Abstract
The problem of mixed inferences is a bugbear for alethic pluralism and logical pluralism alike. Michael Lynch’s alethic functionalism is meant to solve the problem for alethic pluralists. But, as Lynch observes, it is tempting to combine alethic and logical pluralism, and doing so threatens to reintroduce the problem. Lynch proposes a way out of the problem for alethic cum logical pluralists. I argue that Lynch’s way out is a dead end, and the combination of logical and alethic pluralism is unattractive.
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- 1.
“Science, thanks to its links with observation, retains some title to a correspondence theory of truth; but a coherence theory is evidently the lot of ethics” (Quine 1981, p. 63).
- 2.
Lynch (2013) downplays the role of discourses in pluralist theories, but most pluralists (including earlier time-slices of Lynch) suppose that, at least for atomic propositions, what truth-property is relevant to a proposition is a function of what discourse the proposition belongs to.
- 3.
Different versions of functionalism characterize the relationship between truth itself and the various other properties that “realize,” “manifest,” or “play the role of” truth differently. For discussion see Wright (2013).
- 4.
GTT gives a generic characterization of logical consequence because an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is a logical consequence of its premises.
- 5.
Lynch also considers a solution on which the governing logic is the weakest logic among those governing the various domains involved in the compound proposition or inference. That solution, however, is just a special case of MODEST*, where the logics in question are ordered in such a way that one of them is weakest.
- 6.
Some paraconsistent logics reject Disjunctive Syllogism. Maybe some jokes both are and aren’t funny. Then such a logic might well be the right one for discourse about comedy.
- 7.
There is room for some debate as to what does or does not constitute a “logical reason” for a logical law to hold. Here I assume that law holds for a logical reason when its instances are logical truths. On Beall’s approach , the instances of ~(p& ~p) are logical truths, so long as they don’t involve the transparent truth device.
- 8.
I owe thanks to Jack Lyons, Stewart Shapiro, and Sarah Wright for pointing out the need to consider versions of this move on behalf of AP + DLP.
- 9.
- 10.
Whether they do entail it might depend on the details of the non-transitive logic in question. The entailment holds for a logic whose non-transitive consequence relation is the ⊨ct of Cobreros et al. (2012).
- 11.
These are the suppositions Lynch makes in presenting the case.
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Wrenn, C.B. (2018). A Plea for Immodesty: Alethic Pluralism, Logical Pluralism, and Mixed Inferences. In: Wyatt, J., Pedersen, N., Kellen, N. (eds) Pluralisms in Truth and Logic. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98346-2_16
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