Abstract
Several principles shape the pragmatist take on logic that I will defend in this book. The essential four are the Principle of Assertion (PA), the Principle of Propositional Priority (PPP), the Principle of Grammar Superseding (PGS), and the Principle of Inferential Individuation (PII). (PA) says that the bearers of logical properties are products of human discursive actions. (PPP) takes up the thesis that the primary bearers of logical properties are complete propositions. (PGS) advises not to look at the linguistic surface in search of logical insights. And finally, (PII) says that only inferential consequences, upstream and downstream, have any effect on propositional identity. In this chapter, I will explain these principles and their consequences and show that all of them can be traced back to Frege’s work. In addition, I will comment on the Fregean Principle of Context (PCont), a linguistic version of (PPP), and the semantic Principle of Compositionality (PComp), which Frege never stated. As a criterion of propositional identification, I propose the Organic Intuition (OI): ‘To be a proposition is to possess propositional properties.’ I then explain why (OI) offers a safe non-circular guide to detecting the presence of propositions, and finally compare genuine propositions with logical propositions. In the last section, I discuss the kind of discipline that logic is.
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Notes
- 1.
This claim makes my perspective ‘assimilationist’ in Brandom’s sense (Brandom, 2000, pp. 2ff.), i.e. it understands linguistic actions as continuous with a broader class of human (and maybe also non-human) activities. I do not have a clear position in this debate, though. In any case, inferential activities, as understood in this book, are activities that essentially use concepts and are thus ‘discursive’ or ‘linguistic’ in Brandom’s sense (Brandom loc. cit.).
- 2.
This is not the standard interpretation of the meaning of logical constants in Frege’s work. The received view is that they are functions with a sense and a meaning, like any other functions. In this sense, the received view attributes to Frege a semantically homogeneous theory of meaning in which all terms are either names or functions, each with a sense and a meaning. Frege gives reasons to support this view, which should be understood in the context in which they were given. As a theoretical proposal for covering certain theoretical domains, it is not objectionable. Nevertheless, there are enough hints in Frege’s writings to argue that he was aware that logical terms do not work as ordinary predicates do, as I explain in Chap. 3.
- 3.
The received view of the relations between Wittgenstein and Frege would reject this claim (see, for instance Hacker, 2001). I nevertheless consider Frege and Wittgenstein to be more congenial to each other than is traditionally (see, for instance, Wischin, 2019; Forero-Mora & Frápolli, 2021), and that the received interpretation of Frege’s writings (Baker & Hacker, 1984) does not do justice to the nuances about meaning that Frege addresses in his work.
- 4.
This is Brandom’s version of (PPP) (Brandom, 1994, p. 79ff.), a principle that he attributes to Kant, in the first place, and then to Frege and Wittgenstein.
- 5.
Although, as Frege knew, neither all nor only sentences express propositions. Some subordinate sentences do not (Frege, 1892) and some questions and adverbs do (Frege, 1918–1919a).
- 6.
Logical constants are first-order relations in Fregean theory since they are relations between propositions, which are saturated entities, and hence objects. This is a peculiarity of Frege’s semantics which does not affect the fact that they are relations between entities in which concepts can be identified.
- 7.
- 8.
By ‘proposition’ Wittgenstein means a sentence with its sense. Its content is, as in Frege’s view, a thought: ‘In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses’ (Tractatus 3.1). The mere linguistic object is the propositional sign (Tractatus 3.12), and ‘the applied, thought, propositional sign is the thought’ (Tractatus 3.5).
- 9.
(PComp) has been called ‘Frege’s Principle’, and it is customary to read it into Frege’s substitutional argument for distinguishing sense from meaning in 1892. Nevertheless, as we have mentioned, there is no explicit formulation of this principle in Frege’s work (Pelletier, 2001), and it has a problematic coexistence with the Fregean Principle of Context. The compatibility of these principles has been profusely debated (see, for instance, Dummett, 1995; Hale, 1994). My position is that, as they are stated, they do not interfere with each other (Lewis, 1980; Linnebo, 2008, 2019, p. 104).
- 10.
Chomsky’s Innateness Hypothesis makes such an assumption. The Innateness Hypothesis postulates a specific language organ in the human brain in order to explain how children are all able to develop a mastery of their languages, regardless of the complexity of the task and the ‘poverty of stimuli’ (see Chomsky, 1988, pp. 46–7; Pinker, 1994, pp. 237–8).
- 11.
With some illustrious exceptions. (Hintikka & Sandu, 2007) is one of them.
- 12.
- 13.
This claim does not imply that thoughts stand anywhere. The sometimes too quick metaphysical consequences drawn from some semantic and logical claims result from the practice of understanding metaphorical discourse as if it were literal.
- 14.
The connection between propositions and assertion is not contingent but a matter of logical grammar. There are propositions because humans engage in acts of assertion, and acts of assertion are essentially acts in which a proposition is put forward. Nevertheless, this by no means implies that all possible propositions must be asserted. What it means is that propositions are assertables, claimables, thinkables, as I have explained in Chap. 1.
- 15.
A different debate is whether sentences are abstract entities. The sentences that we use in our actual linguistic exchanges are not; they are either traces in a surface, or sound waves. We call them ‘sentence-tokens’. From tokens, types can be abstracted. Two utterances of ‘Joan is a computing science student’ produce two different tokens that belong to the same sentence-type. Sentence-types are entities abstracted from their tokens. Given the (at least basic) compositional nature of the grammar of natural languages and the identity criteria for sentences, we are justified in applying the discourse of parts and wholes to them. There are nevertheless other abstract entities that are articulated in a specific sense, but whose articulation cannot be explained by resorting to any particular abstraction process. This is the case, for instance, for scientific theories and musical works, both of which are undoubtedly articulated abstract entities. The question at this point is whether they are made of parts, in any non-metaphorical sense. My contention is that they are not.
- 16.
Kaplan’s content, one of the two types of meaning that he identifies in indexicals (Kaplan 1979, p. 500), is standardly seen as a contextual ‘enrichment’ of the character of a term, being the character the other kind of meaning that indexicals possess. In this sense of ‘content’, the contents attributed to sentences would be compositional and structured. But Kaplan’s use of ‘content’ is ambiguous: when applied to complete sentences, Kaplanian contents become assertoric contents. This happens, for instance, when he speaks of contents as the bearers of modal and temporal properties (Kaplan, op. cit., p. 501). In this latter sense, contents are neither linguistic entities nor enrichments of them.
- 17.
Recanati’s what is said, individuated by the Availability Principle, is essentially richer than what follows from the sentence’s linguistic meaning plus saturation (see Recanati, 2003, pp. 20ff.).
- 18.
It is sometimes argued that a speaker can assert something that she does not believe. This is a mistake. Believing is a presupposition of assertion, as Grice’s maxims make explicit. In Chap. 10, I will develop this point through the notion of circumstance-shifting operator.
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Frápolli, M.J. (2023). Groundbreaking Principles. In: The Priority of Propositions. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Logic. Synthese Library, vol 475. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25229-7_2
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