Logical Pluralism Research Articles

Logical Pluralism, Meaning-Variance, and VerbalDisputes

Logical pluralism has been in vogue since JC Beall and Greg Restall 2006 articulated and defended a new pluralist thesis. Recent criticisms such as Priest 2006a and Field 2009 have suggested that there is a relationship between their type of logical pluralism and the meaning-variance thesis for logic. This is the claim, often associated with Quine 1970, that a change of logic entails a change of meaning. Here we explore the connection between logical pluralism and meaning-variance, both in general and for Beall and Restall's theory specifically. We argue that contrary to what Beall and Restall claim, their type of pluralism is wedded to meaning-variance. We then develop an alternative form of logical pluralism that circumvents at least some forms of meaning-variance.

Problems for Logical Pluralism

I argue that Beall and Restall's logical pluralism fails. Beall–Restall pluralism is the claim that there are different, equally correct logical consequence relations in a single language. Their position fails for two, related, reasons: first, it relies on an unmotivated conception of the ‘settled core’ of consequence: they believe that truth-preservation, necessity, formality and normativity are ‘settled’ features of logical consequence and that any relation satisfying these criteria is a logical consequence relation. I consider historical evidence and argue that their position relies on an unmotivated conception of the settled features of logical consequence. There are many features that are just as settled but which are inconsistent with pluralism. Second, I argue that Beall–Restall pluralism fails to hold in a single language with a single selection of logical constants, which they require for the position to be distinct from Carnap's. I consider various ways in which Beall and Restall can resist this meaning variance, particularly for negation, but argue that the strongest way relies on an unmotivated conception of the settled features of the logical constants.

Comparing the roles of referents and event structures in parsing preferences

Recent work has shown that potentially reciprocal verbs are interpreted reciprocally when their subjects are complex reference objects (plural referents that incorporate multiple referents), but transitively when their subjects are undifferentiated plural sets. Four self-paced reading experiments investigated why this is the case. The experiments contrasted the hypothesis that the parser's behaviour is driven by the complexity or specificity of potential event structures with the hypothesis that what matters is simply the availability of multiple referents. First we replicated Patson & Ferreira's Experiment 1 with self-paced reading, and then in three studies we manipulated the conjuncts within a conjoined noun phrase (NP) subject (e.g. the men and the women vs. the man and the women) in order to vary event structures. The results indicated that potentially reciprocal verbs were interpreted as reciprocal with any conjoined subject, regardless of what type of NPs comprised it. This suggests that the parser is sensitive specifically to the presence of referents, not to the relative complexity or specificity of the event structure that could be built based on those referents. These findings are consistent with Patson and Ferreira's hypothesis that available referents matter because they immediately saturate the thematic roles of reciprocal verbs.

The Quebec system of social innovation: a focused analysis on the local development field

This article shows the components of a system of social innovation based on collaboration and consensus building between a plurality of actors and economic logics. The social innovation system of Quebec features new combinations, approaches, ways of coordination and governance in which social economy and civil society play an important role. Participative governance, co-production of services, co-construction of public policies, as well as the plural character of the economy represent important aspects of this system. This article addresses the territorial dimensions of what could be called the Quebec model of social innovation.

Pluralism × 3: Truth, Logic, Metaphysics

This paper offers a discussion of metaphysical pluralism, alethic pluralism, and logical pluralism. According to the metaphysical pluralist, there are several ways of being. According to the alethic pluralist, there are several ways of being true, and according to the logical pluralist, there are several ways of being valid. Each of these three forms of pluralism will be considered on its own, but the ambition of the paper is to explore possible connections between them. My primary objective is to present and develop a positive account according to which the different forms of pluralism are intimately related. I will proceed in two steps. First, I will investigate the connection between alethic pluralism and logical pluralism. I will argue that a certain version of alethic pluralism supports logical pluralism. Second, I will connect alethic pluralism and logical pluralism to metaphysical pluralism. I will suggest that the former two are at least partly founded on the latter.

Sets and Plural Comprehension

The state of affairs of some things falling under a predicate is supposedly a single entity that collects these things as its constituents. But whether we think of a state of affairs as a fact, a proposition or a possibility, problems will arise if we adopt a plural logic. For plural logic says that any plurality include themselves, so whenever there are some things, the state of affairs of their plural self-inclusion should be a single thing that collects them all. This leads to paradoxes analogous to those that afflict naive set theory. Here I suggest that they are the very same paradoxes, because sets can be reduced to states of affairs. However, to obtain a consistent theoretical reduction we must restrict the usual axiom scheme of Comprehension for plural logic to ‘stratified’ formulas, to avoid viciously circular definitions. I prove that with this modification to the background plural logic, the theory of states of affairs is consistent; moreover, it yields the axioms of the familiar set theory NFU.

Should Anti-Realists be Anti-Realists About Anti-Realism?

On the Dummettian understanding, anti-realism regarding a particular discourse amounts to (or at the very least, involves) a refusal to accept the determinacy of the subject matter of that discourse and a corresponding refusal to assert at least some instances of excluded middle (which can be understood as expressing this determinacy of subject matter). In short: one is an anti-realist about a discourse if and only if one accepts intuitionistic logic as correct for that discourse. On careful examination, the strongest Dummettian arguments for anti-realism of this sort fail to secure intuitionistic logic as the single, correct logic for anti-realist discourses. Instead, antirealists are placed in a situation where they fail to be justified in asserting monism (that intuitionistic logic is the unique correct logic). Thus, antirealists seem forced either to accept pluralism (i.e. one or more intermediate logic is at least as `correct’ as intuitionistic logic–an option I take to be unattractive from the anti-realist perspective), or they must be anti-realists about the realism/anti-realism debate (and, in particular, must refuse to assert the instance of excluded middle equivalent to logical monism or logical pluralism).

THE CLASSICAL CONTINUUM WITHOUT POINTS

AbstractWe develop a point-free construction of the classical one-dimensional continuum, with an interval structure based on mereology and either a weak set theory or a logic of plural quantification. In some respects, this realizes ideas going back to Aristotle, although, unlike Aristotle, we make free use of contemporary “actual infinity”. Also, in contrast to intuitionistic analysis, smooth infinitesimal analysis, and Eret Bishop’s (1967) constructivism, we follow classical analysis in allowing partitioning of our “gunky line” into mutually exclusive and exhaustive disjoint parts, thereby demonstrating the independence of “indecomposability” from a nonpunctiform conception. It is surprising that such simple axioms as ours already imply the Archimedean property and the interval analogue of Dedekind completeness (least-upper-bound principle), and that they determine an isomorphism with the Dedekind–Cantor structure of ℝ as a complete, separable, ordered field. We also present some simple topological models of our system, establishing consistency relative to classical analysis. Finally, after describing how to nominalize our theory, we close with comparisons with earlier efforts related to our own.

Restall and Beall on Logical Pluralism: A Critique

With their book Logical Pluralism, Jc Beall and Greg Restall have elaborated on their previous statements on logical pluralism. Their view of logical pluralism is centred on ways of understanding logical consequence. The essay tries to come to grips with their doctrine of logical pluralism by highlighting some points that might be made clearer, and questioning the force of some of Beall’s and Restall’s central arguments. In that connection seven problems for their approach are put forth: (1) The Informal Common Core Problem, (2) The Formal Common Core Problem, (3) The Superior Judge Problem, (4) The Problem of the Conditional, (6) The Problem of an Unsettled Concept of Consequence, (7) The Methodological Problem, (8) The General Logical Form Problem. It seems that the case for logical pluralism is far from clear. It is even unclear what exactly logical pluralism is and where is stops. It is also unclear if logical pluralism could be stated as it is, if it were true. So far universalism seems to be the better position to take.

Logical Pluralism: Another Application for Chunk and Permeate

A motivation behind one kind of logical pluralism is the thought that there are different kinds of objects, and that reasoning about situations involving these different kinds requires different kinds of logics. Given this picture, a natural question arises: what kind of logical apparatus is appropriate for situations which concern more than one kind of objects, such as may arise, for example, when considering the interactions between the different kinds? The paper articulates an answer to this question, deploying the methodology of Chunk and Permeate, developed in a different context by Brown and Priest (J Philos Log 33:379–388, 2004).

Rebels with a Cause: Formation, Contestation, and Expansion of the De Novo Category “Modern Architecture,” 1870–1975

Most category studies have focused on established categories with discrete boundaries. These studies not only beg the question of how a de novo category arises, but also upon what institutional material actors draw to create a de novo category. We examine the formation and theorization of the de novo category “modern architecture” between 1870 and 1975. Our study shows that the process of new category formation was driven by groups of architects with distinct clientele associated with institutional logics of commerce, state, religion, and family. These architects enacted different artifact codes for a building based on institutional logics associated with their specific mix of clients. “Modern architects” fought over what logics and artifact codes should guide “modern architecture.” Modern functional architects espoused a logic of commerce enacted through a restricted artifact code of new materials in a building, whereas modern organic architects advocated transforming the profession's logic enacted through a flexible artifact code of mixing new and traditional materials in buildings. The conflict became a source of creative tension for modern architects that followed, who integrated aspects of both logics and materials in buildings, expanding the category boundary. Plural logics and category expansion resulted in multiple conflicting exemplars within “modern architecture” and enabled its adaptation to changing social forces and architectural interpretations for over 70 years.

Representing characters in a scenario: What makes two individuals a set?

Following two individually mentioned characters in a text it is possible to successfully refer to either the individuals, or the set of two. Various factors, syntactic and pragmatic, have been found to affect the ease with which these types of reference can be made, however. This is therefore an interesting puzzle for those attempting to work out how linguistic and pragmatic factors interact in determining the representation we build in the process of understanding text. We build on previous ideas of “equivalence” and a “common association base” to propose that the Scenario mapping and focus model may explain at least some of the factors which affect plural pronominal reference. Two experiments are described which together suggest that the roles assigned to the two individual characters, and the likelihood of these roles being associated with joint activity in subsequent text are crucial in determining the likelihood of plural pronominal reference. Our findings broadly support the view that our representation of characters is heavily dependent on the scenario-based roles which we assign to those characters as we read.

Institutional Complexity in Transition Fields: The case of socially responsible investing

We answer recent calls for investigation into the co-existence of plural logics and examine how organizations experience and respond to institutional complexity in a field which is in transition. W...

Using Continuations to Account for Plural Quantification and Anaphora Binding

We give in this paper an explicit formal account of plural semantics in the framework of continuation semantics introduced in (1) and extended in (4). We deal with aspects of plural dynamic semantics such as plural quantification, plural anaphora, conjunction and disjunction, distributivity and maximality conditions. Those phenomena need no extra stipulations to be accounted for in this framework, because continuation semantics provides a unified account of scope- taking. Index Terms —Discourse semantics, continuations, plural anaphora, plural quantifiers' scope. I. INTRODUCTION HE formal study of plurals is a major and complex undertaking. It should address plural quantification, plural anaphora, conjunction and disjunction, distributivity, maximality, among other problems. Ideally, plural linguistic phenomena should be parallel to their singular counterpart. Unfortunately, it is not so: plurality introduces a number of complications not present in the analysis of singular. In this paper we will only give some directions for further study of plural semantics (our analysis is far from being exhaustive), with emphasis on plural anaphora, in the framework of continuation semantics. The programming language concept of continuations was successfully used by Barker and Shan in a series of articles to analyze intra-sentential linguistic phenomena such as focus fronting, donkey anaphora, presuppositions, crossover or superiority (2, 3, 19, 18, 1). Moreover, (9) proposed an elegant discourse semantics based on continuations. Continuations are a standard tool in computer science, used to control side effects of computation (such as evaluation order, print or passing values). The basic idea of continuizing a grammar is to provide subexpressions with direct access to their own continuations (future context), so subexpressions are modified to take a continuation as an argument. For instance, if we take the local context to be restricted to the sentence, when computing the meaning of the sentence John saw Mary , the default future of the value denoted by the subject is that it is destined to have the property of seeing Mary predicated of it. In symbols, the continuation of the subject denotation j is the function

Pluralismo e Religiões: Bases Ecumênicas para uma Teologia das Religiões

This study brings the significant foundations of an ecumenical theology of religions, considering the challenges of the present time, especially the religious and cultural pluralism, in view of the construction of a plural logic for the theological method. It also brings a synthesis of the view of authors who have made relevant contributions to the theme, such as Paul Knitter, Andres Torres Queiruga, Roger Haight and John Hick, in the European and North American (USA) fields, and Jose Maria Vigil, Marcelo Barros, Diego Irarrazaval e Faustino Teixeira, in the Latin-American field.

There Constructions Used by Japanese Speakers of English: Their Linguistic Features and Acceptability

The concept of World Englishes should allow Japanese speakers of English (JS) to develop Japanese English as their own additional language to express their own identity. In Japan, however, previous research has primarily focused on errors JS make, and has not paid adequate attention to Japanese English expressions which are grammatically correct, but not commonly used by native speakers of English (NS). The general purposes of the present study were to collect such grammatically correct Japanese English expressions which were not preferred by NS, and to analyze why those differences emerge between Japanese English and native English. It specifically focused on the use of there constructions, using the Nagoya Interlanguage Corpus of English (NICE) which contains a large collection of essays on social topics written by adult JS and NS of English. It examined differences between JS and NS in terms of linguistic features such as tense, plurality of the logical subject, the post-logical-subject elements, quantifiers and others. It also examined the acceptability of there constructions, and how their sentence structures were changed by NS and JS evaluators who edited the sentences. It was found that JS preferred to use present tense, plural logical subjects, quantifiers, relative clauses and logical subjects which denote “beings”. A large portion of there constructions with these linguistic features were edited by the evaluators. Possible factors that may account for the preferential use of the constructions are also discussed.

Who are ‘we’ in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese? Expression and reference of first person plural subject pronouns

Peninsular Spanish (PS) and European Portuguese (EP) are null subject languages where subject person is expressed by verbal affixes and the use of subject pronouns is considered to be reserved e.g. for such purposes as the expression of contrast or emphasis. However, the use of pronominal subjects differs strikingly between the two languages. The present study examines the use of first person plural subject pronouns (PS nosotros and EP no´s) in corpora of spoken language and connects it with the different referential properties of first person plural. It is shown that in PS the expression of the subject pronoun nosotros is rare – it occurs only in 4.5% of all clauses with first person plural subjects – and the reference of the pronoun is always hearer-exclusive in the data under survey. In EP, the expression of the first person plural subject pronoun no´s is more frequent, occurring in 32.2% of the clauses with first person plural subjects. In EP, the use of the pronoun is not restricted to the hearer-exclusive reading but is also found in contexts where the reference is construed as hearer-inclusive or impersonal. A further difference between PS and EP is that the latter has developed, in addition to first person plural proper, another construction with first person plural reference consisting of the expression a gente (literally ‘the people’) and a verb in third person singular. In the data examined, the construction with a gente is favoured with certain non-agentive verb lexemes: this tendency is argued to be connected with the origin of a gente as an impersonalizing strategy. Using evidence from contrastive analysis of two closely related languages, the paper argues that null subject languages and grammatical persons are highly divergent with regard to the frequency of subject pronoun expression and the factors affecting it.

Le dictionnaire maître de langue: lexicographie et didactique éd. par Michaela Heinz

look at a snapshot in time and gauge language change by differences between younger and older speakers, or by comparing corpora gathered over the years, Blondeau’s study makes use of three corpora that consist of the same people recorded at intervals of roughly a dozen years. She can therefore follow how individual speakers change (or do not change) their use of the variable in question. Her data comes from the Sankoff-Cedergren (1971) corpus, the Montreal (1984) corpus, and the Montreal (1995) corpus, all of which consist of interviews with the same people. In addition, the Montreal (1995) speakers also recorded themselves going about their daily lives, which attenuates the “observer’s paradox” and allows the researcher to see language use in a natural setting, rather than in the semi-formal interview. The data from only thirty speakers from the first two corpora and twelve from the last were analyzed, all of which give rich data despite the relatively small numbers and allow Blondeau to examine the linguistic, sociolinguistic, and stylistic factors that influence the use of the simple and compound variants. She comes to the following conclusions: the autre has become grammaticalized and serves no discursive function, such as emphasis; use of vous and vous-autres is stable, clearly marking singular and plural reference; the simple variant is more prestigious than the compound one and is therefore found more frequently in the speech of women, speakers of a higher socioeconomic level, and in more formal speech; use of the simple variant has increased over the years. The organization of the book reflects its origins as Blondeau’s doctoral dissertation , though it has been considerably expanded. This is not a negative comment , quite the contrary. There is a nice logic to how the chapters flow, and each of the first four chapters could easily stand alone for use in a linguistics or advanced grammar course. The writing is clear, avoiding excessive technical terminology , and is therefore more accessible to non-specialists in linguistics. There is also a wealth of examples selected from the corpora. The statistical data is generally clearly presented in tables and graphs. However, Tableau II (52) and Tableau V (91) have so many empty cells that it is not clear if it is a printer error or if another kind of organizational structure might have been better. Finally, in her discussion of previous studies on clitics, Blondeau uses Kayne’s (1977) classic work as representing the generativist tradition, although the theory has evolved considerably since then. This is a minor criticism, however, in what is otherwise a fine addition to the body of work in French sociolinguistics. Arizona State University Helene Ossipov HEINZ, MICHAELA, éd. Le dictionnaire maître de langue: lexicographie et didactique. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009. ISBN 978-3-86596-200-3. Pp. 326. 68 a. The Journées allemandes des dictionnaires, held every two years in Klingenberg, Germany since 2004, has become one of the most significant events dedicated to French lexicography. Heinz, the conference organizer, has been efficient in assembling an edited volume following each of these events. The volume reviewed here comes out of the 2006 conference, organized around the theme “le dictionnaire maître de langue,” focusing on what are commonly called dictionnaires d’apprentissage. The introduction provides a context for most of the papers, celebrating the lexicographic career of Josette Rey-Debove (1929–2005), well known for her lead role in many Robert dictionaries. Heinz laments in the introduction 232 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 that the 2006 conference was not dedicated to Rey-Debove, since the theme of the learner’s dictionary is a relevant topic to celebrate her work. Six of the fourteen contributions deal with dictionaries of which Rey-Debove was one of the principal editors. The term dictionnaire d’apprentissage is often taken more broadly than the English terms “pedagogical dictionary” or “learner’s dictionary,” which typically designate monolingual works intended for adolescent or adult learners of English as a second language (ESL). The French term includes monolingual dictionaries of français langue étrangère (FLE) but can also encompass dictionaries for L1 French schoolchildren, or even bilingual dictionaries. The ambiguity of the French term is evident...

Christian Arnsperger, Critical Political Economy. Complexity, rationality, and the logic of post-orthodox pluralism

Critical political Economy (2007), by Christian Arnsperger (who holds the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics at Louvain Catholic university) aims at awaking economists from their dogmatic sleep and making them take a critical turn inspired by the unexpected but meaningful conjunction of Horkheimer and Hayek (focusing on the critical and self-organized side of Hayek’s thought). Arnsperger’s line of argument goes as follows. Economic agents, according to the “main stream”, are rational...

Arnsperger Christian, Critical Political Economy. Complexity, rationality, and the logic of post-orthodox pluralism (with a foreword by David Colander) Routledge, 2007, 327 pages, ISBN: 978-0-415-56937-8

Arnsperger Christian, Critical Political Economy. Complexity, rationality, and the logic of post-orthodox pluralism (with a foreword by David Colander) Routledge, 2007, 327 pages, ISBN: 978-0-415-56937-8