Logical Instrumentalism and Concatenation

Year 2019, Issue: 51, 153 - 160, 31.12.2019

Teresa Kouri Kissel

Abstract

Logical pluralism is the theory that there is more than one right logic. Logical instrumentalism is the view that a logic is a correct logic if it can be used to fruitfully pursue some deductive inquiry. Logical instrumentalism is a version of logical pluralism, since more than one logic can be used fruitfully. In this paper, I will show that a logical instrumentalist must accept linear logic as a correct logic, since linear logic is useful for studying natural language syntax. I further show that this means that the logical instrumentalist must accept a wide range of connectives, in particular concatenation. I end by explaining why this is a feature rather than a bug.

Keywords

Logical pluralism, linear logic, conjunction, concatenation

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