Logical Constants and Focusing Disagreements

Greg Restall (University of Melbourne)

For expressivists about logic (such as Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin), logical vocabulary gives us means to do more than we could without it. With concepts such as negation, conjunction, conditionality, and the quantifiers, we can express contents which would otherwise be out of reach to us. However, in another sense, logical vocabulary seems to be neutral with regard to content. It does not seem to add any new subject matter to our thoughts or conversations.  

I will attempt to explain why a certain class of logical expressions (including the standard propositional connectives, first order quantifiers, and perhaps some modal operators) give us means to extend our expressive resources without adding new subject matter, by attending to the role special that logical vocabulary can play in articulating disagreements.