Experimental Philosophical Logic

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the intersection of experimental philosophy and philosophical logic, an intersection I'll call experimental philosophical logic. In particular, I'll be looldng for and sketching some ways in which experimental results, and empirical results more broadly, can inform and have informed debates within philosophical logic. Here's the plan: first, I'll lay out a way of looking at the situation that makes plain at least one way in which we should expect experimental and logical concerns to overlap. Then, I'll turn to the phenomenon of vagueness, where we can see this overlap explored and developed from multiple angles, showing just how intimately related experiment and logic can be. Finally, I'll canvass some other cases where we have similar reasons to expect productive interactions between experimental methods and formal logic, and point to some examples of productive work in those areas. 3 6 .1 Logic, Pure and AppliedLet's open by briefly considering a distinction between pure and applied logic. This distinction is analogous to the one between pure and applied algebra, or between pure and applied topology, or between pure and applied versions of any branch of mathematics. (I don't pretend that any of these distinctions is precise, or that there are no problem cases; the gist is all that matters.) Roughly, pure logic is an exploration of the properties and relations occupied by logical sys-• terns in themselves, without attending to any particular use they may or may not have. Typical questions within pure logic: is proof system X sound and complete for model theory Y?; is suchand-such a logical system decidable? compact? finitely axiomatizable?; is this rule admissible in that system?; and so on. Pure logic is most naturally thought of as a subfield of mathematics, although it is of course also pursued by researchers in philosophy, linguistics, computer science, electrical engineering, and so on, in pursuit of our own varied research interests.

Prospects for Experimental Philosophical Logic

“…Research works in logic fall under two broad categories (Ripley 2016;Priest 2005). 6 There are works in pure logic and there are works in applied logic.…”

“…The reasoners could just be employing some other system of logic. For example, data from the Wason card-selection experiment have shown that human reasoners are poor at judging conditional statements (Ripley 2016;Joaquin and Agregado 2018). But from these data, Cohen argues, we could not make any evaluation of the adequacy of the implied normative, classical logical system assumed in the experiments since such a logical framework is just assumed by the experimenters.…”

“…Over the years, there has been a steady growth of research projects, which fall under what has been dubbed as experimental philosophical logic (Ripley 2016). 1 Like most sub-areas of philosophy that experienced the 1 The following works might arguably be classified under this heading: (Alxatib and Pelletier 2011), (Bonini et al 1999), (Brauner 2014), (Cobreros et al 2012), experimental turn, 2 experimental philosophical logic seeks to employ not only the available tools and methods of traditional philosophy, but also the tools and data from the experimental cognitive sciences (especially, the psychology of reasoning) to aid philosophical inquiries into the nature of logic itself.…”

“…be it linguistic behavior, social communicative behaviors, etc., can be modeled by a given formal system. The second feature, on the other hand, implies that there is an experimental way to validate (or verify) whether the target phenomenon is indeed modeled by the formal theory (Ripley 2016). The combination of these two aspects will tell us whether a given logical theory is empirically adequate; it would also tell us whether the theory is a good scientific explanation of a piece of reasoning.…”