Abstract

Just what forms do (or should) our cognitive attitudes towards scientific theories take? The nature of cognitive commitment becomes particularly puzzling when scientists' commitments are) inconsistent. And inconsistencies have often infected our best efforts in science and mathematics. Since there are no models of inconsistent sets of sentences, straightforward semantic accounts fail. And syntactic accounts based on classical logic also collapse, since the closure of any inconsistent set under classical logic includes every sentence. In this essay I present some evidence that there really was a substantial cognitive commitment to OQT, and that some of its characteristics have a simple and straightforward explanation in terms of a model based on a form of paraconsistent logic.