• Corpus ID: 1404426

Quine's challenge and Logical Pluralism

@inproceedings{Negro2010QuinesCA,
  title={Quine's challenge and Logical Pluralism},
  author={A Negro},
  year={2010}
}

• A. Negro
• Published 2010
• Philosophy

‌ A number of deviant deductive systems have been proposed which differ in some way from classical logic. An influential philosophical interpretation of plurality in logic has been developed by Quine, who introduced the meaning-change thesis, summarized in his "Change of logic, change of subject". We show that if Quine is right about the consequences of his thesis, then the systems of classical logic can only be rejected as unscientific or meaningless, and not refined as inadequate. We show that there are good reasons both for and against his thesis. We argue against Local Pluralism, on the basis that it is incompatible with the universality and normativity of logic. We then assess Beall and Restall's logical pluralism, which is shown to be not sufficiently fine-grained in that it leads to relativism in logic. We finally introduce Dalla Pozza's Global Pluralism, where deviant logics are viewed as dealing with specific pragmatic meta-concepts, which are distinct from the semantic concept of truth as captured by classical logic, while presupposing it. We show that Dalla Pozza's analysis corroborates the meaning-change thesis without leading to the monistic outcome of Quine.