Logical constants

Mind (2008)
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Abstract

Logic is usually thought to concern itself only with features that sentences and arguments possess in virtue of their logical structures or forms. The logical form of a sentence or argument is determined by its syntactic or semantic structure and by the placement of certain expressions called “logical constants.”[1] Thus, for example, the sentences Every boy loves some girl. and Some boy loves every girl. are thought to differ in logical form, even though they share a common syntactic and semantic structure, because they differ in the placement of the logical constants “every” and “some”. By contrast, the sentences Every girl loves some boy. and Every boy loves some girl. are thought to have the same logical form, because “girl” and “boy” are not logical constants. Thus, in order to settle questions about logical form, and ultimately about which arguments are logically valid and which sentences logically true, we must distinguish the “logical constants” of a language from its nonlogical expressions

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John MacFarlane
University of California, Berkeley

Citations of this work

Inferentialism.Florian Steinberger & Julien Murzi - 2017 - In Steinberger Florian & Murzi Julien (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Language. pp. 197-224.
Formal Ontology.Jani Hakkarainen & Markku Keinänen - 2023 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural Language.Andrea Iacona - 2018 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
Replies to Rosen, Leiter, and Dutilh Novaes.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):817-837.

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