Abstract
In his last papers about deontic logic, von Wright sustained that there is no genuine logic of norms. We argue in this paper that this striking statement by the father of deontic logic should not be understood as a death sentence to the subject. Rather, it indicates a profound change in von Wright’s understanding about the epistemic and ontological role of logic in the field of norms. Instead of a logical constructivism of deontic systems revealing a necessary structure of prescriptive discourse, which marked his earlier efforts, he adopted the view that such systems should be seem as mere objects of comparison, i.e. as providing practical standards of rationality for norm-giving activity. Within such view he proposed an interpretation of standard deontic logic in such a way to free deontic logicians from the philosophical difficulties related to the so-called Jørgensen’s dilemma and deontic paradoxes. This effort, as we claim in the present paper, is an application of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic method to dissolve philosophical difficulties caused by the use of logical tools to model relations between norms.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo for the pos-doc grant (Proc. No. 04/10480-0) to the development of this paper at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and at Utrecht University. I am enormously grateful to G.H. von Wright for kindly receiving me in 2001 at Helsinki for conversations which were the germen of the ideas developed in this paper.
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Maranhão, J.S.A. von Wright’s Therapy to Jørgensen’s Syndrome. Law and Philos 28, 163–201 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-008-9035-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-008-9035-9