Logical Expressivism
Summary | The term logical expressivism refers to several related but distinct theories in the literature. What they share, roughly, is the idea that a satisfactory account of certain philosophical issues regarding logic must appeal to what one (characteristically) does with logical vocabulary or statements, rather than just what is represented by them. Different versions of logical expressivism differ in at least two respects: (a) the philosophical issue that is the explanatory target, and (b) what they claim one does with logical statements or vocabulary. The most prominent advocate of logical expressivism is Robert Brandom. According to Brandom, the characteristic expressive function of logical vocabulary is “to make inferential relations explicit—that is, to explicitly endorse or reject pieces of reasoning by making assertions using logical vocabulary, rather than merely implicitly doing so by reasoning in certain ways. Thus, an account of what makes some vocabulary logical vocabulary must appeal to the fact that this vocabulary allows one to express what follows from what and what is incompatible with what. Here the relevant kind of inferential relations includes more than just logical relations; it includes what Brandom calls material implication and incompatibility, such as the lexical entailment from something being blue to it being colored. The explanatory target of this brand of logical expressivism is the demarcation of logical vocabulary, and what logical vocabulary allows one to do is to explicitly undertake commitments regarding consequence and incompatibility. Jaroslav Peregrin advocates a similar version of logical expressivism. Others use logical expressivism to denote a claim that is closer to expressivism in meta-ethics, e.g., the claim that endorsing an entailment is not a cognitive state; rather, statements about entailment express pro-attitudes toward drawing corresponding inferences. In this case, the explanatory target is an account of what it means to endorse entailments, and what we do with logical statements is to express non-cognitive mental states. What unifies this account of logical expressivism with those of Brandom and Peregrin is the dismissal of the task of finding a place for logical facts in (discourse-independent) nature. Logical expressivism has close ties to semantic inferentialism, logical inferentialism, proof-theoretic semantics, and logical deflationism. Moreover, logical expressivists are often interested in how one can express claims about consequence and incompatibility in the object language of a logic. |
Key works | Brandom's original version of logical expressivism is presented in Brandom 1994 and, with a different focus, in B. Brandom 2008. Peregrin spells out his version in Peregrin 2014. |
Introductions | Chapter 1 of Brandom 2000, entitled "Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism” is a good starting point. An earlier version of this was published as Brandom 1988. For a discussion of a version of logical expressivism that is closer to expressivism in meta-ethics see Besson 2019. |
- Dialetheism (194)
- Epistemology of Logic (198)
- Informal Logic (5,241)
- Logical Pluralism (184)
- Logic and Information (216)
- Logic in Philosophy (195)
- Model Theory (6,302)
- Proof Theory (2,736)
- Set Theory (2,294 | 507)
- Mathematical Logic (1,054)
- Introductions to Logic (162)
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic, General Works (641)
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic, Misc (1,112)
- Inferentialist Accounts of Meaning and Content (371)
- Logical Constants (153)
- Logical Connectives (381 | 197)
- Pragmatism (424 | 308)
- Moral Expressivism (581)
- Logical Expressions (1,430 | 854)
- Deflationary Theories of Meaning (31)
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