Abstract

This book presents an in-depth and critical reconstruction of Prawitz’s epistemic grounding, and discusses it within the broader field of proof-theoretic semantics. The theory of grounds is also provided with a formal framework, through which several relevant results are proved. Investigating Prawitz’s theory of grounds, this work answers one of the most fundamental questions in logic: why and how do some inferences have the epistemic power to compel us to accept their conclusion, if we have accepted their premises? Prawitz proposes an innovative description of inferential acts, as applications of constructive operations on grounds for the premises, yielding a ground for the conclusion. The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the author discusses the reasons that have led Prawitz to abandon his previous semantics of valid arguments and proofs. The second part presents Prawitz’s grounding as found in his ground-theoretic papers. Finally, in the third part, a formal apparatus is developed, consisting of a class of languages whose terms are equipped with denotation functions associating them to operations and grounds, as well as of a class of systems where important properties of the terms can be proved.