NON-LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE

• Authors: Hitchcock David
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Contemporary philosophers generally conceive of consequence as necessary truth-preservation. They generally construe this necessity as logical, and operationalize it in substitutional, formal or model-theoretic terms as the absence of a counter-example. A minority tradition allows for grounding truth-preservation also on non-logical necessities, especially on the semantics of extra-logical constants. The present article reviews and updates the author's previous proposals to modify the received conception of consequence so as to require truth-preservation to be non-trivial (i.e. not a mere consequence of a necessarily true implicatum or a necessarily untrue implicans) and to allow variants of the substitutional, formal and model-theoretic realizations of the received conception where the condition underwriting truth-preservation is not purely formal. Indeed, the condition may be contingent rather than necessary. Allowing contingent non-trivial truth-preservation as a consequence relation fits our inferential practices, but turns out to be subject to counter-examples. We are left with an unhappy choice between an overly strict requirement that non-trivial truth-preservation be underwritten by a necessary truth and an overly loose recognition of non-trivial truth-preservation wherever some truth underwrites it. We need to look for a principled intermediate position between these alternatives.

Keywords

EN

ALFRED TARSKI; CONSEQUENCE; FORMAL; LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE; MODEL-THEORETIC; NECESSITY; NON-LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE; SUBSTITUTIONAL; TRUTH-PRESERVATION

Discipline

• LIBRARY_&_INFORMATION_SCIENCE: LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric
• Year: 2009
• Issue: 16(29)
• Pages: 137-158
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Hitchcock David

• David Hitchcock, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. W., Hamilton, ON L8S 1W7, Canada

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

11PLAAAA10156