Anti-exceptionalism and the justification of basic logical principles

Abstract

Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the thesis that logic is not special. In this paper, I consider, and reject, a challenge to this thesis. According to this challenge, there are basic logical principles, and part of what makes such principles basic is that they are epistemically exceptional. Thus, according to this challenge, the existence of basic logical principles provides reason to reject anti-exceptionalism about logic. I argue that this challenge fails, and that the exceptionalist positions motivated by it are thus unfounded. I make this case by disambiguating two senses of 'basic' and showing that, once this disambiguation is taken into account, the best reason we have for thinking that there are basic principles actually implies that those principles do not require a special epistemology. Consequently, the existence of basic logical principles provides reason to accept, rather than reject, anti-exceptionalism concerning the epistemology of logic. I conclude by explaining how an abductivist, anti-exceptionalist approach to the epistemology of logic can accommodate the notion of basic logical principles.* This paper is dedicated to the memory of David McCarty, who taught me a great deal about logic and its philosophy.

Logical exceptionalism: Development and predicaments

“…Some contemporary scholars revive the problem about justification of deduction, developing varieties of justifications of it (cf. Boghossian, 2001; Carlson, 2022; Rosen 2009; Tenant 2005). Moreover, Kripke (2023) and Birman (2023) put forward ‘the Adoption Problem’ of logical rules.It is worthy of emphasis that Quine's criticism of ‘two dogmas of empiricism’—the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and reductionism that individual statements have their own empirical content, so they can be individually confirmed or falsified by empirical evidence—is very significant: it is the holistic confirmation of logical laws and has obvious anti‐exceptionalist nature.…”

Countering Justification Holism in the Epistemology of Logic: The Argument from Pre-Theoretic Universality

“…It's not that one is not able to have justification with respect to individual sentences about entailment, the point is rather that such justification is dependent on a choice of logical theory, say, classical, intuitionistic, paraconsistent, paracomplete etc. 8 Further, abductivists hold that the grounds for justification of a logical theory is how well it fits with relevant data (frequently taken to be our intuitive judgments about logical Hjortland, 2021Hjortland, , 2022Rossberg and Shapiro, 2021;Sagi, 2021;Becker Arenhart, 2022a,b;Carlson, 2022;Tajer, 2022;Ferrari et al, 2023;Martin and Hjortland, 202X). 2 In a recent paper Martin and Hjortland (2022) distinguish between different kinds of antiexceptionalism about logic.…”