Diversity Reading List

Introduction: Though it is hardly uncontroversial, the thesis that logic is normative enjoys widespread agreement—probably just about as much agreement as one is ever likely to find in philosophy. There is far less agreement, however, on what exactly this thesis amounts to. To begin with, proponents of the
thesis can’t seem to agree on whether the normative authority of logic is robust or weak. If logic is robustly normative, it has a normative authority that is independent of our attitudes or conventions; if it is weakly normative, it has a normative au- thority that is entirely dependent on our attitudes or conventions. This fundamental disagreement about the normative authority of logic seems to leave little room for any point of agreement among the proponents of the thesis. Furthermore, some opponents of the thesis allow that logic is “entangled” with the normative to the extent that it has normative consequences that are instrumental to the achievement of our wider goals (Russell 2017). This makes it difficult to discern any daylight between the views of those who hold that logic is not normative and those who hold that it is only weakly so. In the next section, I will argue that the thesis that unites the proponents and excludes the opponents is that logical statements and the judgments they can be used to express—such as those concerning logical validity or logical entailment—are normative statements and judgments, in the sense that they analytically, semantically, or conceptually have normative consequences. In section 3, I will critically assess whether logical statements and judgments are indeed normative in this sense. I will consider the prospects of various accounts of what the normative consequences of logical statements or judgments might be, and find them all to be wanting. This, I claim, gives us good reason to deny that logic is normative.

Abstract: This chapter investigates what we disagree about when we disagree about logic, on the assumption that judgments of logical validity are normative. If logic is normative, then the popular anti-realist thesis that there are no normative facts or properties generalizes—it entails that there are no logical facts or properties. When faced with this anti-realism, it is tempting to endorse a pluralist thesis, according to which two people who disagree about the validity of an argument can both say something true. This chapter explores the limitations of three prominent forms of pluralism: contextualism, relativism, and expressivism. It argues that none of these forms of pluralism gives an adequate account of what we disagree about when we disagree about logic.

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This paper enumerates Irigaray's main arguments and thoughts regarding the gendered nature of language and "the logos".

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This chapter reviews the book A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (1993), by Louise B. Antony and Charlotte Witt. The appeal to reason and objectivity amounts to a request that the observer refuses to be intimidated by habit, and look for cogent arguments based on evidence that has been carefully sifted for bias. In our own society the arguments of feminists make such appeals to reason and objectivity all the time, and in a manner that closely resembles Platonic arguments. And yet today reason and objectivity are on the defensive in some feminist circles. We are frequently told that reason and objectivity are norms created by "patriarchy," and that to appeal to them is to succumb to the blandishments of the oppressor. We are told that systems of reasoning are systems of domination, and that to adopt the traditional one is thus to be co-opted. A Mind of One's Own is a collection of essays by women who are prominent in philosophy today and who wish to confront recent feminist criticisms of philosophy. Most of the contributors are under fifty and widely respected; most grew up with strong political ties to feminism.

Publisher's Note: This paper examines the methodology used by Kepler to discover a quantitative law of refraction. The aim is to argue that this methodology follows a heuristic method based on the following two Pythagorean principles: (1) sameness is made known by sameness, and (2) harmony arises from establishing a limit to what is unlimited. We will analyse some of the author's proposed analogies to find the aforementioned law and argue that the investigation's heuristic pursues such principles.

Publisher's Note: In Frege's Conception of Logic Patricia A. Blanchette explores the relationship between Gottlob Frege's understanding of conceptual analysis and his understanding of logic. She argues that the fruitfulness of Frege's conception of logic, and the illuminating differences between that conception and those more modern views that have largely supplanted it, are best understood against the backdrop of a clear account of the role of conceptual analysis in logical investigation. The first part of the book locates the role of conceptual analysis in Frege's logicist project. Blanchette argues that despite a number of difficulties, Frege's use of analysis in the service of logicism is a powerful and coherent tool. As a result of coming to grips with his use of that tool, we can see that there is, despite appearances, no conflict between Frege's intention to demonstrate the grounds of ordinary arithmetic and the fact that the numerals of his derived sentences fail to co-refer with ordinary numerals. In the second part of the book, Blanchette explores the resulting conception of logic itself, and some of the straightforward ways in which Frege's conception differs from its now-familiar descendants. In particular, Blanchette argues that consistency, as Frege understands it, differs significantly from the kind of consistency demonstrable via the construction of models. To appreciate this difference is to appreciate the extent to which Frege was right in his debate with Hilbert over consistency- and independence-proofs in geometry. For similar reasons, modern results such as the completeness of formal systems and the categoricity of theories do not have for Frege the same importance they are commonly taken to have by his post-Tarskian descendants. These differences, together with the coherence of Frege's position, provide reason for caution with respect to the appeal to formal systems and their properties in the treatment of fundamental logical properties and relations.

Abstract: The present article provides an introduction to classical Chinese logic, a term which refers to ancient discourses that were developed before the arrival of significant external influences and which flourished in China until the first unification of China, during the Qin Dynasty. Taking as its premise that logic implies both universal and culturally conditioned elements, the author describes the historical background of Chinese logic, the main schools of Chinese logical thought, the current state of research in this area and the crucial concepts and methods applied in classical Chinese logic. The close link between Chinese logic and the Chinese language is also stressed

Abstract: In this article, I analyze Quine's conception of science, which is a radical defence of extensionalism on the grounds that first?order logic is the most adequate logic for science. I examine some criticisms addressed to it, which show the role of modalities and probabilities in science and argue that Quine's treatment of probability minimizes the intensional character of scientific language and methods by considering that probability is extensionalizable. But this extensionalizing leads to untenable results in some cases and is not consistent with the fact that Quine himself admits confirmation which includes probability. Quine's extensionalism does not account for this fact and then seems unrealistic, even if science ought to be extensional in so far as it is descriptive and mathematically expressible.

Abstract: In this paper, I raise the following problem: How does Avicenna define modalities? What oppositional relations are there between modal propositions, whether quantified or not? After giving Avicenna's definitions of possibility, necessity and impossibility, I analyze the modal oppositions as they are stated by him. This leads to the following results: 1. The relations between the singular modal propositions may be represented by means of a hexagon. Those between the quantified propositions may be represented by means of two hexagons that one could relate to each other. 2. This is so because the exact negation of the bilateral possible, i.e. 'necessary or impossible' is given and applied to the quantified possible propositions. 3. Avicenna distinguishes between the scopes of modality which can be either external (de dicto) or internal (de re). His formulations are external unlike al-F̄ar̄ab̄;’s ones. However his treatment of modal oppositions remains incomplete because not all the relations between the modal propositions are stated explicitly. A complete analysis is provided in this paper that fills the gaps of the theory and represents the relations by means of a complex figure containing 12 vertices and several squares and hexagons.

Introduction: In increasing numbers, philosophers are coming to read Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1997, hereafter EPM) as having dealt the definitive death blow to the idea that inner states with epistemic authority could have this authority immediately. EPM purportedly proves that instead, such states necessarily show up already embedded within a web of inferentially articulated conceptual knowledge, and that in order for this to be possible,  the epistemic subject must be a negotiator of a normative space in which standards of justification and correctness are already recognized. [...] In this paper I will attempt to show that Sellars' mythical explanations in EPM employ a very specific and rhetorically complex methodology, and likewise that we will not be in a position to critically assess the paper's arguments unless we give careful attention to its overall textual structure and to the nature of the mythical explanations it employs.