Inferentialism and expressivism about logical vocabulary in Frege

• Autores: Martin Andor
• Localización: VII Conference of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 18-20 July 2012 / Sociedad de Lógica, Metodología y Filosofía de la Ciencia en España (aut.), Concepción Martínez Vidal (dir. congr.), José L. Falguera López (dir. congr.), José Miguel Sagüillo Fernández-Vega (dir. congr.), Víctor Martín Verdejo Aparicio (dir. congr.), Martín Pereira Fariña (dir. congr.), 2012, ISBN 978-84-9887-939-1, págs. 3-10
• Idioma: inglés
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  • Texto Completo Libro
• Resumen

  • In (Brandom 1994) and (Brandom 2001), Robert Brandom controversially characterizes young Frege’s philosophy of language as inferentialist. In Brandom’s view, the kind of inferentialism present in the Begriffsschrift is based on the following three theses (Brandom 2001, 61):

    (1) Conceptual content is to be understood in terms of role in reasoning.

    (2) Such reasoning is not merely logical in nature.

    (3) Logical vocabulary makes explicit the implicit material inferential roles of non-logical expressions.

    Under Brandom’s particular interpretation, (1) amounts to what may be called ‘minimal global inferentialism’ (‘global’ meaning here that no aspect of conceptual content should be accounted for in non-inferential terms, for instance by resorting to different semantics for some subsets of the lexicon). The second tenet is required to bestow plausibility on the first one, as logical inference is generally considered too restrictive to underpin a global semantic theory for natural language. The third tenet requires the first two, but is not necessitated by them.

    In this paper I argue that none of these theses is actually held by Frege. I proceed by first showing that the arguments Brandom supplies for attributing the relevant interpretation of (1) to Frege are unsatisfactory. While this undercutting does not suffice by itself to reject this attribution, I make a strong case for interpreting ‘inference’ (‘Schluss’) in Begriffsschrift always as ‘logical inference’. As noted above, the absence of (2) renders Brandom’s (1) extremely implausible; however, I argue that one can attribute (1) to Frege under an interpretation that doesn’t require (2). Without Brandom’s reading of (1) and (2), (3) falls. I show why Brandom’s reasons for attributing (3) to Frege don’t stand closer scrutiny.