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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Certain combinations of sounds or signs on paper are meaningful. What makes it the case that, unlike most combinations of sounds or signs, they have meaning? What is this meaning that they have? And what is it to understand this meaning? This book advances new answers to these questions by developing inferential expressivism, a novel approach to the study of meaning which combines elements of the expressivist and inferentialist programs. Expressivists explain the meaning of words in terms of the attitudes that words are used to express; inferentialists explain the meaning of words in terms of the inferences that words are used to draw. Reasoning with Attitude lays out the foundations of inferential expressivism by defending the view that the meaning of an expression is to be explained in terms of the inferences we draw involving the attitudes we express. As the book shows, by joining forces, expressivism and inferentialism can meet their key challenges whilst retaining their distinctive insights and advantages. Notably, inferential expressivism solves the Frege-Geach Problem plaguing expressivism, and addresses the charge that inferentialism has limited applicability. The book demonstrates the fruitfulness of the inferential expressivist approach by applying it to several open questions in semantics from different areas of inquiry, including epistemic operators and conditionals in the philosophy of language, negation and the truth predicate in the philosophy of logic, and normative vocabulary in meta-ethics.

This open access book makes a case for extending logic beyond its traditional boundaries, to encompass not only statements but also also questions. The motivations for this extension are examined in detail. It is shown that important notions, including logical answerhood and dependency, emerge as facets of the fundamental notion of entailment once logic is extended to questions, and can therefore be treated with the logician's toolkit, including model-theoretic constructions and proof systems.After motivating the enterprise, the book describes how classical propositional and predicate logic can be made inquisitive—i.e., extended conservatively with questions—and what the resulting logics look like in terms of meta-theoretic properties and proof systems. Finally, the book discusses the tight connections between inquisitive logic and dependence logic.

This book offers new insights into the nature of human rational capacities by engaging inferentialism with empirical research in the cognitive sciences.Inferentialism advocates that humans'unique kind of intelligence is discursive and rooted in competencies to make, assess and justify claims. This approach provides a rich source of valuable insights into the nature of our rational capacities, but it is underdeveloped in important respects. For example, little attempt has been made to assess inferentialism considering relevant scientific research on human communication, cognition or reasoning. By engaging philosophical and scientific approaches in a productive dialogue, this book shows how we can better understand human rational capacities by comparing their respective strengths and weaknesses. In this vein, the author critically revisits and constructively develops central themes from the work of Robert Brandom and other'language rationalists': the nature of the assertoric practice and its connection to reasoned discourse, the linguistic constitution of the shared space of reasons, the social nature and function of reasoning, the intersubjective roots of social-normative practices and the nature of objective thought.Practices of Reason will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic.

The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it.The content of that logic and where it can be applied are determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference.

Inferentialism is a philosophical approach premised on the claim that an item of language (or thought) acquires meaning (or content) in virtue of being embedded in an intricate set of social practices normatively governed by inferential rules. Inferentialism found its paradigmatic formulation in Robert Brandom's landmark book Making it Explicit, and over the last two decades it has established itself as one of the leading research programs in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic. While Brandom's version of inferentialism has received wide attention in the philosophical literature, thinkers friendly to inferentialism have proposed and developed new lines of inquiry that merit wider recognition and critical appraisal. From Rules to Meaning brings together new essays that systematically develop, compare, assess and critically react to some of the most pertinent recent trends in inferentialism. The book's four thematic sections seek to apply inferentialism to a number of core issues, including the nature of meaning and content, reconstructing semantics, rule-oriented models and explanations of social practices and inferentialism's historical influence and dialogue with other philosophical traditions. With contributions from a number of distinguished philosophers—including Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin—this volume is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the foundations of logic and language.

In this study two strands of inferentialism are brought together: the philosophical doctrine of Brandom, according to which meanings are generally inferential roles, and the logical doctrine prioritizing proof-theory over model theory and approaching meaning in logical, especially proof-theoretical terms.

Can OUGHT be derived from IS? This book presents an investigation of this time-honored problem by means of alethic-deontic predicate logic. New in this study is the leitmotif of relevance: is-ought inferences indeed exist, but they are all irrelevant in a precise logical sense. New proof techniques establish this result for very broad classes of logics. A profound philosophical analysis of is-ought bridge principles supplements the logical study. The final results imply incisive limitations for the justifiability of ethics as opposed to empirical science.

Central topics in medieval logic are here treated in a way that is congenial to the modern reader, without compromising historical reliability. The achievements of medieval logic are made available to a wider philosophical public then the medievalists themselves. The three genres of logica moderna arising in a later Middle Ages are covered: obligations, insolubles and consequences - the first time these have been treated in such a unified way. The articles on obligations look at the role of logical consistence in medieval disputation techniques. Those on insolubles concentrate on medieval solutions to the Liar Paradox. There is also a systematic account of how medieval authors described the logical content of an inference, and how they thought that the validity of an inference could be guaranteed.

The middle years of the nineteenth century saw two crucial develop­ ments in the history of modern logic: George Boole's algebraic treat­ ment of logic and Augustus De Morgan's formulation of the logic of relations. The former episode has been studied extensively; the latter, hardly at all. This is a pity, for the most central feature of modern logic may well be its ability to handle relational inferences. De Morgan was the first person to work out an extensive logic of relations, and the purpose of this book is to study this attempt in detail. Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) was a British mathematician and logician who was Professor of Mathematics at the University of London (now, University College) from 1828 to 1866. A prolific but not highly original mathematician, De Morgan devoted much of his energies to the rather different field of logic. In his Formal Logic (1847) and a series of papers'On the Syllogism'(1846-1862), he attempted with great ingenuity to reformulate and extend the tradi­ tional syllogism and to systematize modes of reasoning that lie outside its boundaries. Chief among these is the logic of relations. De Mor­ gan's interest in relations culminated in his important memoir,'On the Syllogism: IV and on the Logic of Relations,'read in 1860.

The theory of oppositions based on Aristotelian foundations of logic has been pictured in a striking square diagram which can be understood and applied in many different ways having repercussions in various fields: epistemology, linguistics, mathematics, sociology, physics. The square can also be generalized in other two-dimensional or multi-dimensional objects extending in breadth and depth the original Aristotelian theory. The square of opposition from its origin in antiquity to the present day continues to exert a profound impact on the development of deductive logic. Since 10 years there is a new growing interest for the square due to recent discoveries and challenging interpretations. This book presents a collection of previously unpublished papers by high level specialists on the square from all over the world.

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