Revision and Revolution

DIEGO TAJER

Workshop; VIII Workshop on Philosophical Logic; 2019

Some authors have recently argued in favor of anti-exceptionalism about logic. The general idea is that logic is not different from the other sciences, and its principles are as revisable as scientific principles. In this paper, I start by discussing some recent developments on this topic, such as Williamson (2017), Hjortland (2017) and Woods (2019). I claim that all of them are partially right, but at the same time they ignore some central aspects of logical practice which should be taken into account. Then, I propose a Kuhnian perspective on logical disagreement. According to my view, there is a paradigm at work, in which scientists may use non-classical logics in order to solve some specific puzzles, but classical logic stays in a privileged position, as a common language and as a general theory of reasoning. This role cannot be fulfilled by other logics, and therefore the comparison between classical and non-classical logics is not like a regular comparison between competing hypotheses in science. Classical logic is not the ?best available theory?, but the fundamental piece of our scientific paradigm. My position is still anti-exceptionalist: logic is like any other science, or at least like any other science which can be characterized by Kuhnian paradigms.