Abstract
According to logical non-necessitarianism, every inference may fail in some situation. In his defense of logical monism, Graham Priest has put forward an argument against non-necessitarianism based on the meaning of connectives. According to him, as long as the meanings of connectives are fixed, some inferences have to hold in all situations. Hence, in order to accept the non-necessitarianist thesis one would have to dispose arbitrarily of those meanings. I want to show here that non-necessitarianism can stand, without disposing arbitrarily of the meanings of connectives, based on a minimalist view on the meanings of connectives.
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Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to Cristian Alejandro Gutiérrez-Ramírez, Carlos César Jiménez-Jiménez, Moisés Macías-Bustos, Claudia Olmedo-García, Dr. Ivonne Pallares-Vega, Víctor Manuel Peralta del Riego and Dr. Gerard Renardel de Lavalette for their encouragement and comments, their invaluable help and support on several respects, as well as to two referees for their thorough reading of a previous version of this text and their kind advices to improve it both in form and content.
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This work was completed with the support of a grant from the ECW Lot 20, as well as to the facilities provided by the staff of the Bernoulli Institute of the University of Groningen.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Estrada-González, L. On the Meaning of Connectives (Apropos of a Non-Necessitarianist Challenge). Log. Univers. 5, 115–126 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-011-0025-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-011-0025-6