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Logical Consequence Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

José M. Sagüillo
José M. Sagüillo*
Affiliation:
Department of Logic, University of Santiago De Compostela, Santiago de Compostela 15701, SpainE-mail: , lflgsagu@usc.es
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Extract

Tarski's 1936 paper, “On the concept of logical consequence”, is a rather philosophical, non-technical paper that leaves room for conflicting interpretations. My purpose is to review some important issues that explicitly or implicitly constitute its themes. My discussion contains four sections: (1) terminological and conceptual preliminaries, (2) Tarski's definition of the concept of logical consequence, (3) Tarski's discussion of omega-incomplete theories, and (4) concluding remarks concerning the kind of conception that Tarski's definition was intended to explicate. The third section involves subsidiary issues, such as Tarski's discussion concerning the distinction between material and formal consequence and the important question ofthe criterion for distinguishing between logical and non-logical terms.

§1. Preliminaries. In this paper an argument is a two-part system composed of a set of propositions P (the premise-set) and a single proposition c (the conclusion). The expression ‘c is a [logical] consequence of P’ is used with the same meaning as the expression ‘c is [logically] implied by P’. The expressions ‘is a logical consequence of’ and the converse ‘implies’ are relational. Often, I shall be talking in the same sense of validity of an argument. Validity is a property of arguments; an argument with premise-set P and conclusion c is valid if and only if P implies c; i.e., c is a logical consequence of P. Notice that this notion of argument is strictly ontic; it does not involve any agent that thinks, determines or establishes that a given proposition is or is not a consequence of a given set of propositions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of Symbolic Logic , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , June 1997 , pp. 216 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1997

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