Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Recently, there has been a significant upsurge of interest in what has come to be known as the 'Adoption Problem', first developed by Saul Kripke in 1974. The problem purports to raise a difficulty for Quine’s anti-exceptionalist conception of logic. In what follows, we first offer a statement of the problem and argue that, so understood, it depends upon natural but resistible assumptions. We then use that discussion as a springboard for developing a different adoption problem, arguing that, for a significant class of basic logical principles, there is indeed a difficulty in seeing how they might be ‘freely adopted,’ thereby vindicating something close to the spirit of Kripke’s original claim. This first part of our argument will enforce a significant qualification of Quine’s claim that basic logical principles can be empirically confirmed. In the concluding sections of the paper, we turn to the question, specifically, of the empirical revisability of logic, arguing that when proper attention is paid to the role of reasoning in theory revision, it does indeed emerge that anti-exceptionalism, in full generality, is untenable.
Source: Mind
DOI: 10.1093/mind/fzad011
Authors: Paul Boghossian, Crispin Wright
Institutions: New York University, University of Stirling
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4388577186