Florian Steinberger – Is logic a normative discipline?

Logic Supergroup — Online Colloquium, June 5, 2020 https://logic.uconn.edu/supergroup/ Please note that cuts were made for technical reasons at 3:20 and 3:39. No content was lost. Florian Steinberger (Birkbeck) — Is logic a normative discipline? Some disciplines are in the business of telling us what is. Physics, for instance, seems to be a case in point. By contrast, other disciplines such as ethics, jurisprudence and, in the eyes of many, epistemology are normative disciplines. They are characterized by the fact that they concern themselves with normatively assessable subject matters (forms of behavior, practices, actions or mental states) and they essentially involve normative concepts. According to the traditional story, logic too should be grouped with these normative disciplines. However, in recent years a counternarrative has gained currency. It denies that logic is normative. Metalogical statements do not in and of themselves have any implications as to how we ought to think. Inasmuch as there are plausible implications of this kind, they must have their source in additional, non-logical principles, which together with logical principles give rise to them. As the counternarrative takes pains to emphasize, the same is true of virtually any discipline, including paradigmatically descriptive ones. Hence, logic enjoys no special normative status---the traditional story is revealed to be a myth. In this paper, I probe the counternarrative and argue that it begs the question because it presupposes that logic, by its very nature, is concerned with a non-normative subject matter. Rather than adopting a contrary position, I suggest we ought to be pluralists about the subject matter of logic—a meta-pluralism that is orthogonal to standard forms of logical pluralism. My proposed meta-pluralism about logic allows us to treat logic as a formal model, which much like, say, decision theory may have both descriptive and normative applications. I close by developing the notion of logic as a normative model.

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