Hooman Mohammad Ghorbanian
Abstract
In his famous article “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, Carroll explained how adding logical rules as propositions to an argument causes an infinite regress in the inference and makes the conclusion far from reach. As a solution, some logicians propose to consider logic as dispositional ...
Read More
In his famous article “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, Carroll explained how adding logical rules as propositions to an argument causes an infinite regress in the inference and makes the conclusion far from reach. As a solution, some logicians propose to consider logic as dispositional knowledge. Logical dispositions are potentialities that in presence of certain situations manifest as certain actions. An agent, who is familiar with logic, when facing an argument, reveals their ability and deduce. In defending the dispositional approach, some consider logic as a part of a universal language or as the language of thought; in this way knowing logic like knowing a language is considered as having some dispositions. In this paper, we show logic is not part of the universal language, since we could have several and different logics. Although the dispositional approach could prevent Carroll’s regress, it cannot explain some basic features of logic such as its apriority. Dispositions are neither a priori nor a posteriori, but logic is always considered as an archetype of apriority. Also, we can explain actions in accordance with logical rules as actions that are motivated by propositional knowledge we have; logic provides reason to act logically. Therefore, in presence of better explanations for the propositional approach and some disadvantages of the dispositional approach, the latter seems unsatisfactory.
homan mohammad ghorbanian; Sara Ghane
Abstract
Dummett`s philosophy is influenced by two great philosophers : he follows Frege in his methodology and attempts to build metaphysics upon logic and theory of meaning, and he also follows Wittgenstein in his theory of meaning and accepts his use theory of meaning that says in most cases, the meaning of ...
Read More
Dummett`s philosophy is influenced by two great philosophers : he follows Frege in his methodology and attempts to build metaphysics upon logic and theory of meaning, and he also follows Wittgenstein in his theory of meaning and accepts his use theory of meaning that says in most cases, the meaning of a word is its use. Nevertheless, Dummett tries to avoid the radical skepticism found in late Wittgenstein, since he believes if that is true then communication is in constant danger of simply breaking down. His solution against this radical skepticism is introducing the idea of implicit knowledge for our understanding of how language works. In this article, I tried to show how this idea causes Dummet`s theory to be different from Wittgenstein's concept of language. We cannot maintain at the same time both implicit knowledge of the language and think of the theory of meaning as a base for metaphysics.
