Pilar Terrés Villalonga (Universidad de Salamanca): Minimalism, contextualism, and the sameness of meaning across logics

When:
20 January, 2023 @ 11:30 am – 1:30 pm
2023-01-20T11:30:00+01:00
2023-01-20T13:30:00+01:00

Substructural logics emerge from the rejection of some structural rules in the full structural classical logic, which allows substructural logics to reject classically valid inferences without varying the rules of logical connectives. In view of this observation, many theorists have assumed that there is some minimal meaning for logical connectives, codified in their operational rules, that coincides across logics. Hence, minimalism is an inferentialist view on the meaning of logical vocabulary that identifies the meaning of logical connectives with their operational rules in sequent calculus. The operational rules, therefore, fix the meaning as well as define a sameness criteria of connectives across logics. However, in this talk I want to defend that what counts as an operational rule is logic-dependent, and hence, meaning, as well as sameness of meaning, become logic dependent. From this thesis, a contextualist view about logical connectives naturally emerges: the contribution of a logical connective to an utterance is dependent on the particular logic that should govern the discourse, without a primary or literal meaning independent of the context.