated to interpreters. For Grice, for instance, utterance meaning lies close to what is overtly encoded, allowing only for the resolution of indexicals, tense, reference, and ambiguity. Lepore and Stone (L&S) agree, but with a stunning twist: they analyze all extrasemantic content as being derived from ambiguity resolution, leaving no work for Gricean tools. Despite significant areas of concurrence with L&S, we ultimately find their analysis to be untenable. To establish this, we focus on a form of pragmatic enrichment that recruits coherence establishment processes to apply within the clause—‘eliciture’—for which we see no credible analysis in terms of ambiguity resolution. We argue that an adequate account of language understanding must recognize the robust roles of both ambiguity resolution and pragmatic enrichment, using tense interpretation as a case study.


Author(s):  
Jessica Brown

This chapter criticizes the conception of evidence to which the infallibilist is committed—a factive conception of evidence on which knowledge is sufficient for evidence. As is well known, this view has the counterintuitive result that certain pairs of subjects who are intuitively equally justified, e.g. a person and a BIV, are not equally justified. Defenders of this view of evidence have attempted to reply to this objection by distinguishing whether a belief is justified from whether the subject is blameless or excused for holding it. They endorse the knowledge view of justification according to which a belief is justified if and only if it meets the fundamental norm of belief which they take to be knowledge. This chapter argues against the knowledge view of justification that it has difficulty explaining the propositional and graded senses of justification. It also argues that the knowledge view of justification fails to provide an adequate account of blameless belief.


Open Theology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-255
Author(s):  
Calvin D. Ullrich

AbstractThis article seeks to distill key moments in the early work of the philosopher John D. Caputo. In considering his early investigations of Martin Heidegger, it argues that an adequate account of the trajectory of his later theological project requires a refraction through a crucial double gesture in these earlier writings. To this end, the article follows Caputo’s relationship with Heidegger where the optics of ‘overcoming metaphysics’ are laid bare (the first gesture). In these deliberations, alongside Neo-Scholastic Thomism, it is clear that what constitutes (theological) metaphysics for Caputo is any thinking which fails to think that which ‘gives’ the distinction between Being and beings. The second gesture, then, reveals ‘a certain way’ (d’une certaine maniére) of reading that allows him not only the unique possibility to re-read Scholastic Thomism by way of Meister Eckhart, but also the delimitation of the mythological construal of Being in the later Heidegger himself. The article’s methodological argument is that this transgressionary impulse gleaned from Heidegger, constitutes the ‘origins’ of Caputo’s move into the ethical-religious paradigm of deconstruction and, therefore, is also axiomatic for his later radical theology of ‘religion without religion.’


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 613
Author(s):  
Christopher Tollefsen

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.


2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maeve Cooke

The article considers the role of translation in encounters between religious citizens and secular citizens. It follows Habermas in holding that translations rearticulate religious contents in a way that facilitates learning. Since he underplays the complexities of translation, it takes some steps beyond Habermas towards developing a more adequate account. Its main thesis is that the required account of translation must keep sight of the question of truth. Focusing on inspirational stories of exemplary figures and acts, it contends that a successful translation makes truth appear anew; further, that it is the central role of truth in translation that enables the prospect of learning from the inspirational messages of religion. By highlighting truth as the point of continuity between intercultural learning and learning from religion, it provides support for the thesis that encounters between religious and secular citizens are a subset of intercultural encounters and, as such, contexts of possible mutual learning.


1979 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
D. S. MacRae

During the last decade or so there has been considerable interest in the nature and effects of protection policies on the economic performance of developing countries, and a number of attempts have been made to measure the levels of protection afforded local activities. It is, of course, desirable that such studies should take adequate account of the system of protection in its entirety, and this includes a consideration of direct (i.e. quantitative) as well as indirect (i.e. tariff) restrictions of imports.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Salto ◽  
Carmen Requena ◽  
Paula Álvarez-Merino ◽  
Luís F. Antón-Toro ◽  
Fernando Maestú

AbstractNeuroscience has studied deductive reasoning over the last 20 years under the assumption that deductive inferences are not only de jure but also de facto distinct from other forms of inference. The objective of this research is to verify if logically valid deductions leave any cerebral electrical trait that is distinct from the trait left by non-valid deductions. 23 subjects with an average age of 20.35 years were registered with MEG and placed into a two conditions paradigm (100 trials for each condition) which each presented the exact same relational complexity (same variables and content) but had distinct logical complexity. Both conditions show the same electromagnetic components (P3, N4) in the early temporal window (250–525 ms) and P6 in the late temporal window (500–775 ms). The significant activity in both valid and invalid conditions is found in sensors from medial prefrontal regions, probably corresponding to the ACC or to the medial prefrontal cortex. The amplitude and intensity of valid deductions is significantly lower in both temporal windows (p = 0.0003). The reaction time was 54.37% slower in the valid condition. Validity leaves a minimal but measurable hypoactive electrical trait in brain processing. The minor electrical demand is attributable to the recursive and automatable character of valid deductions, suggesting a physical indicator of computational deductive properties. It is hypothesized that all valid deductions are recursive and hypoactive.


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