Philosophy of Logic as Meta-Semantics

Gareth Rhys Pearce (University of Vienna)

The first activity of the Slovak-Austrian Philosophy of Language Network (https://danzeman.weebly.com/slovak-austrian-cooperation.html) this year is an online talk by Gareth Pearce (University of Vienna), entitled "Philosophy of Logic as Meta-Semantics". The talk is on Monday, MARCH 1 at 11.00 CET, as part of the Department of Analytic Philosophy's seminar, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Please write to [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to participate.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

"Philosophy of Logic as Meta-Semantics"
Descriptivists about logic hold that logics are descriptive theories of truth preservation. Minimalists about truth hold that facts about truth can be reduced to facts about certain semantic relations e.g. reference and satisfaction (Field 2001, Horwitch 1999). If both descriptivists and minimalists are correct then there is an intimate connection between the correctness of a logic for a particular language and the language's (meta) semantic features. This talk outlines the consequences of the descriptivist-minimalist view for both the nature of logical correctness and the normativity of logic. The resulting picture is, I believe, a natural and attractive one that gives us reason to be descriptivist-minimalists, but such matters of taste are hard to argue for and will be omitted from this talk. I'll suffice to try and convince you that these are the consequences of the view and leave matters of judgement to another day.