Elaborating Abilities: The Expressive Role of Logic
Elaborating Abilities: The Expressive Role of Logic
This chapter presents a meaning-use analysis of the expressive role characteristic of logical vocabulary. In mastering the material inferences needed to deploy ordinary, non-logical vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to deploy logical vocabulary. Also, logical vocabulary lets one explicitly say that an inference is good, an endorsement that without the use of logical vocabulary remains implicit in what one does. A resolution is offered of the analytic logicist's dilemma: how logical vocabulary can be both expressively useful and available to use in explicating other vocabularies. Automata are discussed as codifying how one set of abilities can be elaborated from another. An appendix discusses indexical vocabulary, as an example of pragmatic expressive bootstrapping.
Keywords: logic, indexicals, automata, inference
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