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Logical Instrumentalism

Kouri, Teresa
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1472751856

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Philosophy.
Logic and reasoning go hand in hand. So often, we hear that someone has reasoned poorly about something if they have not reasoned logically, or that an argument is bad because it is not logically valid. To date, research has been devoted to exactly just what types of logical systems are appropriate for guiding our reasoning. Traditionally, classical logic has been the logic suggested as the ideal for this purpose. More recently, non-classical logics have been suggested as alternatives. Even more recently, it has been suggested that multiple logics are reasoning guiding, or none are. So far, no one has addressed the impact that natural language has on our ability to reason well. My project fills this gap. I focus on the relationship between the meaning of the connectives ("and", "or", "not", etc.) in natural language and logic. By assessing what these connectives mean in natural language, we can figure out what they must mean in the formal language in order to guide our reasoning. I show that the connectives do not have a single meaning across all contexts in natural language, and thus there can be no single meaning to the connectives in the formal language which guides our reasoning. This means that the right logic to guide our reasoning depends on our context. My dissertation is divided into five chapters. The first is a literature review. In the second, I examine the classical and non-classical answers to the question "which logic guides our reasoning?" and find them all wanting. In the third chapter, I show that the views that postulate either that there are multiple logics that guide our reasoning or that there are none are flawed for the reason that they do not appropriately account for the relationship between natural language and logic. In the fourth chapter, I show how we can adapt an old view to solve this problem. Finally, in the last chapter, I propose a formal reasoning guiding system that takes natural language into account and defend it from some potential objections. The appendix begins to address a major problem for this type of project. Given what my dissertation shows, we can see how the traditional view on logic guiding reasoning was misguided. However, if we replace the notion of "right logic" with the system I develop, we can reap the same benefits.
Stewart Shapiro (Advisor)
Neil Tennant (Committee Member)
Kevin Scharp (Committee Member)
Craige Roberts (Committee Member)
Chric Pincock (Committee Member)
144 p.
Philosophy
logic; reasoning; pluralism; meaning; natural language; negation

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kouri, T. (2016). Logical Instrumentalism [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1472751856

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kouri, Teresa. Logical Instrumentalism. 2016. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1472751856.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kouri, Teresa. "Logical Instrumentalism." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1472751856

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.