Ordinary language has no exact logic" - most philosophers agree with Peter Strawson's statement today. In the present volume, Christoph Schamberger proves otherwise. The rules of derivation in everyday life and in philosophy can be described in precise, simple terms. Using numerous examples, Schamberger first examines colloquial conditional sentences and arguments. He then presents a non-classic calculus of natural deduction with which the logical conclusion can be drawn and validated in ordinary language. The final capital comprises a critical discussion of (...) the principle of bivalence, which restricts the applicability of logic to sentences that are either true or false. Readers are required to have only a basic understanding of logic. Die Umgangssprache hat keine exakte Logik - diesem Urteil von Peter Strawson stimmen heute die meisten Philosophen zu. Dieses Buch beweist das Gegenteil: Die Schlussregeln des Alltags und der Philosophie lassen sich exakt und einfach beschreiben. Anhand zahlreicher Beispiele untersucht Schamberger zunachst umgangssprachliche Wenn-dann-Satze und Argumente. Anschliessend prasentiert er einen nicht-klassischen Kalkul des naturlichen Schliessens, mit dem sich die logische Folgerung in der Umgangssprache exakt erfassen und uberprufen lasst. Das letzte Kapitel setzt sich kritisch mit dem Zweiwertigkeitsprinzip auseinander, das den Anwendungsbereich der Logik auf Satze einschrankt, die entweder wahr oder falsch sind. Das Buch setzt von seinen Leserinnen und Lesern nur Grundkenntnisse der Logik voraus. (shrink)

The traditional criteria for distinguishing philosophy from other disciplines have either proved too limited or too broad. Only in its method does philosophy differentiate itself from other disciplines. Philosophy’s point of departure is constituted by spontaneous convictions, which, in a first step, need to be articulated through conceptual analysis and then, in a second step, need to be justified; the third step comprises critiquing other philosophers’ thoughts and defending against others’ critique. This article proposes several metaphilosophical theses: Intuitions are not (...) a fundamental source of evidence for philosophical theses, but are instead themselves in need of justification. Consistency is more important than truth; the task of philosophy is to develop extensive and, at the same time, consistent theories about the conceptual background of experience. (shrink)

Epistemic democracy aims to show, often by appeal to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, that democracy has a high chance of reaching correct decisions. It has been argued that epistemic democracy is compatible with various metaethical accounts, such as moral realism, conventionalism and majoritarianism. This paper casts doubt on that thesis and reveals the following metaethical dilemma: if we adopt moral realism, it is doubtful that voters are, on average, more than 0.5 likely to track moral facts and identify the correct (...) alternative. By contrast, if we adopt conventionalism or majoritarianism, we cannot expect that voters are both competent and sincere. Either way, the conditions for the application of Condorcet’s theorem are not met. (shrink)

Proponents of conditional logics such as David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker reject inferences containing counterfactuals from "if A, B" and "if B, C" to "if A, C" due to ordinary language counterexamples. Contextualists defend this inference rule called "hypothetical syllogism" or "transitivity" on the basis of a possible word semantics, which, however, assigns implausible truth values to certain counterfactuals. My defence of hypothetical syllogism avoids this problem, as it rests on Nelson Goodman's uncontroversial, metaphysically parsimonious assumption that we accept counterfactuals (...) as true only under certain conditions from which, in conjunction with the antecedent, the consequent can be inferred. The counterexamples to hypothetical syllogism can be rebutted because their premises are doxastically noncotenable; that is, there is no set of conditions under which the premises can be accepted as jointly true. (shrink)

Apart from a passing reference to Kant, Grice never explains in his writings how he came to discover his conversational maxims. He simply proclaims them without justification. Yet regardless of how his ingenious invention really came about, one might wonder how the conversational maxims can be detected and distinguished from other sorts of maxims. We argue that the conversational maxims can be identified by the use of a transcendental argument in the spirit of Kant. To this end, we introduce Grice’s (...) account of conversational maxims and categories and compare it briefly with Kant’s thoughts on categories. Subsequently, we pursue a thought experiment concerning what would happen if speakers constantly broke one or another of the maxims. It seems that it would not be possible for children to recognize a significant number of lexical meanings under such circumstances. Hence, the conversational maxims are rules whose occasional application is a necessary condition of language and conversation. (shrink)