Abstract
My purpose in this paper is to shed some light on two questions: In what sense is logic philosophical? And what is philosophical logic? I take these two questions as coextensive: An answer to one of them is also (or can easily be converted into) an answer to the other. I approach the problem from three perspectives: a conceptual, a descriptive, and a prescriptive perspective. In other words, I try to answer the following questions: (i) In what sense can logic be taken as philosophical? (ii) In what sense has logic been taken as philosophical? (iii) In what sense should logic be taken as philosophical? To this end, I analyze excerpts from five works in which meanings are attributed to the expression “philosophical logic.” The meanings are then object of critical analysis: I try to assess which of these semantical alternatives do not hold up as satisfactory answers to (iii). The result of this analysis is then used as a starting point for my own answer to question (iii).
This article is an extended and improved version of two lectures I delivered, the first at the seventh Logic in Question, held at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, in June 2017, and the second at the sixth World Congress on Universal Logic, held in Vichy, France, in June 2018.
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Notes
- 1.
Recall the widely known disagreement between Stoics and Peripatetics about the status of logic (while the former viewed logic as part of philosophy, the latter regarded it as a mere tool to be used in philosophical inquiry). One might also argue that much of the work developed in logic, even in philosophy departments, is extremely technical, sometimes not having much connection with what many people call philosophy. Finally, much of the genuinely philosophical discussions about logic have gained a life of their own outside of logic, forming a relatively independent discipline known as philosophy of logic.
- 2.
By “classical logic,” Burgess means classical propositional logic and first-order predicate logic ([5], pp. 1–12).
- 3.
This does not prevent Goble from stating that “Today, most of the flourishing research in philosophical logic is being done by computer scientists, working, for examples, on aspects of knowledge representation, system verification, or AI” ([18], p. 2). If, according to a relatively literal interpretation of his words, philosophical logic is philosophy, or a specific type of philosophizing, it seems paradoxical that computer science is the most fertile environment for the development of philosophical logic.
- 4.
Apparently the first time that the expression “formal philosophy” was used was in 1974 in the book Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, edited by Richmond Thomason [44].
- 5.
Explicit reference to the concepts of explication, explicandum and explicatum were first made 2 years earlier in an article entitled The Two Concepts of Probability [10].
- 6.
In a pioneering work of conceptual explanation, Carnap distinguishes between at least two concepts of probability: statistical probability and logical probability [10].
- 7.
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Silvestre, R.S. (2022). Philosophical Logic = Philosophy + Logic?. In: Béziau, JY., Desclés, JP., Moktefi, A., Pascu, A.C. (eds) Logic in Question. Studies in Universal Logic. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94452-0_15
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