Popper’s Correspondence with Peter Schroeder-Heister

Abstract

AbstractPeter Schroeder-Heister (b. 1953) is a German philosopher and logician whose research focuses on the foundations of deductive reasoning, in particular in the field he has called proof-theoretic semantics (cf. Schroeder-Heister, 2018; Piecha and Wehmeier,.Peter Schroeder-Heister on Proof- Theoretic Semantics, Springer, Outstanding Contributions to Logic. To appear, 2022). He worked at the universities of Konstanz and Tubingen, where he has held a professorship in Logic and Philosophy of Language since 1989. Shortly after his Dr. phil. at the University of Bonn in 1981, which he did under the supervision of Gisbert Hasenjaeger (cf. this volume, § 13.10) with Dag Prawitz as an external adviser, he hit upon Popper’s logical writings and realized that the inferentialism advocated by Popper bears significant relationships to the idea of proof-theoretic semantics. Subsequently, in 1982, he wrote a paper on Popper’s theory of deductive inference stressing in particular the issue of demarcation of logical from extra-logical signs (later published as Schroeder-Heister,.History and Philosophy of Logic 5:79–110, 1984). Sending a draft of this paper to Popper led to the correspondence reproduced here.