Event Detail

Fri Jan 26, 2018
60 Evans Hall
4–5:30 PM
Logic Colloquium
John MacFarlane (UC Berkeley)
Is Logic a Normative Discipline?

Various philosophers, including Kant, Frege, and more recently Hartry Field and Greg Restall, have held that logic is in some interesting sense a normative discipline. Field, in particular, has argued that we need a normative characterization of logical validity in order to understand what proponents of alternative logics are disagreeing about. I will discuss what one needs to say in order to sustain an interesting version of this claim, and I will consider whether Field gives good reasons for accepting it.