Abstract
The basic idea of logical expressivism in the Brandomian tradition is that logic makes inferential relations explicit and thereby accessible to critical discussion. But expressivists have not given a convincing explanation of what the point of logical theories is. Peregrin provides a starting point by observing a distinction between making explicit and explication in Carnap’s sense of replacing something unclear and vague by something clear and exact. Whereas logical locutions make inferential relations explicit within a language, logical theories use formal languages to explicate inferential roles and meanings of ordinary-language expressions. But Peregrin also holds that the whole point of logical theories is to provide perspicuous models of inferential structures in ordinary language practice. This turns explication into a mere continuation of making explicit by other means, and it leads to a one-sided conception of logic which has no room for evaluating inferential practice in light of logical theories. As a more convincing alternative, I suggest that expressivists rely on the method of reflective equilibrium. This approach is closely related to Carnapian explication, but it has the potential of correcting informal inferential practice without dubious ambitions to replace ordinary languages by logical formalisms.
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Notes
Occasionally, Brandom seems to use “explication” not merely as an alternative to “making explicit” but in a sense that comes somewhat closer to Carnap’s, e.g. when he writes that some specific social practice may be “explicable in wholly behavioristic terms” (Brandom 2008b: p. 210). But such passages provide no systematic answer to the issues I raise in this paper.
In this paper, I use “ordinary language” to refer to the language in which the practice the expressivists wants to study is couched. Typically, this is a natural language such as English or Finnish used for everyday communication, but it can also be a more technical variant of such a language used for some specialized, often scientific, purpose. “Formal” is used to contrast formal theories with informal accounts, and formal languages with the vernacular, but not to refer to (theories of) formal rather than material inferences (see Brun 2004: p. 24, pp. 38–40 for a distinction of various uses of “formal”).
As I will point out in the next section, Peregrin does not consistently observe the distinction I analyse in this section.
The claim that conditionals are suitable for this function is contested (see, e.g. MacFarlane 2008), but this does not affect the points I am going to make.
This is how Carnap is usually interpreted and I assume that Peregrin shares this interpretation. In Brun (2016), I argue that this interpretation is problematic and develop a more pragmatic reading of Carnap.
When Peregrin deals with making explicit within formal languages, he is sometimes easy to misunderstand as saying that ordinary-language inferences are made explicit with the help of a logical theory. One example is his (2014a: ch. 9) discussion of how inferability can be made explicit by introducing an operator (“\(\triangleright \)”) into a standard theory of formal logic. Since Peregrin writes about inferability and discusses a formal expression (“\(\triangleright \)”), this is easily read as if this operator would explicate what “inferability” means in English. But this is not the idea. “\(\triangleright \)” is meant to make explicit the relation of inferabilityin the formal system (which Peregrin represents by “\(\vdash \)”). Inferability in an ordinary language is not at issue. This is difficult to see, firstly, because making explicit is performed within a formal system, whereas in the paradigmatic cases making explicit is performed within an ordinary language. Secondly, since Peregrin has to speak about what is implicit (namely inferability in the formal language), he explicitly refers to the implicit (by “\(\vdash \)”). This may lure the reader into assuming that the implicit is not what the formal expression “\(\vdash \)” refers to, but something else; inferability in English is then the obvious candidate.
It is less clear whether Peregrin thinks that explication always involves a transition from one language to another, which will also depend on what he takes to be criteria for individuating languages. But these issues need not be addressed for present purposes. I only rely on the hopefully uncontroversial assumption that in the paradigmatic instances mentioned, explication involves a transition from one language to another.
Most explanations of making explicit seem to simply take what is explicit to be identical with, not only similar to, what has been implicit so far. At least this is the most natural interpretation of passages like “The expressive role of the conditional is to make explicit, in the form of a claim, what before was implicit in our practice of distinguishing some inferences as good.” (Brandom 2000: p. 81) or “[Logic provides] the expressive tools permitting us to endorse in what we say what before we could endorse only in what we did.” (Brandom 1994). One might question whether identity is not too strong a requirement, but this point need not concern us here.
See also Brandom’s comments on Sellars’s conception of the Socratic method (Brandom 1994: p. 106).
On the asymmetrical role of valid and invalid patterns of inference, see Cheyne (2012).
I substantiate this claim in Brun 2017.
See Brun (2014a) for more details on how to apply reflective equilibrium in a broader setting that includes formalizations and theories of formalization. For general discussions of (theories of) logical formalizations of inferences see, e.g. Baumgartner and Lampert (2008), Brun (2004), Peregrin and Svoboda (2017) and Sainsbury (2001). For extensive references to further literature see Brun (2004, 2014a).
Of course, the critical evaluation of inferential practice can draw on additional resources, for example on arguments that refer to background theories from philosophy of language, general accounts of normativity and so on.
This claim rests on the assumption that our logician has not adopted \(\varphi \)\(\vdash \)\(\lnot \)\(\varphi \)\(\rightarrow \)\(\psi \) as a basic rule of inference, which, of course, she has no motivation to do given her commitment to reject inferences such as (3).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on earlier versions, I am grateful to Dominique Kuenzle, Jaroslav Peregrin and Christine Tiefensee. This paper is part of the project “Reflective Equilibrium—Reconception and Application”, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project 150251).
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Brun, G. Logical expressivism, logical theory and the critique of inferences. Synthese 196, 4493–4509 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1662-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1662-y