Art of Necessity

THE ART OF NECESSITY:
Deductivism, Modality, and the Limiting of Reason

Adrian Heathcote Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy The University of Sydney
Contents
1 2 Introduction Abductive Inference and Invalidity 2.1 Imprimis . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Invalidity . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Implications . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Inconsistency . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Inference . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Inx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 17 17 21 30 35 42 46 48 48 54 60 64 70
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Validity and Necessity 3.1 The Conditions of Validity . . . 3.2 The Ambiguity of Truth Tables 3.3 Substitutional Semantics . . . . 3.4 First Order Models . . . . . . . . 3.5 Tarski and Logical Consequence
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Models and Modalities 4.1 The Necessity of Set Theory . . . . 4.2 The Insufciency of Set Theory . . 4.3 The First-Order Thesis . . . . . . . . 4.4 Skolem Relativity . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Modal Logic and First-Order Logic Circularity and Deductivism 5.1 Philosophical Preliminaries 5.2 The Nature of Circularity . . 5.3 Relevance and Conditionals 5.4 The Measure of Necessity . . 5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . ii
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The Impoverishment of Empiricism 6.1 The Medieval Origins . . . . . 6.2 Ockhamist Empiricism . . . . 6.3 The Generalised Euthyphro . 6.4 Empiricism and Mathematics . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . .
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135 135 139 145 152 162
iv
The Art of Necessity
Chapter 1
Introduction
hat do we need, in the way of inferential machinery, to properly think about the world? How much is enough? A very common answer to this question is: not much; rst-order logic, the staple of logic courses throughout the world, should be sufcient. But is that right? Can all rational enquiry be reduced to that handful of rules? I argue in this book that it cannot. Let me coin the term inferential essentialism to describe the view that some set of inferences I is sufcient to reason about the world. Obviously I may be very large or very small. This book is particularly directed at two common forms of inferential essentialism that set I as rather small. The rst view I call, following David Stove, Deductivism.1 It insists that only deductive inference is proper, correct, reasoning; but it is more usefully characterised by what it rules out, which is principally probabilistic and abductive reasoning. The second view is more restrictive still: it could be given the ungainly name: rstorderism. It holds that only rst-order inference is to count as inference proper. Typically one who holds this view will reject modal inferences, or higher-order inferences, along with, but not necessarily, probabilistic and abductive inference. All philosophers are inferential essentialists of some sort or anotheri.e. everyone has a view of how much we need in the way of inferential resources though it may not always be explicit. Moreover the vast majority of philosophers, now and throughout history, have thought that I must be a rather small set. This is even reected in the way that philosophers are taughtfor we usually think that a course in rst-order logic is sufcient training to deal
1
David Stove Hume, Probability, and Induction in Philosophical Review, 1967, pp.160
177.
with philosophical problems, and most undergraduates would be exposed to no more. There may be philosophical reasons why such a narrow base set is thought to be attractive: philosophers have wanted both to propose theories as well as to criticise the theories of others. However, if we are to do this then we must be in possession of a comparatively simple set of inferential rules so that we can check any given inference against them. If the inference set were innite, or even just very large, it would be more difcult to make such a check. And were this so we would not be able to see of every given inference whether it was valid or invalidleading to a kind of inferential or critical paralysis. But to say that this view has been commonly held does not necessarily mean that it has been explicitly avowedrather my point is that philosophy seems often to be conducted as if it were being held to be true. It is, as it were, part of the unconscious of philosophy. I want to argue in this book for a large, possibly innite, set I. That is, I argue that narrow inferential essentialism has been responsible for a large number of philosophical problems, of a rather disparate character. Freeing philosophy from this assumption will produce a more realistic methodology, as well as giving us greater leverage on philosophical problems. But that is for the remainder of the bookin this chapter I want to describe the historical background in more detail, to set the scene for what follows. * Throughout its history philosophy has been largely Deductivist. This estimate of the ubiquitousness of Deductivism may seem to contain an exaggeration, but if it does it is only, I believe, a very slight one. There have indeed been many philosophers who have argued for the importance of inductive inference, or probabilistic inference in generaland, indeed, much of the best work of the last sixty years has been due to them. (The names of Ramsey, Carnap, Richard Jeffrey, Henry Kyberg, Brian Skyrms, and Patrick Suppes spring immediately to mind.) Likewise one of the greatest philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, Leibniz, had an advanced and prescient understanding of the importance of probabilistic inference. And in the same century we have the invaluable work of Arnauld and Nicole, in The Port-Royal Logic. But as philosophically important as these contributions have been they clearly do not constitute the dominant tradition. From St Augustine through to the end of the Middle Ages, with the Ockhamists, and on into the early-modern philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, the entire Continental Idealist tradition to the present day, the Nineteenth Century British Idealist tradition, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Ayer, the Oxford Ordinary Language philosophers, Popper, Feyerabend, Quine, Rorty and many moreall
Introduction
have explicitly eschewed probabilistic inference, or else simply ignored it completely. If one looks at the main themes that have dominated philosophy, the Deductivist core is readily apparentproponents of non-deductive modes of inference, like Arnauld, Leibniz, Mill, and Keynes have been minor dissenting voices largely unheard in the din of Deductivist Orthodoxy. The philosopher who made the difference was, I suggest, David Hume. Prior to the middle of the Seventeenth Century the neglect of non-deductive inference was perfectly natural since almost nothing was known; there was nothing that constituted even the beginnings of a formal theory of probabilistic inference. By the end of the Seventeenth Century, however, thanks to the efforts of Pascal, Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz, Jacob Bernoulli and others much was known and the beginnings of a formal theory were present. Had philosophy at that point continued in the direction that Leibniz was indicatingin his epistemology at leastour tradition might have been very different to what it was. Two signicant movements intervened, however: the Idealist response to Cartesian Doubt, represented by Berkeley and Hume (of the Treatise, at least); and Humes inductive scepticism. The rst replaced an external world about which evidence could be assembled and competing claims weighed, with an internal world that could be known directly and infallibly, and in which probability had no place; and the second cast doubt on the objective rationality of inductive expectations. After Hume the employment of probabilistic reasoning by philosophers dwindles away to a trickle (with Mill being the great exception); Kant, Humes great heir, rarely mentions probability and never employs it. Probability survived in the mathematicians and scientists of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth CenturyPoisson, Laplace, de Moivre, Markov, Gauss, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and othersbut disappears in the, predominantly Idealist, philosophy of the time. When interest was revived in the 1930s and 40s it came as an intrusion from the outside, as a European importation from mathematics that derived ultimately from the Moscow School of Markov, Khinchin and Kolmogorov. But if the rejection of probabilistic reasoning in philosophy from the middle of the Eighteenth Century onwards was largely due to the inuence of Hume, there is still the question of how Deductivism originated. The simple answer, canvassed above, that before the Seventeenth Century nothing was known, begs the obvious question of why not? How was it that, with an interest in games of chance going back at least to Antiquity, and the use of evidential enquiry being much older still, a theory of probability and chance took so long to develop? It is at least possible that the focus on deductive inference inhibited the mathematisation of the subject, for that only emerged with Cardano in the Renaissance, when Scholasticism had begun to loosen its hold on the
scientic mind. However, this idea that, on one side of the Seventeenth Century it was Scholasticism that stied probability theory, whereas on the other it was Hume, though undoubtedly correct in outline, presents too discontinuous a picture of the history of philosophy. In fact, I maintain, it was the very same impulse at work on either side of the interregnum represented by the Scientic Revolution, and it succeeded in both instances in causing a signicant divergence of science from philosophymaking for the two cultures of C.P. Snow. One can trace this original impulse back to William of Ockham. Ockham represented a radical, and purifying, change in the development of philosophy he was the rst philosopher to be, in Reinhold Seebergs phrase, fanatical about logic. Certainly Ockham was the beneciary of the logical researches of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, but he possessed a synoptic view that went well beyond that of his predecessors, and a quite unique understanding of the modal concepts involved in logical inference itself. In his Summa Totius Logic we nd a schematic breakdown of the forms of admissible inference. For example, the eighth-eleventh propositions say: From something necessary something contingent does not follow; Something impossible does not follow from something possible; From an impossibility anything follows; What is necessary follows from everything. The signicance of these schemata lies in the way they partition statements into distinctive categories, and immediately suggest differing epistemic roles. For if one combines these statements with a general empiricism, derived from Aristotle and prominent in Aquinas, that all knowledge derives from sensory experience, and the further claim that experience delivers only contingent truths, then certain things follow. The propositions given above tell us that necessary truths only imply necessary truths, that they are, in a phrase, inferentially closed; but this means that a knowledge of what is necessarily truefor example, that God existscan reveal nothing about the world that we nd around us. Thus we cant check whether a necessity is really true by making any observations on the natural world. And just as the inferentially closed realm of the necessarily true does not reach down to the contingent, so also God is an unknowable being, remote and removed from what occurs here on Earth. The two realms of modal propositions, the necessary and contingent, are reected in the two realms of Being: the divine and the secular. Ockham
Introduction
staunchly maintained this separation and held that the divine was entirely a matter of faith. It is apparent that Ockhams characterisation of the various kinds of inference represents not just a development of modal notions within logic but the rst real attempt at a meta-logic, a logic of logic. For with Ockhams list of propositions it becomes possible to make judgments about the validity of whole groups of inferences simply by examining the character of their premises and conclusions. It is here, I think, that Ockhams startling originality lies, and it seems to have been missed by the traditional commentators on Ockham. With this powerful set of modal principles governing the nature of logical entailment we have the beginnings of Deductivism. All of Ockhams philosophy was a matter of uncompromisingly drawing out the consequences of this relatively small set of propositions about the nature of logic and experience. His nominalism, for example, was really little more than an insistence that we are acquainted in our experience only with particulars: we perceive no essences (which would be necessities) and it will accomplish nothing to place such essences as concepts in the mind of God. It does not appear to have been Ockhams intention to deny that there is an objective difference between, say, a hawk and a hand-saw, merely that whatever makes that difference cannot be an independent entity. In a sense, perhaps, we might see him as more resembling a modern Trope theorist than a modern nominalist. Likewise Ockhams stand on causal necessities can be seen to be a consequence of his views on what experience can reveal. He held that there was no necessity making one thing happen as a result of something else happening; all there is to causal situations is regular successiona purely contingent relationfor necessities are not, by their nature, observable. This goes along with the Two Realms idea: the world of nature is a world of contingency, and the necessities are the special preserve of the Divine. It was here perhaps, more than anywhere else, that Ockhams inuence on his contemporaries was greatest, for his doctrine about natural necessities had profound theological consequences. To maintain that there were no causal necessities allowed God complete freedom to act in the world, and, indeed, Ockham and his followers later in the Fourteenth Century outbid one another in what they claimed God could do. For God was not bound by covenants, or our earthly conceptions of right and wrong, or our sense of what should reward the pious Christian life: God was free to love those who hated him and hate those who loved him; He is absolutely unconstrained in what He may will, and nothing can compel a particular response from Him, thus grace is only ever freely given, never earned: He is ultimately ineffable and unknowable. One can see in this the beginnings of Luthers protest against the Church, and also perhaps
of the mystical irrationalism of the later neo-Platonists. If Aquinas is the great synthesiser, trying to make all of our knowledge, religious and secular, of a piece, then Ockham is the great decouplerof the divine from the secular, but also of the parts of the natural world from each other. In Ockhamist metaphysics we have a punctiform knowledge of particulars but there is nothing that cements any of these particulars together to make a functioning whole: the world is all topologically disconnected. A measure of Ockhams enormous inuence can be gleaned from the complaint of the Chancellor of Florence, the Humanist and Bibliophile, Coluccio Salutati, at the end of the Fourteenth Century, a complaint addressed to his countrymen who . . . y the heights of logic and philosophy without understanding or even reading the texts of Aristotle, for they search out among the Britons at the end of the world this or that treatise, as if our Italy was not sufcient for their erudition. These works they pore over without books and the writers of good philosophy to help them, and they learn from them dialectic and physics and whatsoever soaring (transcendens) speculation deals with.2 Undoubtedly Salutati intended to refer to philosophers beyond the Ockhamist group, philosophers like Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Suiseth and William of Hentisberybut these were of comparatively minor inuence as against the Oxford Ockhamists. But whatever inuence Ockham had in shaping the Humanism of the Italian City States is itself insignicant in comparison with his inuence closer to home. Certainly it is striking that we nd Ockhams argument on causal necessities repeated, with little modication, four centuries later in Berkeley. In the Principles he notes that As to the opinion that there are no corporeal causes, this has been heretofore maintained by some of the Schoolmen, as it is of late by others among the modern philosophers; who though they allow matter to exist, yet will have God alone to be the efcient cause of all things. These men saw that among all the objects of sense there was none which had any power or activity included in it; and that by consequence this was likewise true of whatever bodies they supposed to exist without the mind, like unto the immediate
2 See The Fifteenth Century, 13991485 by E.F. Jacob in The Oxford History of England series, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. pp. 6767.
Introduction objects of sense. But then, that they should suppose an innumerable multitude of created beings, which they acknowledge are not capable of producing any one effect in nature, and which therefore are made to no manner or purpose, since God might have done everything as well without themthis I say, though we should allow it possible, must yet be a very unaccountable and extravagant supposition. (Principles of Human Knowledge, sect. 53)
Thus, according to Berkeley, natural causation does not exist because nothing natural existsit is all Spirit. Why try to mix an intensional causation with a physical ontology? Why not make it all intensional? Berkeley objects to the extravagant hypothesis of the Schoolmen only because he prefers the even more extravagant hypothesis that is his own. By comparison, Humes views on causation seem to be a return to a pure Ockhamist position. He believes that the causal necessities we think are in the world are really a projection of our inductive expectations based on past experience and he goes on to insinuate that there is something logically unintelligible in supposing them to exist in the world. The basis of this unintelligibility appears to lie in an Ockhamist insistence that we can observe only particulars (bundles of Humes sensible qualities) and that these particulars are all contingent entitiesafter all, what would it be like to observe in a single instance a necessity, something that could not have been otherwise? How would we observe that could not? Hume nds it absurd that a sensible quality, or even the repetition of a sensible quality, could disclose this modal nature. Thus Hume believes that our belief in causal necessities is an illusion fostered by our habit of reading into the world things that have only a subjective existence: in short, causal necessities are secondary qualities. On the questionsurely, now, the pressing questionof how change occurs, of what makes one thing happen seemingly as a result of something else happening, Hume is either a strong sceptic (there is nothing there because there can be nothing there) or a weak sceptic (there may be something there but we cant know about it) depending on which passages one chooses to emphasise.3 Unlike the Scholastics Hume
I am aware that I am here jumping into a lively contemporary debate on the correct interpretation of Hume, the debate on whether Hume is a Realist or not. The terms of this debate have often seemed a little mysterious to the present author, so let me just say here that I think that those who think Hume is a Realist (under the skin, or whatever) have been reading Humeencouraged one has to say by his own inadvertent misdirectiontoo much in the light of the contemporary scientic (i.e. Newtonian) philosophy. Such a reading ies in the face of his manifest ignoring of contemporary science (except in one solitary footnote) and is forced to mangle his quite explicit and clear arguments to the contrary. My own view is that Hume is better seen as reviving a Medieval Ockhamism in the light of contemporary Lockean empiri3
does not have available to him a God who can ll-in the gaps and provide the active force so he is left only with human psychology. This is, then, forced to do a great deal of the explanatory work that would normally be left to natural science. But if Humes metaphysics could be described as Ockham minus God his epistemology is simply pure Ockham (for the simple reason that Ockhams epistemology is already minus God). His denial of causal necessities decouples events one from the other so that all that is left is regular succession and this, in turn, has implications for the foundations of induction. Neither pure (Demonstrative) reasoning nor deducing the logical consequences from our past experience can lead us to believe that the future will resemble the past, since it is always conceivable, or possible, that the course of nature may change, that snow may, in the future, burn rather than feel cold. But how does Hume know that it is possible that the course of nature may change? Only because he antecedently believes that there is no necessary connection between touching snow and it feeling coldfor if there were it would not be possible for it to be otherwise.4 However, once Hume draws the conclusion that it is possible that the course of nature may change he is immediately inclined to believe that inductive inference is without foundation and therefore, itself, merely a subjective matter. Thus Humes philosophy is of a piece: necessary connections are projections of our inductive expectations and the latter are merely the workings of custom and habit. In this way Hume appears to have shown that there can be no inductive inferencethat deductive inference is the only legitimate form of inference, the only one that has a foundation. He has, in other words, proven inductive scepticism. The attentive reader of Hume may, however, wonder whether he has done anything more than simply assume inductive scepticismor, what amounts to the same thing, assume Deductivism. His argument merely shows that our inductive expectations cannot have a deductive foundation, it is entirely neutral on the question of whether it has any other sort of foundation, or whether it might not simply be a different species of inference altogether.5 Indeed if one
cism. Thus he is a late Medieval rather than an early Modern. (But one has to say that the misunderstandings of his philosophy were much abetted by his infuriating habit of ignoring all other philosophersas though he were philosophising de novo.) 4 I cannot see that Hume has any non-question begging reason to believe that it is not a necessary truth that snow, tomorrow, will feel cold to the touchparticularly if we allow metaphysical necessities. And his stated reason is manifestly weak and, even, irrelevant. (There is also a confusion that runs through Humes entire discussion of necessary connections between types of events and between tokens. But I will not try to unravel it here.) 5 Of course if one could show that our inductive expectations were unjustied even as a species of probabilistic inference then one would have an interesting argument for inductive
Introduction
examines Humes argument one can see that it is another example of an inferential closure argument: descriptions of our actual experience are deductively closed, in the sense that no statements about what we might, in the future, experience, follow from them. It will help to have the argument before us in more detail. Let F be a statement about the future (say, that tomorrow snow will feel cold to the touch, or that bread will nourish); let N be a set of necessary statements, as complete as our knowledge allowsthat constitutes the basis for what Hume calls demonstrative reasoning; let P constitute a set of statements that summarises our past experience. Now, form the deductive closure of Ndenoted Cl(N)which is to consist of the set of logical consequences of N, and likewise the deductive closure of Pdenoted Cl(P). Humes inductive scepticism is, very simply, the claim that F Cl(N) Cl(P). In other words all statements about the future na/ tures of objects are outside the deductive closure of what we might genuinely know by reasonwhich is delimited by Cl(N) and Cl(P). (Note that if we were to consider the probabilistic closure of the set P which consists of all the statements rendered probable by P, and which we will denote Pr(P)then the argument no longer obviously goes throughindeed seems pretty obviously false, in the light of the success of predictive statistical methods.) In fact, once we see Humes argument in this light it becomes clear that many of his distinctive arguments are of the same kindin particular his isought gap argument is another inferential closure argument. (All ought statements are outside the inferential closure of all is-statements.) So also is his Idealist argument (in the Treatise) for our having no knowledge (based on Reason) of an external world. (All statements about the external world are outside the inferential closure of the set of sense-data statements.) These inferential closure arguments come, I maintain, originally from Ockham, and have their basis in the logical and theological currents of the Fourteenth Century. It is for this reason that I think Humeanism should be regarded as a phase of a remontant Ockhamism. And if this makes Hume seem less original than we might have thought, it should, at least restore to Ockham some of the recognition that has been denied him.6 There is, however, a problem with Ockhamism, whether in the original or
scepticism. But if not, not. 6 It is ironic that Ockham is remembered mainly for his razor (Frustra t per plura quod potest eri per pauciora, or as it is commonly rendered, dont multiply entities beyond necessity) since this is not at all original to him. The principle is known to have been adduced by Peter of Spain, later Pope John xxi, over seventy years earlier, and is likely to be much older than that.
10
in Humes formulation, that does not appear to have been noticed until long after the view had become accepted, and even taken for granted. The problem is that in espousing the empiricism that was current at the time, Ockham did not have available to him the resources necessary to provide an account of our knowledge of logical and mathematical truths. On his own view such truths were necessary truths, as were valid inferences (usually seen as necessary conditionals, or consequenti). Yet, also on his own account, observations yielded only contingent statements to serve as premises, or antecedents; how then do we know the very logical truths which serve as the machinery for ensuring inferential closure? How did these necessary truths manage to get through the nely sifting empiricist lter? For Ockham these statements were ultimately grounded either in faith and revelation, or in meaning. By Humes time it had become customary to try to solve this problem by thinking of these logical truths as true solely in virtue of their meanings, and this has become the standard Empiricist view ever since.7 The problem is that this will involve us in a Euthyphro dilemma: are logical statements necessary because they are analytic; or is the language constrained by an antecedent set of necessary truths that place limitations on what sentences may meanin other words, are they apparently analytic only because of some underlying necessity? (For example, does the law of non-contradiction seem true because of the arbitrary meaning assigned to and and not, or is the meaning constrained to reect some antecedent necessary logical truths?) If we try to explain the necessity of necessary truths as arising out of analyticities then we will be left with nothing to explain how these analyticities arise. Language will be entirely contingentand so, consequently, will the necessary truths! (The analogy with the standard Euthyphro is quite apparent here: if goodness arises from the will of the gods, and that will is not a matter of conforming to an antecedent goodnessif it is not so constrainedthen the gods could have willed what we now regard as bad to be good.) It took Quine, as the great successor to Hume and the Empiricist tradition, to embrace this horn of the dilemma with the needed radicalism; for only Quine seemed to be aware that even logical necessities had to be purged from a properly constituted, and self-consistent (itself a modal notion!) Empiricism. Thus, Quine embraced the idea that necessities arise only out of analyticitiesand then embraced the consequent idea that there are no genuine analyticities: it is all
7 Though this view of Hume is very much the standard interpretation there has been at least one voice raised in dissent (see W. A. Suchtings Hume and Necessary Truth Dialogue, v, (1966), pp. 4760. Suchting argues that Hume should be seen as having a psychological theory of necessary truth rather than a linguistic one. The following Euthyphro dilemma will apply mutatis mutandis to a psychological theory as well, however.
Introduction
11
contingent, and may change as our account of the world changes. (Just as, with the standard Euthyphro, Ockham had earlier argued that goodness arises only out of Gods Will, and that since that Will is completely unconstrained, it may change at any moment, making the bad suddenly good.) But as audacious as Quines response to the problem was, and is, it is also on examination full of difculties and scarcely believable.8 By following Ockhamist Empiricism to its logical conclusion Quine showed, with great effectiveness, that the view is unworkable. For this elimination of logical necessities to work it would be necessary for there to be a systematic presentation of rst-order logical truth and validity in terms that did not involve necessity but that instead made use of the free substitution of linguistic items. This is how Tarskis account of logical truth and consequence assumed its importance, whether he intended it to be used this way or not: it offered a completion of Ockhamist Empiricism that would be satisfactory on its own (i.e. Quinean) terms. I will argue in chapters three and four that this will not work and that, in effect, the above Euthyphro cannot be solved this way: we need modal notions if we are to understand logical truthor logical truth will itself become undenable. This touches on another matter. As I suggested earlier, Deductivism is likely to go along with the view that logical inference is, somehow, psychologically tractable. This, in turn, is likely to accompany the notion that logic is not continuous with the surrounding mathematics, that it is not, for example, hostage to the existence of suspect abstract entities, like numbers, or vectors, or sets. For if it were hostage to such entities awkward epistemological questions could be raised concerning our access to logical truth. In a sense our knowledge of logical truth would become conditional on our knowledge of the existence of such entities. Such a situation would put in jeopardy the entire notion, central to Deductivism, that logical inference is our prior, and exclusive, means of deciding the cogency of metaphysical claims; that it is not only the nal arbiter, but the sole one. This idea, that our logic of choice is the sole logic that there is; that our logic is not metaphysically hostage to the existence of abstract entities; that it is not about anything particular, but about everything; that it is, in a phrase, topic-neutralthis idea, or bundle of ideas, is, when applied
Of course, some might say that there is much more to Quines position than just the response to the above Euthyphro. One might emphasise his rejection of intensional notions, the failure of substitutability, the need for a purely extensional language for physics, etc. Yet much of this is really the Euthyphro in disguised form. What reason does Quine have for believing that science is, or will be, expressible in a purely extensional language? No reason that I can discern. (We may agree that it would be advantageous if it could be so expressed, but that is no reason to believe that it can be.)
8
12
to rst-order logic, called the rst-order thesis. It goes with the ancient idea that logic is, so to speak, a skeleton, or frame, or common-core, over which the world is drapedthe world consisting of contingent embellishments on a stem of necessity. Thus we nd in Wittgenstein the view that logical truths are semantically emptythey are about nothing at all. And if logic stands apart, and above from, the world to which it applies, then it is a short step to imagining that philosophy does the same. As Wittgenstein put it in the Tractatus: Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word philosophy must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.) (4.111). It is an idea that goes well with the classical notion that philosophy is a universal methodsince, in some sense, it is about everything there is no room left for it to reect on itself; there is nowhere to stand that is not just philosophy all over againthere is no place from which to exert an Archimedean leverage. I believe that these ideas of separateness and discontinuity are false and, ultimately, damaging; it is one of the main purposes of this book to try to show them so. Mention of (Tractatus-era) Wittgenstein in this context is not accidental as he also is best seen, I suggest, as an Ockhamite Empiricist, and much of his philosophy recapitulates the tradition from Scotus through to Hume. For example, Wittgensteins theory of truth is essentially that of Duns Scotus and therefore Ockham, his modal logic and even his account of the mystical is Ockhamist, and his inductive scepticism, his denial of necessary connections, his demarcation of the meaningful from the meaningless is likewise fundamentally Ockhamist. Where Wittgenstein differs from Hume and much of the later post-Lockean Empiricist tradition is that he is explicitly a Realist. But the same Deductivist thread that runs through the Ockhamist-Humean tradition is also present in Wittgenstein; indeed I think Wittgenstein is the philosopher who best represents, within the Ockhamist Empiricist tradition, a purely Ockhamist logic and metaphysics, freed from the phenomenalism and Idealism of the post-Cartesian Empiricists. By placing Wittgenstein within this line of descent I want to break with the standard view which attempts to present himas perhaps he wished to present himselfas a solitary gure working outside any tradition. The points of similarity, even between his philosophy and Humes, are simply too great to ignore.9 I have already suggested that the Ockhamist Empiricist tradition rather inevitably produces a particular metaphysical picture, one that we nd in OckI am referring here only to Tractatus-era Wittgensteinnot to the Idealist Wittgenstein of the Investigations. It is an interesting question as to how Wittgenstein came by this inuence. I dont think it can be ruled out that, by this time, these ideas had so saturated European thought that they were simply in the air.
9
Introduction
13
ham himself, in Hume and the Humean tradition, and in Wittgenstein. By making everything in the natural world contingent it excluded natural necessities, producing a causally disconnected, discrete, world-view. In Ockhams time there was a sound theological reason for believing this: the natural world was the created world, and thus its existence was contingent upon Gods decision to create it; had there been any necessities in the world they would have placed a limitation on Gods Will. As we have seen, the completely untrammeled nature of Gods freedom was Ockhams ruling principle. It was, thus, completely in keeping with his fundamental beliefs that Ockham saw the world as disconnected and, in a sense, incompleteGod was a necessary being who united the contingent natural world, who knitted it into a whole. But by the time we come to Hume such a metaphysics makes no real intellectual senseand seemed to his contemporaries to y in the face of well-established science. In Hume such disconnectedness goes under the name Humean Distinctness, and sometimes Humean Supervenience. It says that the world consists of loose and separate facts and that everything supervenes on such facts. It is a view that has been endorsed by many modern philosophers under the description, and cover, of Humes Regularity Theory of Causation. The thesis of Humean Distinctness is a metaphysical doctrine that is intimately connected with the view that is often called Logical Atomism. If, at bottom, the world consists of simple facts, or states of affairs, that stand as truth-makers to simple propositions, then, if there were any necessary connections between these facts, they would not be properly atomic, but rather sub-components to the genuinely atomic state of affairs, of which they are abstracted parts. This is because logical atomism is intimately linked to the idea that atoms should be free to enter into larger and larger molecules in an unrestricted manner. Thus, atoms are essential because they are the building blocks of a combinatorial theory of possibility: the actual world is one large molecule, another possible world is a rearrangement to give another molecule. This is the view that we nd behind the Tractatus but it is also the underlying metaphysics in Hume, where it could be called Phenomenal Atomism: there is only punctiform sense experience and there can be no connections between distinct sense experience that is not also, contrary to either common understanding or our phenomenal limitations, simply another sense experience. Thus Humean Distinctness implies Atomism. I do not argue the point in what follows, but my view is that this Atomism, and the Distinctness Thesis that goes with it, is fairly decisively controverted by Quantum Mechanics. Indeed it is this that is usually meant when it is said that quantum systems can exhibit non-local behaviour. If one has a pair of particles, prepared so as to be anti-correlated, then the pure state of the com-
14
posite system does not supervene on the mixed states of the components.10 This non-supervenience is as yet poorly understood but it suggests that there is a state-space connection between the two particles, that belies their physical, spatial, separation. This is likely to be a fairly wide-spread phenomenon, so widespread that there seems little hope of recovering a physically meaningful logical atomism. Thus Ockhamist Empiricism has fostered a metaphysics that is empirically false. It is time to abandon it. My claim in this book, then, is that Deductivism and the, historically, closely associated views of Ockhamism and the rst-order thesis, are false and have led us into some pervasive errors. Firstly, in trying to make deductive reasoning do all the inferential work, it has given us an unrealistically narrow base for our epistemology, a narrowness that is all too evident in the most inuential epistemologists: Descartes, Hume and Kant. Secondly, I maintain that in depriving us of an adequate account of necessity it has undercut itself, by allowing no account of logical truth that is both adequate and consistent with its principles. Thirdly, the ofcial reliance on a manifestly inadequate system of deductive reasoning has led to, what one might call, a black-market in informal logic: philosophy has had to rely on a set of informal proscriptions against, say, circular reasoning, or innite regress, where the justication for such proscriptions has been manifestly unclear. Often, in fact, we havent even known what such charges amount to. There is, for example, a vast and inconclusive literature on the topic of circularity that often leaves it unclear whether any deductive inference at all could be free from the fault. But there is an even more egregious problem. Although we know that certain oft-used formal logical systems are sound there has never, to my knowledge, been an argument to suggest that the result of adding these informal proscriptions to that corpus of deductive inferences will result in anything that is consistent, sound, or even useful. For all that we know we might be working with a set of rules and principles that could never be guaranteed to deliver philosophical truths, and that might, indeed, be systematically producing nonsense. I believe that such worries, far from just being idle possibilities, must be
An account of this matter can be found in, for example, R.I.G. Hughes The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1989. See also my Critical Notice of the above in the Australasian Journal Of Philosophy, June, 1994. I should say that there seems no reason at present to believe that, what one could call, object atomism is false: matter does seem to decompose into particulate atoms, namely elementary particles. The atomism that fails in Quantum Theory might be described as property, or attribute, atomism (or, as it is sometimes referred to in Quantum Mechanics, factorisability). Of course, I believe that causal connectedness also shows that the Humean Distinctness Thesis is false, but since it has been much contended against I do not wish to rest too much weight on it here.
10
Introduction
15
taken seriously. In everyday philosophical practice it is all too easy to forget that philosophical methodology has accumulated to its present state from purely contingent historical causes. We are the heirs of argument strategies that originated 2500 years ago in a very different place and at a very different level of logical and scientic knowledge. The Athenian Greeks may even have had very different purposes to those we now have. (Do we still want our philosophy to produce wisdom in their sense? Is it still protable to try to expose all claims to knowledge as impudent, or hubristic, as Socrates attempted to do? Should we still think of the Socratic Dialogue as the proper model for philosophising?) As philosophy has developed to the present day it is characterised by fractures that run partly along the lines of this ancient indebtedness. For example, there are those who believe that all philosophical problems can be traced back in some form to Platoand even that they may nd their best expression therewhile others think that the distant past has little, or nothing, to teach them.11 This is not a debate that I intend to enter into here (or elsewhere, if it comes to that). My concern is with the soundness of the methodology that we now possess. I will argue in chapter ve that Deductivism is responsible for some of the confusions about the nature of circular reasoning, taking a dialectical fault and trying to understand it using only the resources of deductive reasoning. I believe that this also resolves some other long-standing puzzles about the nature of logic. Thus, at least in part, this book has as its concernand I am aware that the term will probably have a number of disagreeable associations for at least some readersa claim in metaphilosophy. I argue that philosophy itself has gone awry from its having a fundamentally awed methodology, or at least from the absence of a more complete set of methodological tools. In one sense, then, this book is about the history of an idea, but it is also a straightforward discussion of certain standard topics in the philosophy of logic: necessity, validity, implication, and inference. And just as mathematics has benetted enormously from the development of meta-mathematics, so too can philosophy benet from the close scrutiny of its argument strategies, and its intimate relationship with formal logic. In short, from a metaphilosophy. *
11 A disagreement that is often reected in disputes about the proper structuring of the teaching syllabus. For a spirited defence of the opposing view see Martha Nussbaums Cultivating Humanity. Of course the above remarks are not intended to disparage the Ancients, merely to point out that the gulf that separates us from them is the result of our having two and a half millenia to digest their arguments. We can thus neither go back to the Greeks nor pretend that what we have learned since then does not affect our understanding of their limitations.
16
T HE A RT OF N ECESSITY
It will be worth stating at the outset what I am not going to attempt in this bookto allay any false hopes. Firstly, I am not going to defend, or extend, probabilistic reasoning. That has been done ably by others. Secondly, I am not going to develop, or extend, non rst-order deductive logicsthat project ought to be driven by immediate practical concerns about the need for something beyond existing inferential methods. And again, it has been done ably by others. No, my concern here is to examine the detrimental effect that a particular, very widely pervasive, doctrine has had, on matters that are of immediate concern to all working philosophers. Matters concerning inference, the nature of logical truth, the method of appraising arguments, and a great deal else besides. But I hope that the historical thread runs strongly through the technicalitiesmaking it clear that there are broader explanatory issues that at stake. The plan of the book is as follows: chapter two looks at one immediate consequence for philosophical methodology of the exclusive reliance on deductive inference. It argues that abductive inference is essential. Chapters 3 & 4 discuss the attempt to eliminate necessities from logican attempt that, if successful, would effectively complete the Ockhamist program, by turning its own scepticism against its inferential base. I argue that it has substantial metaphysical costs that make it unappealing. In chapter 5 I turn to other aspects of inference that have been rendered obscure and problematic by Deductivism. Chapter 6 closes with a discussion of how to reform Empiricism and the philosophy of mathematics without the distorting inuence of Deductivism and the Ockhamist tradition. Thus it is my purpose to show that seemingly diverse problems have the same underlying root causeand that this cause has been missed hitherto because it runs so deeply through our philosophical tradition. My hope is that now, when we have untangled some of the knots that this philosophy has tied us in, we will nish with something that is methodologically clearer and richerand also less likely to place us at random from the truth.
Chapter 2
Abductive Inference and Invalidity

bductive inference, or inference to the best explanation (in Gilbert Harmans felicitous phrase), is useful precisely when there are no deductive grounds for accepting a given conclusion. In scientic contexts we take it to be rational to accept the best explanation that we can nd for a phenomenon while acknowledging that the data do not deductively force the choice of any explanation. We take this to be rational because we think that a rational person should seek to optimise the truth of their beliefs about the world, and to accept the best explanation is surely to accept the theory that is the optimal choice. Abductive inferences, then, just like their near relations the inductive inferences, allow us to make choices between competing theories and explanations in circumstances in which deductive certainty is unattainable. Put this way inference to the best explanation looks to be an inevitable component of our rag-bag of maxims governing rational action and explanation (a rag-bag that will include Ockhams Razor and other principles). To many it may appear even more exalted; it may be seen as a virtual tautology: if we shouldnt accept the best explanation, then what? the second-best explanation? the fth?
2.1
I MPRIMIS
Yet although inference to the best explanation looks at rst blush to be a necessary part of our criteria for theory acceptance it is not unassailable. A critic might concede that we do use such inferences in our scientic reasoning and yet hold that it is not rational to do so. This has been claimed about inductive 17
18
reasoning, from Hume through to the Popperians, so why not hold it about abductive inference as well? In particular someone might hold that abductive reasoning, like inductive reasoning, requires a foundation, a non-circular justication. If none can be found then abductive inference is without warrant, as Hume put it when discussing induction. In the previous chapter I described a position which I called Deductivism. It is the view that only deductive inference is rational, well-founded, or warranted. For the Deductivist therefore, neither induction nor abduction provide rational grounds for believing a conclusion. When deductive grounds are absent we have scepticism or, as sometimes with Hume, Nature herself must make up the difference by providing us with the requisite beliefs directly. But, as I also argued in the preceding chapter, Hume is far from alone in holding to this kind of logical purism. To mention again just one example, Karl Popper, as an avowed disciple of Hume, and the Popperians, as avowed disciples of Popper, are the heirs to this position, for on their view only deductively certain conclusions warrant belief: induction, and by extension, abduction, do not provide rational ground for accepting a conclusion. In fact on the Popperian view scientic methodology is cut down to just one deductive rule: modus tollens. It is this lone inference rule that underwrites falsication, and falsication is made to do all of the work on the Popperian scheme. If Deductivism has been the overwhelmingly dominant tradition in the history of philosophy then, as suggested in the previous chapter, its usual context has been Ockhamist Empiricism. But one could easily be a Deductivist and not be an Empiricistindeed Descartes in the Meditations is a particularly clear example of this. But we may conjecture that Rationalism did not have a sufciently attractive epistemology to recommend it to subsequent generations and to a great extent it represents the road not taken in modern philosophy. For our purposes here, however, the main point is that Deductivism is a broader doctrine than Ockhamist Empiricism. Sometimes in this book my concern will be the wider doctrine and at others it will be with the narrower. Here it will be with the wider. One of the main features of deductive reasoning that has caused it to be accorded a special role is its formal character. Inferences can be seen to be valid on the basis of their formal patterns and these formal patterns can be studied independently of the inferences themselves. The formality of deductive reasoning is advantageous if one wishes ones set of maxims for rational assessment to consist in a set of rules that can be stated independently of subject matter. This has been seen as important from the time of Aristotle, on through the Medieval period, and exercises a powerful hold on Twentieth Century philosophy. Undoubtedly, throughout the history of philosophy, it was the certainty
19
of deductive inference that led it to have the unique role that it had, but in the Twentieth Century, where fallibilism has largely replaced certainty-based epistemologies, it is the fact that deductive inference can be formalised that has kept it in central position. The suspicion that many philosophers feel for inductive and abductive inference probably reects the difculty (or impossibility!) that is thought to attend the formalisation of those inferences. If they cannot be formalised how can we be sure that they are sound, or reliable? Bas van Fraassen is an empiricist who stands as the most recent and articulate representative of this Formalist tradition. But like many modern Formalists van Fraassen is a probabilist; that is, he thinks that rational belief change takes place by revisions of ones subjective probabilities.1 He differs from traditional formalists however in his attitude to the rules that one should adopt when changing ones subjective probabilities. Whereas a Bayesian will have a single rule, conditionalisation, which is applied uninchingly to all new evidence, van Fraassen has only a single negative rule: avoid probabilistic incoherence. Anything that this rule does not exclude is permitted. One might think that such an apparently liberal rule would mean that van Fraassen is in reality an anti-formalist. However, while it is true that this rule permits opportunistic belief revisionsI believe p because I can! much of the laissez-faire attitude is undercut by van Fraassens opposition to abductive inference.2 And it is this opposition that is at issue here. So van Fraassen is opposed to abductive inference. Or, more precisely, he is opposed to the idea that there is a rule of rationality that requires one to believe the best explanation. . . or he is opposed to such a rule when it is interpreted probabilistically? Or ampliatively? (It is a little unclear exactly how strong the conclusion is intended to be.) But a defender of abductive reasoning could hold the line provided concessions are made elsewhere. Perhaps a strict Bayesian who uses simple conditionalisation could not accept abductive inference on pain of incoherence in his probability revisions (though it is not clear to me that this need be so) but someone who holds to the more liberal Jeffrey Conditionalisationmay abduction not be compatible there? Imperfect rational agents, such as we are, may yet be able to nd room for inference to the best explanation within the motley of rational rules of thumb and imprecise probability assignments. Surely we know too
See Bas C. van Fraassen, Laws & Symmetry, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1989, chapters 6 and 7. 2 It is hard to avoid Formalism once one admits that beliefs are represented by subjective probabilities and that revisions should avoid incoherence. Incoherence is a result of accepting conicting rules for belief revisions.
1
20
little about fallible rationality to rule it out.3 Yet I mention these matters only promptly to drop them. My intention is not to give a detailed account of the role that abductive inference plays in the instrumental rationality of fallible agents but simply to argue that it must play some role. Thus even though I have mentioned van Fraassen as a representative of the kind of abductive scepticism that I wish to argue against I am not going to defend abduction against his specic charges (though the comments above should indicate how I hope such a defence might go). Instead I will present an argument that suggests that inference to the best explanation is an integral part of reasoning, and indeed so entwined with our use of deductive reasoning that the latter would be paralysed without it. Hence in order to defend abduction I will focus not on its usefulness in scientic contexts where Deductivists are all too happy to insist on impossible economies in methodologybut in those contexts where Deductivists nd themselves most comfortable. I will endeavor to place abductive inference at the heart of the Deductivists own methodologywhere they live, as it were. To do this I isolate two elementary claims and argue that they are incompatible. Here are the two claims: AI: Abductive inference is irrational. It is not reasonable to believe that the best explanation is the one most likely to be true, nor therefore is there any rule, no matter how vaguely specied, that licenses such inferences. DR: Deductive refutation is rational. It is reasonable to try to show a position to be unsound by a determination of the invalidity of the arguments used. We are not warranted in believing the conclusions of invalid inferences; thus we are required to revise our beliefs on the determination of invalidity. Of course DR does not say that the only method of refuting an argument is to convict it of invalidity; it is perfectly proper also to show that the argument rests on a false premise. However DR could hardly be denied. The method of reasoning, including reasoning within philosophy itself, consists in large measure of the checking of inferences to ensure that they are valid and, if they are not valid, rejecting them. Even those idealised rational agents who conditionalise are presumed to update their beliefs according to logic. An invalid
The view that Im gesturing toward is proffered by David Lewis in his Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities II (Conditionals, (ed) F. Jackson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, (1991), p.107). I have more to say about credence measures for non-ideal rational agents in chapter 6.
3
21
inference, were it to occur, is presumed to be rationally correctable. Even an ideal agent must be Human enough to admit when he has made a mistake. The determination of an arguments invalidity is made easy in the limiting case when the premises are known to be true and the conclusion false. However in the usual dialectical circumstance the truth or falsity of the conclusion is precisely what is in dispute: the limiting case is not, therefore, of much practical use. That is why we need to have recourse to some other method of refuting an argument and it is this that DR sanctions. Obviously, DR gives expression only to the negative side of Deductivism, the side which concentrates on refutation and the determination of invalidity. But one could be a Deductivist in a positive sense if one only ever asserted that which followed, and which could be shown to follow, from premises that one already held. This cleaving to the good rather than spurning the evil is rarely ever met with in actual Deductivists, however. From Aristotle to the present day, Deductivists have had a critical programme in which the views of others are to be shown-up as resting upon fallacious arguments. This critical emphasis is, one could conjecture, principally responsible for the way in which sceptical conclusions are the usual terminus for philosophical investigations from Hume onwards. Exposing how little reason can establish while wielding it with devastating effect against an opposing position is the great tension, one might almost say the contradiction, that has lain at the heart of much modern philosophy. DR gives expression to this negative side of Deductivism for it is its negative pretensions that I wish to expose. I will argue that AI and DR are in direct conict with one another. Thus although many may have been tempted by the logical purism described above there simply is no coherent position to occupy: one cannot consistently use deductive reasoning in the way that argument requires and also forswear abductive inference. Deductivism ends not in scepticism but in inconsistency.
2.2
I NVALIDITY
It is necessary now to rehearse an argument concerning the problem of determining the invalidity of arguments. The argument is known to many philosophers, in the abstract at least, though it is often neglected in practice. The neglect is rather lamentable given the signicance of the issues for the nature of the philosophical enterprise. Suppose we consider the following argument: (1) If it is sunny in California then it is sunny in Los Angeles It is sunny in Los Angeles
22
The Art of Necessity It is sunny in California
We would normally adjudge this argument to be invalid and would point to the fact that it is a substitution instance of the invalid argument form asserting the consequent. (2) pq q p
Furthermore, ordinary truth tables provide a decision procedure for proving the invalidity of this argument form. The problem arises because the inference that underlies the reasoning just given is itself invalid. The argument in (1) is not invalid because it is a substitution instance of the invalid form (2). That could not be the explanation because the invalid form (2) has valid substitution instances and therefore being a substitution instance of (2) does not guarantee that an argument will be invalid. For example the argument in (3) is a valid substitution instance of the invalid argument form (2). (3) If it is raining in California then it is raining in California It is raining in California It is raining in California.
The correct explanation for the invalidity of the argument (1) is then, not that it is a substitution instance of the argument form (2) but that there is no valid argument form of which it is a substitution instance. We can see this by comparing (1) to (3). (3) is not only a substitution instance of the invalid form (2) it is also a substitution instance of the valid argument form (4). (4) pp p p
The point is that whereas some invalid argument forms have valid substitution instances, all valid argument forms have only valid substitution instances. It follows, then, that if an argument is a substitution instance of some valid argument form that it must be valid. The correct explanation for the invalidity
23
of (1) would then seem to be that it is a substitution instance of (2) and not a substitution instance of any valid argument form.4 Nor is this phenomenon restricted to purely trivial examples, for the argument (5) is valid (5) If either Gwyneth or Bill is here then they are both here Gwyneth and Bill are both here Either Gwyneth or Bill is here.
This is despite the fact that this argument is plainly an instance of asserting the consequentthat is, it is a substitution instance of the invalid form (2). But no matter, because it is also a substitution instance of the valid argument form (6) (p q) (p & q) p&q pq
Obviously it is possible to construct examples of arbitrarily large complexity large enough so that we can no longer see at a glance whether the argument instantiates some valid argument form. The crucial point, however, is that it is quite wrong to infer that an argument is invalid just because it is a substitution instance of some invalid argument form. Thus we cannot, in general, hope to show that an argument is invalid by citing some invalid argument form that it instantiates. We need to show more, namely that there is no valid argument form that it instantiates.5 We may now seem to have found a prescription for determining an arguments invalidity. Unfortunately, an objection can be put even to this most
The signicance of this point was rst brought home to me by the paper The Fallacy behind Fallacies by Gerald Massey in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1981, pp. 489500. The issue was also noted, apparently independently, by David Stove in his book The Rationality of Induction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1986. 5 For the propositional arguments that we are employing here we can make use of the following denition of substitution instance. Let p1 , p2 , . . . pn |= q be an argument form of the propositional calculus with p1 , p2 ,. . . pn and q as propositional variables. If A1 , A2 , . . . An , B, are propositions and A1 , A2 , . . . An |= B is an argument then it is a substitution instance of p1 , p2 . . . pn |= q if there is a function f that maps p1 , p2 ,. . . pn and q to the propositions A1 , A2 ,. . . An , B. If f is a one-to-one function from propositional variables to simple propositions then the form is said to be the specic form of the argument. The argument that we have given above can now be stated thus: if p1 , p2 , . . . pn |= q is a valid argument form then every substitution instance will be a valid argument. However, if p1 , p2 . . . pn |= q is an invalid argument form it does not necessarily follow that a substitution instance will be invalid.
4
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modest proposalindeed the accusation is that the above argument to the prescription for determining invalidity is itself invalid. The objection runs as follows. It does not follow from the fact that the validity of (3) is to be explained by its being a substitution instance of the valid argument form (4) that every valid argument must be a substitution instance of some valid argument form all valid argument forms may indeed have only valid substitution instances and yet not all valid arguments be substitution instances of valid argument forms. In other words, it does not follow that all validity must be formal in nature. We now accept that inductive inferences are not formalthis was the enduring lesson of Goodmans non-projectible grue. Why not accept that not all deductive validity need be formal? David Stove has argued that we should indeed accept this possibility. Let me call deductive arguments whose validity is not formal in nature, if there are any, anomalous valid arguments. The possibility of there being anomalous valid arguments is relevant to the determination of the invalidity of an argument for the following reason: in order to establish that an argument is invalid it is required (a) that one nd an invalid argument form of which it is a substitution instance, (b) that one determine that there be no valid argument form of which it is a substitution instance, and then (c) that one determine that it not be an anomalous valid argument. The possibility of there being anomalous valid arguments clearly complicates an already complicated picture. Do we have an argument for there being no anomalous valid arguments, or, to put it the other way round, do we have a reason for believing that deductive validity is formal? I think we dothough I can give only a very cursory sketch of it here. A valid argument is one for which it is impossible that the premises be true and the conclusion false. This can occur in three ways: (1) the premises are necessarily false, (2) the conclusion is necessarily true, or (3) the conclusion is somehow contained within the premises. It is the last way that is seized upon by Relevantists as at the heart of validity. Whether they are right about that or not it is clearly at the heart of the question as to whether validity is formal. This is because cases (1) and (2) are obviously formal: any impossibility will do for the premises in (1) just as any necessity will do in the conclusion for (2). Case (3) is more difcult to see however. The notion of the conclusion being somehow embedded in the premises and being extracted by inferential rules is the reason for the impossibility of having the conclusion false when the premises are true: what is true in the premises could not become false just by being isolated by a rule and placed as the conclusion. But if this embedding is the underlying explanation of validity then it also suggests why deductive logic should be formal. If the conclusion is embedded in the premises in a
25
certain way then, surely, some other conclusion could be similarly embedded in a different premise set? Since embedding is a formal notion so is deductive validity. (If we wanted to give this a name we might call it Bolzanos Thesis) I conclude then that there are no anomalous valid arguments. All valid arguments will t into some (perhaps as yet undiscovered) formal system in which there are logical constants in addition to the logical variables. Returning to the question as to how invalidity may be established we nd that ruling out anomalous valid arguments simplies the account given above to the following two conditions. An argument is invalid iff (a) there is an invalid argument form that it instantiates and (b) there is no valid argument form that it instantiates. Invalid arguments always satisfy condition (a) because every invalid (or valid) argument is a substitution instance of the invalid argument form (7) p q
Determining that an argument is invalid is thus always a matter of determining that it not be a substitution instance of some further valid argument form.6 In general, then, determining invalidity is not a matter of nding some (i.e. any) invalid argument form that it instantiatesas, for example, when we attempt to indict an argument as invalid because it asserts the consequent (as in (1) above)it is a matter of showing that there is no valid argument form that it instantiates.7 Since condition (a) is always satised we can simplify the above account to give the following criterion of invalidity. An argument A is invalid iff there is no valid argument form of which A is a substitution instance. We can summarise our claims thus far in two general points: (i) Every argument, valid or invalid, is a substitution instance of some invalid argument form. (ii) Every valid argument form has only valid substitution instances.
6 Strictly, of course, (5) is not quite the form for every argument, unless we agree to conjoin premises. But it is nevertheless true that there will be an invalid argument form for every argument, if we have a separate variable to mark each and every premise. It will thus be true that every argument, valid or invalid, is a substitution instance of some invalid argument form. 7 Lloyd Reinhardt tells a nice story about George Boolos from the time when they were logic students together at Oxford. Reinhardt was having trouble formalising a particular argument and asked Boolos if he could do it for him. Boolos: So let me get this straight, all you want me to do is put this in logical form? Reinhardt: Thats right, just put it in logical form. Boolos: o.k. p therefore q.
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One may hastily conclude from these points that it is never possible to determine that an argument is invalid by adducing some invalid argument form of which it is a substitution instance. This is not so, however. Just as there are some argument forms, the valid ones, that have only valid substitution instances, so there are others that have only invalid substitution instances. We might call these the Hyper-Invalid Argument Forms. The simplest example of these is (8). (8) p p p&p
In general, these have not been much studied by logicians and they are pointed-up in no logic text of which I am aware.8 In the propositional case these will be represented (or rather their corresponding conditional forms will be represented) by truth tables that have false in every line of the nal entry column.9 This will be the case when the conjunction of the premises has the form of a tautology and the conclusion has the form of a contradiction. If an argument is a substitution instance of a hyper-invalid argument form then it must be invalid, and could not therefore be a substitution instance of any valid argument form. One way, then, to determine that an argument is invalid is to try to nd a hyper-invalid argument form that it instantiates; this will be one way of testing the argument. But if one can nd no such formand it is clear that the hyper invalid argument forms will be only a very small subclass of the total set of invalid argument formsthen one is thrown back onto nding some other way to eliminate the possibility that the argument instantiates some valid argument form. In general, then, demonstrating invalidity is a matter of ruling out validity. Since determining invalidity is a matter of ruling out validity it is important to emphasise that this is a highly non-trivial matter. An argument may have a number of different forms in, say, the propositional calculus, as does argument (3) above, or it may have forms in a number of different systems the propositional calculus, the modal calculus S5, the second-order quanticational calculus, or what have you. These represent two dimensions in which the forms of an argument can be distributed, the depth and breadth of the
Neither Massey nor Stove note the existence of such forms, a fact that invalidates their general conclusions, or so I argue in section four. (The point was also not made in the earlier version of this chapter that appeared in Theoria.) 9 Thus argument formsor better their corresponding conditionalshave a symmetrical structure: at one end there are thosethe valid onesthat have only true as the nal value, and at the other end those that have only false. The rest are simply the common or garden variety invalid forms; it is these that we are mainly concerned with.
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structure, as it were. We have not determined that an argument is invalid until we have ruled out all of the valid forms in all of the systems. And further, since we have not yet exhausted a construction of all of the logical systems, we do not know whether we might have missed something of importance to the question of an arguments validity once we have been through the valid argument forms in all of the known systems. The two dimensions of logical structure carry with them their own separate difculties for the determination of invalidity. The difculty of determining whether an argument is not valid within a particular logical system we may call the synchronic problem; it consists of the observation that invalid argument forms can have valid substitution instancesnding an invalid argument form is, in general therefore, necessary but not sufcient for proving invalidity. If an argument is not valid in some particular systemif we can nd no valid argument form that the argument instantiates in the system then we must look through all of the other logical systems. This we may call the diachronic problem. An argument is invalid tout court if and only if there is no valid argument form of which it is a substitution instance (that is, no valid argument form in any logical system). Logicians sometimes try to nesse these problems by speaking of arguments as, say, not valid in the propositional calculus, or even as invalid in the propositional calculus, and simply avoiding the question of whether an argument is invalid simpliciter. Sometimes it is one of these that is intended even though it is not said outright, for what is said is either false or misleading. Kleene, for example, says, to show by truth tables that a formula is not valid, the table must in general be entered from the prime components.10 It is obvious however that truth tables would show at best that a formula is not valid in the propositional calculusthe question of whether it is not valid simpliciter has not even been addressed. (Unless, we take the term formula as temporarily restricted to the formulas of the propositional calculus. But then it is clear that we are not dealing with arguments but symbolic expressions.) But the stronger locutions, such as invalid in the propositional calculus, are more deeply misleading still, even when they are explicit, for they hark back to the false idea that invalidity can always be determined within a particS. Kleene, Mathematical Logic, London, Wiley (1967), p.14. The same mistake is made by Copi in Symbolic Logic (5th ed), Macmillan, N.Y. (1979), pp.1925. It should also be said that entering from the prime componentsor what Copi calls simple statementswill show at best that an argument is not valid in the system in which the prime components are prime. It will not show that the argument is invalid. The argument All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal would be judged invalid if one entered from the prime components of the propositional calculus.
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ular system, as though there were invariable signs of its presence. But invalidity is not like a blemish on a carpet and logic is not a well-crafted stain detector. At best we can say that an argument is not valid in the propositional calculus we should not mis-state that as invalid in the propositional calculus.11 Arguments do not waver in invalidity, being invalid in the propositional calculus but valid in S5. An argument is either valid or it isnt. To say that invalidity is not like a stain is to reiterate a basic point about logic. Logic is, properly speaking, a theory of validityit is not a theory of invalidity and it is a mistake to think of it as one. Logicians are attempting to codify the valid inferencesevery inference for which it is impossible for the premises to be true while the conclusion is falsebut it is no part of their task to also produce a set of fallacious inference forms. Just as it is no part of the job of mathematicians to codify what is not mathematically true. The invalid arguments are simply the disorganised remainder, once we have taken away all the valid ones. But this means that the wisdom of the philosophical Enlightenment, with us to this day and enshrined in philosophical practice that proof is hard while disproof is easyis exactly the opposite to the lesson of logic, which is that proof is (relatively) easy, because it is rule-governed, while disproofat least to the extent that it involves detecting invalid inferences is hard because it isnt. The cumenical compromise is to say that proof and disproof are both as hard as one another, though for different reasons. Proof is hard because, even though the inferential rules are daily being discovered and systematized, it is difcult to nd premises that are more assertable than the conclusion; disproof is hard because determining that an opponents argument is invalid is no easy matter.12 To return then to the question of how invalidity is to be determined: the synchronic and diachronic problems represent two distinct obstacles that must be overcome if we are to conclude that an argument is invalid. How difcult
The distinction here is akin to the theological distinction between evil as an absence of perfection and evil as the presence of something bad. If its the former, evil-detectors will have to be thoroughly acquainted with perfection; if its the latter they need only a nodding acquaintance with the bad. 12 John Bacon and Jim Franklin have suggested that the real problem is that we should only call an argument valid when the proponent of the argument names the rule of inference that is intended to generate the conclusion and the stated rule does indeed do so. I see no good reason to thus change our current terminology, but let us consider the proposal calling an argument licensed when a rule is correctly cited. Now one can indeed usefully indict an argument (ad hominem) as improperly licensed when the argument is valid but for the wrong reasonsbut we will still be left with the question as to whether a given argument is valid or not. This is, after all, our prime interest. (And we must keep in mind how small our knowledge of inferential rules actually is!)
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are these obstacles to overcome? The existence of a decision procedure for testing the validity of arguments in a particular logical system is often misrepresented as though it were a procedure for determining invalidity tout court. Indeed it is this that is suggested by the misleading locution invalid in the propositional calculus. Generations of undergraduates have gone away from elementary logic courses with the idea that they have learned how to determine an arguments invalidity. But they have not. Rather they have learned something with a more limited utility: they have learned how to test the validity or invalidity of an argument form, a form that their given argument may have. If the form is valid then so is the argument, but if not then the argument may yet be valid or invalidthat is something the test was unable to discern. It is a symptom of the depth of this confusion that students are never asked to determine an arguments invalidity by testing for the presence of a hyper-invalid argument formwhich is at least a sufcient, if not a necessary, condition. The idea that invalidity is determined the other way has been so seductive that the presence of a genuine test, however partial, has been completely overlooked. We can bring out the problem with determining the invalidity of an argument by imagining the procedures of a hypothetical Invalidity Machine that is designed to answer the question is. . . valid? for any argument that is inserted into the blank. Let us suppose that the machine can access all the known logical systems. It is instructed to search through the hyper-invalid argument forms and, if it nds a form that the argument has, then it issues the answer yes and the program terminates. If the answer is no then it searches though the valid argument forms and, if it nds one, then the answer is no and the program again terminates. But if it instantiates no such forms then the machine simply has to go to the next system and repeat the procedure. When it reaches a system that has no decision procedure then it is forced to go through proof trees and it can never be certain that it has exhausted all the possibilities. Eventually then, and as we see it is sooner rather than later, the machine is doomed to go though an endless search.13 If the argument was valid then there is a chance that the machine will terminate, but if the argument is invalid the machine will never be able to say that it is: it will never terminate. We can summarize the conclusions of this section thus: there is no effective procedure for determining the invalidity of an argument (as opposed to
Of course we know that we do not have to go far before we reach that point, for although the rst-order predicate calculus is complete, we know from Churchs Theorem that there is no decision procedure for it. When we reach more exotic systems we know, from Godels Theorem, that the system may be incomplete.
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argument form in some particular system). Or better: the determination of an arguments invalidity is not algorithmic. In the next section we consider the implications of this for philosophy and philosophical methodology.
2.3
I MPLICATIONS
The validity of an inference has been regarded as a matter of form at least since the time of Aristotle; accompanying this thesis there has been the shadowy corollary that invalidity is also a matter of form. Medieval logicians, such as Peter of Spain and Robert Kilwardby in the late 13th Century, tried to bring out this corollary by developing a science of fallacy, taking their lead from some fragmentary remarks in Aristotles De Sophisticis Elenchis. In Kilwardby we nd the formality of invalidity becoming quite explicit. But since. . . reasoning, both demonstrative and dialectical, is the source of recognising and discovering truth, and a careless person can be deceived in connection with either, logic must determine the deceptions that can occur in either of them so that they can be avoided and one may thus come to the truth more expeditiously.14 (My emphasis) What is attractive in this picture is clear enough. If Robert Kilwardby had been right and it were possible to list the forms of deception, as well as the forms of correct reasoning, then, it is supposed, deductive logic would have been sufcient for all reasoning. It does not follow, of coursesince it does not follow from the existence of a set of deductive forms that that set must be exhaustive of good reasoningthat is, it does not preclude the need for nondeductive probabilistic inferenceeven if we allow forms of invalid reasoning into the set. But what is important is that it was thought to follow: deductive logic, indeed Aristotelian syllogistic, was thought to give a necessary and sufcient set of rules for correct reasoning. This form of Deductivism seems to have had its epistemological image in the conation of knowledge with certainty, a conation that had far-reaching, and well-advertised, consequences.
Robert Kilwardby, The Nature of Logic: Dialectic and Demonstrative, in The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts, Vol.I, (ed) N. Kretzman and Eleonore Stump, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 271. Kilwardby became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1272. Kilwardbys view that the deceptions of reason could be determined had political consequences when he banned the teaching of certain propositions at Oxford. In all of this he seems to have been following the similar actions of Peter of Spain, when in 1267 he also had banned certain propositions in Paris. The 1277 Paris Condemnations are discussed in chapter 6.
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Nevertheless it is the negative side of this Deductivism, the debunking role of reason, the detection of fallacies, that is the point at issue here. The issue is whether there is a simple way of recognising invalidity. As we saw in the previous discussion it is quite wrong to conclude that an argument is invalid merely because we can nd an invalid argument form that it instantiates. It follows, then, that when we infer that an argument is invalid we must be making a judgement as to the non-existence of any valid argument forms for the argument in question. What basis there might be for this judgement is never mentioned, however, and were Deductivism true it is not clear that there could be one. To the extent, then, that philosophical analysis does not have a grasp of what would be required to make an inference to invalidity it is radically enthymematic at best. At worst it is simply incoherent. The pervasiveness of this error can be seen in the almost universal acceptance of the argument from analogy, for this argument is identical to the mistaken inference that arguments are invalid in virtue of their instantiating some invalid argument form. In an argument by analogy an argument is inferred to be invalid if a second argument can be produced which is both obviously invalidbecause it has, let us say, true premises and a false conclusionand that has the same form as the rst argument. The implication is that, if two arguments have the same form and one is invalid, then the other must be also. This is not so, however, as weve already seen. Sameness of form does not guarantee that two arguments will both be invalid if one is, because one argument may instantiate some further valid argument form that the second does not. The examples (3) and (1) are, in fact, of just this type. Sameness of form cannot guarantee invalidity because invalidity is not in general a matter of instantiating some particular invalid form. The argument from analogy thus rests on the same mistaken idea as before: that invalidity is a matter of form and that we can show an argument to be invalid if we can just produce some invalid form of which the argument is a substitution instance. One might, if one were making a judgement in haste, think that the argument from analogy is valid when one is inferring the validity of one argument on the basis of its sameness of form to a second argument. After all validity, unlike invalidity, is a matter of instantiating a particular form: surely if one argument is valid then any argument that has the same form will be valid also. It takes only a moments reection, however, to see that this is not so. If the argument from analogy will not work in the case of an inference to invalidity then it cannot work in the case of an inference to validity either, and for exactly the same reason. Valid arguments can instantiate invalid argument forms and an invalid argument may share that form. It does not follow, then, that two
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arguments must both be invalid or valid together if they have a common form. Indeed our original examples provide a case: (3) is valid but it has the same form, namely (2), as (1). It is true that valid argument forms have only valid substitution instances but one cannot mistake that for the claim that valid arguments have only valid argument forms. But to say this is, in fact, to do nothing more than to repeat that instantiating some invalid argument form does not guarantee that an argument is invalid. It doesnt guarantee it because invalid argument forms can have valid substitution instances.15 The pervasiveness of the fallacious Argument from Analogy suggests, I think, that philosophers are in the grip of a quite misleading view of the capacity of logical form to reveal an arguments invalidity. The philosophers view of logic thus differs markedly from the logicians, for, as I noted in the last section, the latter sees logic as a calculus of valid inference, whereas the former sees it as an instrument in a fundamentally dialectical process of argument and counterargument. Logicians have abetted this situation by suggesting usually in the exercise sections of their text-booksthat their decision procedures for validity and invalidity can be brought to bear on natural language argumentsthe very stuff of the philosophical enterpriseand not merely on symbolic argument forms. They have thus encouraged the view that an argument that has been translated into the logical notation of a system and not been found to be valid in that system can be said to be invalid in that system simpliciteras though they were temporarily unaware of the importance of the placement of the negation in that claim. They have thus encouraged the near-universal acceptance of, what might be called, Kilwardbys Error (what I have also called Deductivism): that logic can determine the errors of human reason. It is this that has led to the idea that the proper role for logic is in the debunking of the arguments of others. But if the Argument from Analogy shows the ubiquity in philosophical method of the erroneous inference from invalid form to invalid argument, then there are other, deeper, reasons to believe that philosophers chronically underestimate the difculty of knowing when an argument is invalid. Indeed, what I called in the last section, the diachronic problem can thus seem to present us with abysses that are deeper and wider than an exclusive focus on the synCopi, in his Symbolic Logic (5th ed.), suggests that the argument from analogy is valid provided the specic forms of the arguments are considered (i.e. given by the prime components). This is not so, however. Specic form is system-relative (in Copis usage it is relative to propositional logic) and cannot tell one that an argument is invalid simplicitur. This is the same mistake as was mentioned above: treating not valid in the propositional calculus and invalid as if they were one and the same thing. Copi knows that they are not the same thing but only by conating them can he justify the fallacious inference.
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chronic problem might suggest. Indeed, what we have said so far does not really suggest how serious the problem is. There are a multitude of logical systems each trying to capture some inferential pattern in the complexity of natural reasoning. To make an assessment of an arguments validity or invalidity that argument must be assessed in each of the logical systems. If the argument instantiates a valid argument form then the argument is valid; if we can nd no valid argument form then we can conclude that the argument has not been shown to be valid. It has not thereby been proven to be invalid. But surely, one might protest, the process of going through the logical systems need not always be a tedious matter of checking the forms of every such system? Indeed it need not. The process is considerably shortened by our ability to recognise that certain logical systems may not be relevant. If an argument contains no modal operators, for example, then we know that the inference, valid or invalid, is not a matter of modal logic. (We must recognise, however, that it may not always be clear what terms do function as modal operators.) The formalisation of logical inference allows us to see how the various terms in a natural argument could bear on its validity. But to concede this is not to concede very much. We cannot resolve all disputes as to the validity or invalidity of an argument by simply sorting through the known logical systems. This is because we do not know everything that is relevant to validity. There are many examples of arguments whose validity has been in dispute, either because it was not clear how to render them in the formal system of the day or because no known formal system would accommodate them. Descartes Cogito Ergo Sum is a familiar example. This argument has been taken to be circular and invalidsomething it could not possibly be since a circular argument is ipso facto validas well as straightforwardly invalid, and straightforwardly valid (though not at the same time). It has also been taken to be valid but requiring a new logical system to capture the essence of its inference structure. Hintikka has proposed a performative logic to try to capture what many have found elusive in the argument. The details and the prospects of this proposal need not concern us here, however. What is important is that there remain inferences whose symbolisation is unclear. It follows that, as long as there are unclear cases, we will be unsure whether an inference whose invalidity is in dispute is not simply one of those cases. An inference to invalidity always carries such a risk, and it is a risk that should not be minimised. The diachronic problem is, then, not as easy to nesse as might rst appear. The development of logic is certainly not yet completedindeed it may seem
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to have only just begunand an inference to invalidity is inherently fallible.16 The fallibility of such inferences is something that we will return to in the nal section in more detail but it is worth pointing out immediately that this fallibility becomes positively vertiginous when one takes into consideration Kripkes argument for a posteriori necessities. To my knowledge it has not been previously recognisedeven by Kripke himselfthat the existence of a posteriori necessities, such as that water is identical to H2 O, entails the existence of valid arguments whose validity is only discovered a posteriori. For example, the argument A, therefore water = H2 O is a valid argument for any proposition A whatever, since the conclusion is a necessary truth. We only discovered that this argument form was valid, however, when we discovered the necessary truth that water is H2 O. We thus have a whole new category of valid arguments, namely those that are a posteriori valid. As science advances we can expect to discover more such necessities and therefore more a posteriori valid arguments. Logic has taken an empirical turn in a wholly unexpected way. Arguments that were thought to be invalid, prior to Kripke, such a Bush is the President of the U.S. therefore water = H2 O turn out to be valid after all. Relevance logicians will undoubtedly already have turned pale at this suggestionor perhaps they will simply take it as more grist to their millnevertheless, the point remains that we cannot know which arguments are valid until we at least know which propositions are necessary. This empirical turn makes it clear that the diachronic problem is as deep as the problem of knowledge itself. We cannot know with certainty that an argument is invalid until we have ruled out the possibility of its being valid. Our beliefs about which arguments are valid will change as our knowledge of the world changes. It is not merely the unnished state of our knowledge of logical form that is at issue but the unnished state of our knowledge tout court. We have at best fallible knowledge of the class of invalid arguments and some judgements of invalidity will shift as our non-logical knowledge shifts. In the next section I will take up the broader issues concerning the impact of Deductivism, and then take up the question as to whether the problem that has been posed for determining invalidity doesnt entail some serious inconsistency. I will then return to the question of the nature of the fallible inferences to invalidity in the nal section of the chapter.
16 Witness the development of higher-order logics, topological logics, new versions of modal logic, temporal logics, dynamical logics, and many more. If one sees logic as the codication of all inferences that t the standard denition of validityand I think that is how it should be seenthen the number of potential logics is probably innite. Thus even without a posteriori valid inferences there will be enough to be going on with.
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2.4
I NCONSISTENCY
The mistaken belief that invalidity can be easily recognised has created philosophical confusions and shaped philosophical practice. The self-image of philosophy as the art of debunking the views of others goes back at least as far as Socrates. When logic began to be formalised under Aristotle it became absorbed into this adversarial enterprise, with the consequence that it was put to use as a way of exposing the errors in an opponents position. Provided one is cautious in making these negative assessments there is nothing inherently wrong with this. But when deductive inference becomes the whole of reasoning such a view becomes untenable. In the medieval period we have the beginnings of such an exclusive reliance and it continued on through the Enlightenment, up to the present day, where deductive reasoning has often been taken to consist in nothing more than the lower predicate calculus.17 A direct effect of the psychological mind-set created by Deductivism is that sceptical arguments about non-deductive modes of reasoning, such as induction, were able to be stated and take hold in a way that would have been impossible if directed against deductive reasoning. Humes famous argument, for example, about the alleged circularity of attempts to provide a foundation for inductive inference can be recast against deductive inference just as well. To see this, note that we explain the validity of deductively valid arguments in terms of the impossibility of having the premises true and the conclusion false. But what is the basis of this impossibility? If the explanation is that the premises are necessarily false, then the problem becomes that of saying why it is impossible to have the necessarily false premises true and the conclusion false. If the explanation is that the conclusion is necessarily true, then the problem is that of saying why it is impossible to have the premises true and the necessarily true conclusion false. If, nally, the explanation is that the conclusion is somehow contained within the premises, then the problem becomes that of saying why it is impossible to have the premises true and that which is contained within the premises false. We might feel that the blatant inconsistencies here are our reason for believing that these impossibilities cannot obtain. But we cannot appeal to that inconsistency without the threat of cirDeductivism in the medieval period included a number of modal principles of classical entailment, mentioned in the previous chapter: from a necessary truth only necessary truths follow; from an impossibility everything follows, etc. These were exceptionless generalisations and thus would have licensed the inference that it was invalid to, for example, infer a contingent proposition from a necessary one. Such meta-logical inferences can be found often in postmedieval empiricism and they play a central role in Humeanism. This is a matter that I return to in the nal section.
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cularity, without begging the question, without using logic in order to justify logic. Thus we must assume some principles of logic to provide a foundation for logic. For a sceptic like Hume, however, that would be no foundation at all. We can imagine him saying that he asks only for the foundation of this inference, that there is required a medium which may enable the mind to draw such an inference and that if it proceed by means of reasonfor which read logicthen it must evidently be going in a circle, and taking for granted that which is the very point in question. That we have not been saddled with a deductive scepticism to rival inductive scepticism is little more than an historical accident: Deductivism shaped the thinking of philosophers from so early in the piece that deductive scepticism was unable to get a toe-hold. Inductive scepticism, on the other hand, was not only thinkable, it was plausibleafter all, if it wasnt deductive reasoning, and it couldnt be founded on deductive reasoning, then it must be groundless, or circularwhich amounted to the same thing. Deductive logic, however, required no such grounding since it was self-evident. The threat of circularity fell on stony ground. A modern Humean, such as Karl Popper, could allow himself to take deductive inference for granted, while inductive inference was without foundation. But history is not monolithic, even if looking backward from the standpoint of its effects can make it seem so. During the 17th Century the Aristotelian logic of the Schoolmen came under attack from some Cartesians. This attack seems to have been directed less against logic itself than against its dominance in the schools. One Gabriel Wagner, however, went further: he argued that formal logic in its entirety was unnecessary, frequently wrong, and that it should be abandoned wholesale. Instead he advocated natural reason free from the distortions of formalisation and systematisation. In the next section I will briey discuss one recent Wagnerian, D.C. Stove, and urge that Wagnerianism is the wrong line to take against Deductivism.18 Let me now return to my main theme, which is the nature of invalidity, since it is necessary to pursue the general insignicance of form from a differGabriel Wagner published his attacks in 1696 in the weekly Vernunftubungen. These ar ticles brought him to the attention of Leibniz who replied by letter in the same year. Leibniz argues, with great show of moderation, that formal logic has its uses, that it is however frequently misused, and that the counterexamples that Wagner had proffered rely in the main on equivocation. For my purposes, however, the most striking feature of Leibnizs reply is his emphasis on the difculty of determining invalidity. After making clear that this is something that requires much more skill than it is usually thought to involve, Leibniz stresses that logic is more useful for proof than exposing errors of reason: I lay little importance in refutation but much in exposition. G. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, (2nd ed), (ed.) L.E. Loemker, D. Reidel, Dordrecht (1969), pp. 462471.
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ent direction. If an argument has true premises and a false conclusion then it is invalid. This is a sufcient condition for invalidity, but not a necessary one. An invalid argument can, therefore, sometimes be recognised from the actual truth values of premises and conclusion. This gives us an epistemic handle on invalidity in a small subset of the total set of cases. We have no such handle, however, in the case of validity. This is because an invalid argument can have any of the possible distribution of truth-values that are allowable: the conjunction of the premises can be false and the conclusion either true or false, or the conjunction of the premises can be true and the conclusion again either true or false. It follows from this that, since invalidity is compatible with all possible distributions of truth values, since, as it were, no actual distribution of truth values rules out invalidity, that one cant detect a valid argument from the presence of a special set of truth-value distributions to premises and conclusions.19 One cannot say: this argument must be valid because it has such-and-such a distribution of truth-values to premises and conclusion for no invalid argument can have that distribution. Valid arguments cannot then be recognised by actual truth-values, whereas invalid arguments can, in certain circumstances. This is another way in which the asymmetry between validity and invalidity maniNote that my point here concerns actual truth values, not their modal status, so it is irrelevant whether an argument is valid because it has a contradiction in the premises or a tautology for its conclusion. These cases have no bearing on the asymmetry that I am concerned with here.
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fests itself.20 Because actual distributions of truth-values do not afford us with a means of recognising valid arguments in any instances we are forced back on to a modal condition. This is the counterfactual denition of validity. It says: an argument is valid if and only if, were the premises true, the conclusion would have to be true also. We can derive from this a (negative) counterfactual denition of invalidity: it is not the case that were the premises true the conclusion would have to be true also. It is the distinctive feature of these denitions that they apply to arguments and not to argument forms, at least on the face of it. Do we then have a pair of denitions that obviate any need to speak of form at all? Not so: the modal intuitions for the counterfactual conditions entangle with logical form in awkward waysways that logicians rarely spell out.21
20 In an unaccountable slip E.J. Lemmon completely garbles the account of validity given in his book Beginning Logic, Van Nostrand Reinhold, Wokingham, 1965. He says, on p.2, describing invalid arguments, using the terms sound and unsound where we use valid and invalid,
. . . thus in the argument (3) Napoleon was French; all Frenchmen are European; therefore Hitler was Austrian all the propositions are true, but no one would say that the conclusion followed from the premises. The basic connection between the soundness or unsoundness of an argument and the truth or falsity of the constituent propositions is the following: an argument cannot be sound if its premises are all true and its conclusion false. A necessary condition of sound reasoning is that from truths only truths follow. This condition is of course not sufcient for soundness, as we see from (3), where we have true premises and a true conclusion but not a sound argument. Lemmon is of course quite wrong: it is both necessary and sufcient for sound reasoning that from truths only truths follow. Example (3) does not show failure of sufciency because in (3) the conclusion does not follow from the premises, as he himself has noted immediately following the statement of it. Lemmon is equivocating on the term follow, which in the two occurrences above is used correctly. The nal quoted sentence, however, evacuates the sense to include conclusions that do not properly follow. It is unclear what Lemmon could have had in mind here: was he thinking of the missing sufcient condition as a Relevance-type constraint? But the only point that the example supports is the one that I made above: invalid arguments can have true premises and true conclusions and validity cannot be established from actual truth values. But Lemmons slip here is not without consequence. He is not led, here at any rate, into a fruitless search for the missing sufcient condition, but he is led to overemphasise the formality of the determination of invalidity, saying that logic may be dened as . . . the study, by symbolic means, of the exact conditions under which patterns of argument are valid or invalid (p.5). Lemmons mistake is doubly strange for it was he who claried the modal logic of Lewis systems of entailment. (For a self-referential wrinkle in this question of the sufcient conditions of validity see the next chapter.) 21 I will use the terms counterfactual account of validity and modal account of validity interchangeably.
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Prima facie the validity counterfactual is a condition that applies to arguments and not argument forms. We apply the counterfactual test in the standard way by looking to the closest possible worlds in which the premises are true and noting that the conclusion must be true in those worlds also. (In fact we do not need to fuss about nearness in this case since in any possible world true premises guarantee a true conclusion.) We vary the truth-values here while keeping the argument constant. This can be understood in contrast to the way validity is assessed by form: the substitution instances are varied while the form is kept constant. Thus a truth table assesses the validity or invalidity of a form by listing the truth-valuations of the possible substitution instances of the form. It is irrelevant to the invalidity of a form that some substitution instances may be valid. In truth tables a valid substitution instance corresponds to a restriction of the full table for the form to just those lines that are allowable in the substitution instance. (In the earlier example (3) corresponds to a restriction of (2) in which only two lines are relevant, those in which p has the same value as q.) This problem with valid substitution instances of invalid forms is not present in the counterfactual criterion of validity since it is the argument itself that is there described. Varying the truth values of the argument across possible worlds is a different process to varying the actual values of substitution instances of some argument form. In an ideal world these different processes would be kept distinct. As a number of people have pointed out, however, this is not an ideal world. Although the counterfactual denition of validity gives the best account of the validity of an argument it does not give us an adequate epistemic handle on the matter. Intuitions about other possible worlds are no more manageable (and no less manageable) than the straightforward intuition about validity. The judgement that an argument is valid is just the same as the modal intuition that were the premises true the conclusion would have to be true also. So although the counterfactual account of validity is conceptually adequate (and indeed the most appropriately general account of validity that we possess) it falls short of providing us with a decision procedure for arguments. This, after all, is what we wanted at the outset and have had so much trouble getting. The logician sometimes solves this problem by a sleight-of-hand: he simply identies the assessment of a form with the counterfactual assessment of the argument itself, explaining the truth-table, say, as giving the possible truth values of the argument itself rather than the argument form.22
E.J. Lemmons presentation in Beginning Logic (op.cit.) uses just such a sleight-of-hand (see pp. 6467). I think that students often become uneasy at this manuvre but cant put their nger on the reason for their discomfort.
22
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However, this conation of arguments with argument forms is illicit in general and fraught with danger. I discuss it in detail in the next chapter. For present purposes, however, the main problem is the one that weve been discussing throughout this chapter, namely the existence of valid substitution instances of invalid argument forms. If we pretend that a decision procedure for argument forms is a decision procedure for the validity of arguments themselves, we will be in danger of assessing a valid argument as invalid because we assess the wrong form. We also face the diachronic problem: a decision procedure for an argument form does not tell us that an argument is invalid simpliciter but merely that it is not valid in some particular logical system. How, then, could it give us an epistemic handle on what is going on in other possible worlds? It cannot tell us whether these very premises imply this conclusion. The conation of a decision procedure for an argument form with a decision procedure for the counterfactual criterion of validity creates a chimera of certainty about the determination of invalidity where no real certainty exists. However, although this conation has the undesirable consequence that problems with determining invalidity through form ow into the intuitions about the counterfactual criterion for invalidity, there is at least one consequence that leaks back the other way. The counterfactual criterion focuses the mind on the argument rather than some argument form that is instantiated. When, for example, we ask ourselves whether argument (3) is valid we are psychologically less apt to think of the form (2) if the mind is holding the counterfactual criterion in focus. The counterfactual criterion gives us some grasp on validity prior to specication of forms. If we did not have any modal intuitions here it would be hard to see what the formalisation of logic was trying to capture. There must be some modal intuitions that the logician is attempting to formalise.23 These intuitions are, of course, fallible and defeasible, but they underwrite our pre-theoretic judgements of validity in such a way that we are guided in the direction of the appropriate form. Yet although the counterfactual condition for validity has a benecial effect on thinking about form it also makes it plain how desirable it is that the conditions for validity, counterfactual and
23 The essentially counterfactual and modal nature of validity stands hard against Dorothy Edgingtons view that conditionals, indicative and subjunctive, do not have truth-conditions. (See Do Conditionals have Truth-Conditions? in Conditionals, (ed.) F. Jackson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp.176201). The fact that deductive validity will be lost on her account is partially masked by an ambiguously worded and unsatisfactory account of validity which disguises its modal, or counterfactual, nature (p.201) and the fact that her main, but not sole, interest is in indicative conditionals (p.178). This is, however, not the place for a detailed discussion of these issues.
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formal, be kept distinct. If form is allowed to rule over our modal intuitions then we shall soon have none of the latter left. The counterfactual denition of validity takes the argument itself as its object whereas the formal account is directed toward the forms that the argument has. These different objects are reason enough alone to keep them distinct. Yet now that we have them distinct we can use them to state and answer a puzzle about the determination of invalidity that has threatened from the outset. In brief it is the problem of self-consistencyit is the application of the synchronic problem to itself. Invalid forms can have valid substitution instances. Suppose, contrary to fact, that our only means of determining the invalidity of an argument was by looking at the forms of the argument. How, then, could we have discovered that it is invalid to infer the invalidity of an argument from an invalid form? In short how could we have discovered that the following is invalid: (9) A instantiates invalid argument form f A is invalid
for it is the invalidity of (9) that has been the point at issue throughout this chapter. Our inference, that it is invalid to infer invalidity in this way, would seem to be undercut! But note that if (9) is itself an argument form (with A and f variables) then the mistaken belief that every substitution instance of it is invalid is an example of the very fallacy itself. It is self-instantiating! In fact this seems to be the mistake made by both Massey and Stove, as indicated above in section two. They have wrongly concluded from the invalidity of (9) that every instance of it is also invalid. But there are some instances of (9) which are valid, namely when A instantiates a Hyper-Invalid Argument Form. So (9) is an invalid argument form that has valid substitution instances! So how do we know that (9) is invalid? The answer, of course, is that it has invalid substitution instances (for recall that no valid argument form can have invalid substitution instances) which we know to be invalid because they have true premises and false conclusions. There is no difculty, therefore, determining that (9) is invalid. The self-consistency of our reasoning to invalidity is assured. It is important to remember that our problem was, after all, not how do we know that certain argument forms are invalid, but rather how do we know that certain arguments are invalid, when we have no help from actual truth values. The point was that we cannot simply advert to their instantiating an invalid argument form: we have only our belief that they do not instantiate any valid argument forms. These considerations do throw up one noteworthy point, however. A sceptic might try to draw the conclusion that invalidity is always undeterminable
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on the basis of the arguments in this chapter. That would be a mistake. If invalidity cannot be determined at all then it cannot be determined that it cannot be determined. The sceptic would have no reasoning on which to base such a sceptical conclusion. Scepticism therefore is the wrong conclusion to draw. The right conclusion is that invalidity can be difcult to determine, that, above all else, it cannot be deduced. Thus an inference to invalidity is essentially fallible and defeasiblebut rational for all that. This is taken up in the next section.
2.5
I NFERENCE
Invalidity cannot, in general, be recognised by nding some invalid argument form that the argument instantiates; instead the invalidity is a matter of there being no valid argument formdiscovered or as yet undiscoveredthat the argument instantiates. Inferring that there is no such form will be a risky matter given the incomplete (and incompleteable) state of our knowledge of validity. Indeed, the question presents itself: can we ever really know that an argument is invalidleaving aside those that are hyper-invalid or actually have true premises and a false conclusion? As suggested in the last section many may feel the pull of a sceptical conclusion here: in general an argument cannot be known to be invalid. This would be a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion and its implications for philosophy would probably be startling enough to need little further comment. The critical edge of philosophy would be much blunted if no arguments could be determined to be invalid. Such a scepticism would leave us with a subject, and yet with not enough in the way of cognitive grip to carry out work on it. It is hard to see how philosophy could survive such a scepticism. Fortunately, as I argued in the last section, this sceptical conclusion is not only undesirable, it cannot be maintained on the basis of the argument of this chapter. Indeed, I have been arguing that a particular invalid argument is rather too pervasive. The conclusion of this chapter could not then be that invalidity cannot be determined. The point is not that invalidity cannot be determined but rather how, given that we are able to make such judgements, do we succeed in doing so? In short: what is the epistemology of invalidity? We have already seen that there is a striking asymmetry between validity and invalidity. There is no distribution of truth-values to premises and conclusion that would be sufcient to guarantee an arguments validity, and yet the instantiation of a valid argument form is sufcientand if there are no anomalous valid arguments, necessary as well. By contrast, there is a distribution of truth-values that will be sufcient to guarantee an arguments invalidityto wit, true premises and a false conclusion. The instantiation of a hyper-invalid
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argument form is also a sufcient condition of invalidity, but there is no form, the instantiation of which would be a necessary condition for invalidity. Thus we can show that an argument is invalid by showing that it does not satisfy the necessary condition for validity, i.e. by eliminating from contention the valid argument forms that it might satisfy. And if it does not satisfy one of the sufcient conditions for validity that is the absolute best that we can do. Furthermore, we know that this eliminative inference to invalidity is fallible in that future discoveries, linguistic and scientic, can lead us to revise our previous assessments of invalidity. However, if we wish to show that an argument is valid then, since no actual distribution of truth-values will sufce, we must fall back on the instantiation of a valid argument form. The epistemology of invalidity has been much hampered by the psychological attractiveness of the mistaken view that invalidity and validity are at root symmetrical and that therefore our epistemic access to validity has, as its mirror image, a similar epistemic access to invalidity: if one is formal then the other must be as well, if adducing a form will work for one then it should work for the other as well. This symmetry thesis is one manifestation of the view that I earlier labelled Deductivism since it is an aspect of the failure to recognise that our epistemic access to invalidity is not deductive, that we are not proving invalidity. Making room for our epistemic access to invalidity means that Deductivism must be seen as the false doctrine that it is. Deductive reasoning is not, therefore, and cannot be, all that there is to reasoning or we could not determine the invalidity of a great many invalid arguments. There must, then, be legitimate fallible reasoning that falls outside deductive reasoning and that underpins our ability to use deductive reasoning in the way we do. In particular, I maintain that the inference that an argument is invalid is an inference to the best explanation, that it is essentially abductive in nature. We infer that an argument is invalid when we have searched through all of the possible forms for the argument and failed to turn up any that are valid. The failure to turn up a valid form is best explained by the absence of such forms. Our conclusion that an argument is invalid is, of course, both provisional and defeasible. We may not have exhausted all of the features relevant to validity in our production of argument forms, and may therefore have wrongly concluded that the argument is invalid. But even though the inference to invalidity is fallible it need not be irrational or unwarranted. The abductive inference to invalidity is fallible because all such inferences are fallible. When we run through all of the possible forms for the argument we are trying to exhaust the logical structure of the argument, thus exhausting the possible ways that it might be valid. It is perfectly the same as in scientic contexts. We think it is reasonable to believe an explanation when it is the best
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that has been found for a particular phenomenon.24 In this case the best explanation for ones failure to turn up a valid argument form is that the argument is invalid. Likewise, if we are looking for an explanation of the re then it is perfectly reasonable to eliminate the possible causes to get at the actual cause. As Sherlock Holmes says, When we have eliminated the impossible, Watson, then anything that is left, however improbable, must be the truth.25 (Of course Holmes mistakenly calls this method deduction thus, unfortunately, contributing to the sway of Deductivism even among ctional characters!) We are ruling invalidity in by ruling validity out. Since there are no infallible markers of invalidity, we must make do with the absence of the markers of validity. Even in the formative stages of our understanding of inferential rules abductive inference is not entirely absent. The very ability to learn and use a language requires a great deal of non-deductive reasoning. The need for charity in interpreting others is simply disguised inference to the best explanation and induction. We understand others by applying reasonable maxims to their utterances. At the most fundamental level, then, non-deductive inferential methods rule our understanding. Our ability to reason is not something apart from the scientic methods of inference, but something that rides on top of those nondeductive modes of inference. Or, to change the image, deductive inference only survives in an atmosphere of non-deductive inference. Our grip on language carries with it some rudimentary grasp of valid inference. Natural languages do not t our formalised logics perfectly, as logicians themselves emphasise, or we would not need to be so careful in translating from English to symbolese. Yet there is some match-up or we would not succeed at all. This grasp that we have on valid inference does not immediately convert, however, into a grasp of invalid inference. When we discern that one sentence follows from some other sentence we are discerning some relation between the two, in general some necessary connection. This is what we mean when we say that there are marks of validity, something that can be discerned upon inspection. It does not follow that there are marks of invalidity. Invalidity consists of the absence of those necessary connections that sustain valid
24 This is akin to an eliminative induction. Suppose we have an urn with a mixture of coloured balls and we make a number of withdrawals (without replacement) and draw no white balls. Then the hypothesis that the urn contains no white balls is inductively supported and the probability increases with each draw. 25 All readers of Conan Doyle seem to automatically correct for the oddity in his way of expressing this point, for he obviously, falsely, assumes that there will be only one explanation left once the impossible is eliminated. He really intends that we eliminate the improbable to discover the probable.
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inference. In general, there are no marks of invaliditys presence, merely the absence of marks of its absenceto put it so as to bring out the full existential pathos. At this stage the reader may feel that only half the job has been done. Surely, he wants to say, we need also to know more about how these nondeductive inference patterns work. This is a perfectly reasonable request, but not unfortunately when made here. My sole aim has been to argue for the necessity of such inferences, to indicate how the application of deductive inference has been warped by the neglect of these other modes of inference; how deduction has been asked to do too much.26 Indeed my intention was to argue that the promotion of deductive logic as exhaustive of reason was inherently contradictory. The determination of an argument as deductively invalid is not itself deductiveit requires the use of abductive inference. This account of the epistemology of invalidity is an advance, I think, over the suggestions of Gerald Massey and David Stove. Although both authors discuss the synchronic problem they are both a little unclear, I think, as to its implications. Indeed their suggestions as to how the problem is to be overcome are altogether too vague if left as they stand. From Massey we have only the claim that we scrutinise the argument to determine its invalidity. He says, in fact, But suppose none of the arguments we devise for some proposition p strike us as valid. What then? Do we need a theory of invalidity to discredit them? By no means! That these arguments seem upon careful reection to be invalid is reason enough to abandon them and to look elsewhere for a good argument for p. It is much the same with arguments propounded by others. . . Those that upon close scrutiny seem invalid are best set aside. . . (p. 496) These appeals to careful reection and close scrutiny seem a rather retrograde step in Masseys otherwise excellent essay since they make it appear, once again, as though there is something internal to an argument that is able to be seen upon scrutiny to be the positive mark of its invaliditya form, in other words! And this after Massey has, rather relentlessly, pointed out that there is no such thing. What does he think we can possibly see when we scrutinise? David Stoves positive suggestion amounts to little more than an appeal to intuition. We have intuitive assessments of validity and invalidity and these assessments are sufciently robust to ground our agreement on logical matters. In fact he is against the formalisation of logical systems because at bottom we can do no better than our intuitions. Cases rule! is the slogan that summarises
And, anyway, it has been done perfectly well elsewhere; see K. Josephson and Josephson Abductive Inference (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) 1995.
26
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his anti-formalistic attitude to assessments of invalidity and validity. His is a thoroughly Wagnerian attitude to logic. (Indeed one might call him the Perfect Wagnerian.) Yet, although I think intuition plays a role, it does not, and cannot, be all that there is to the story, for it does not give us a reasonable procedure for settling disputes about invalidity. If all we have are appeals to brute intuition we have nothing to say to someone who disagrees with our assessments of invalidityno reasoning process that we can employ with them. Stoves position is not scepticalas he himself insistsbut it leads to it in only one move. And if it offers no reasonable process for settling disputes as to invalidity it also offers no account of how those intuitions work. There is no reason, after all, to think that our brute intuitions are in fact correct. A proof of the soundness of a system is both justication of the process of formalisation as well as a ratication of our intuitions. Neither Stoves groundless intuitions nor Masseys careful scrutiny upon nothing provide an adequate account of our ability to make assessments of invalidity. Seeing the process as an inference to the best explanation allows us to see how determinations of invalidity can be arrived at and agreed upon. Such determinations can be rational and yet falliblemuch what we should think of philosophy itself.
2.6
I NFIX
I have been emphasising that the determination of the invalidity of an argument is a matter of inference to the best explanationand if we restrict ourselves to making judgements from forms that is so. But in some cases we have additional information, that is non-formal in nature, that can be used to facilitate a determination. In fact this additional information was mentioned in chapter one: it is Ockhams summary of the principles of entailment. The signicant items are: 8) 9) From something necessary something contingent does not follow. Something impossible does not follow from something possible.
These two are signicant because they allow us to identify invalid arguments. For obviously if we have an argument that has all necessary premises and a contingent conclusion then we know, by (8), that it cannot be valid. Likewise if we have premises that are co-possible, then we know that any argument to an impossible conclusion cannot be correct (by 9).
A BDUCTIVE I NFERENCE AND I NVALIDITY
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In fact the special exception that we mentioned earlier in this chapter any argument form with a tautologous premise and a contradictory conclusion will have only invalid substitution instancescan easily be seen to be a special case of a combination of 8 and 9, in the terms that are recognised by propositional logics. But 8 and 9 offer us an ability to recognise invalidity in cases that go beyond this special exceptionwhere we have any set of necessities, or any set of co-possible statements, for premises. Then, in the rst instance we know that any contingent claim cannot validly follow; while in the second we know that any impossibility cannot validly follow. So there are some instances where philosophy is able to make decisive judgements as to the invalidity of an argumentprovided there is agreement as to the modal status of the constituent claims. Yet although the preceding discussion staves off scepticism it does not leave our picture of philosophy entirely unaltered. Many philosophers have seen philosophy as equipped with special tools to do a special job. The analysis of an opponents position, using the subtle determination of invalid and fallacious reasoning, has seemed to many to be a different job to that done by the sciences. Even philosophers of a naturalist bent have taken it to be their task to contribute to the sciences with tools that only philosophers know how to wield, the philosopher and the scientist may have a common goal but their tools, their intellectual equipment, are different, and thus their role in the enterprise of knowledge is different. On this view, philosophy exists above the sciences, determining the fallaciousness of reasoning with methods that result in certainties; the ashing razor of logic being essentially sharper and cleaner than the messy, blunted, methodology of the natural sciences.27 We have seen that this is not so, however. The natural scientist and the philosopher share the same logical toolsinference to the best explanation underpins both. Thus the last difference between philosophy and the empirical sciences vanishes, along with the comforting illusion that philosophy is a broker of certainties. Philosophy is not a special subject, not a privileged metadiscipline, it is just a part of our single epistemic enterprise, with common aims and using common methods.
Popper tried to correct the natural sciences by suggesting that they should make do with modus tollens as their single methodological rule, the rule of falsication. They were thus advised to eschew inductive reasoning in favour of a deductively sanctioned rule. He did not seem to realize however that any mistaken deductive inference required the reintroduction into the sciences no less than into philosophyof the kind of non-deductive inferences that were supposed to have been eliminated. The sciences should always have responded, therefore, by asking Popper to try and live with the same restrictions that he asked of them.
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Chapter 3
Validity and Necessity

ow that we have considered invalidity at some length, we turn to the notion of valid inferencewhich will be our exclusive concern for the next two chapters. I will be arguing, in essence, that the attempt to formalise the concept of valid inference by employing set-theoretic notions leads to considerable difculties. I begin by laying out the traditional understanding of the concept the one that all philosophers are familiar withand discuss medieval attempts to clarify the concept. I then begin to trace the reform movement of the Twentieth Century (which I attribute to the joint inuence of Tarski and Quine) and examine John Etchemendys argument for the non-equivalence of the traditional concept with the reformers set-theoretic surrogate. In chapter four I go deeper into the problems with the resulting entanglement between set theory and logic.
3.1
T HE C ONDITIONS OF VALIDITY
The use of valid inferences predates any theory of what it is for an argument to be valid, but that did not prevent the pre-Aristotelian philosophers from disputing the inferences of others. It is clear, for example, that Pythagoras and Thales in the Sixth Century bc had a working understanding of the notion of valid inference even though no theory of validity has survived. Indeed the absence of a theory probably attests to the widespread agreement on what counts as a valid inference, for denitions tend to arise as a way of settling otherwise unsettlable disputes; if there are no such disputes there is no need for denitions. Self-conscious theories of validity seem to have arisen mainly as a response to the Sophists, who, if tradition is to be believed, gave trans-
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parently fallacious arguments that had a similar form to an opponents valid inferencethereby attempting to discredit them. (I will forbear from repeating the last chapters injunctions against this move!) Plato, it appears, took this challenge seriously and it provoked him to consider the link between the premises and conclusion of a valid argument. His considered view was that the necessary connections between sentences, the entailment of one sentence by others, is a reection of the connections between the Forms to which the premises and conclusion refer. Hence if the Forms are, in effect, generalizations of the Euclidean abstractions point, line, plane, etc, then logical inference is a generalisation of geometrical inference. (This model of necessary connections has, of course, recently been taken over by Armstrong, Dretske and Tooley as a way of explaining causation and laws of nature.) Underlying this Platonic conception of valid inference there is the germ of the modern conception. We may state this modern conception as follows: Val: An argument A is valid iff it is impossible that its premises be true and its conclusion false. In one sense this is vaguer than the Platonic conception since it does not mention the ontological ground of this impossibility; it would take the rise of a full semantics for Modal Logic before one could feel that the denition had been adequately spelt out. On the other hand it is more satisfying than the Platonic conception as it does not require one to know, or even pretend to know, the strange mechanics of coupling Forms. Val is at the heart of modern logic and is stated explicitly in nearly every textbook. But is it true? Let us break the biconditional down into its two implicational halves, thus obtaining a necessary and sufcient condition for validity. NecV: An argument A is valid only if it is impossible for its premises to be true and its conclusion to be false. SuffV: An argument A is valid if it is impossible for its premises to be true and its conclusion to be false. The rst conditional here, NecV, looks to be true beyond all doubt, but what of the second? Is it really true that any argument for which it is impossible that it have true premises and a false conclusion is valid? Consider the following argument: (1) Either snow is white or snow is not white This argument is invalid
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If this argument is valid then, since its premise is necessarily true, its conclusion must be true as well. But the conclusion says that the argument is invalid. So we have the consequence that the argument is invalid if it is valid. Suppose then that the argument is invalid: then, by SuffV, it must be possible for the premise to be true and the conclusion false. But we know that the premise is a necessary truth so that only leaves the possibility that the conclusion is false. But if the conclusion were false then the argument would be valid. On the condition that SuffV holds and the argument is supposed to be invalid we can show then that the argument is valid. But this is no paradox since we can deny SuffV; if we do we have the conclusion that it is impossible for the premise of (1) to be true and the conclusion false (since both are in fact necessary truths) and yet the argument is invalidas the conclusion says. SuffV is false. In (1) we have an argument that is invalid but which satises the conditions for a valid argument; there must then be some condition for validity that has been omitted. Of course that does not mean that we have any reason to doubt that our conditions for validity are not necessary: NecV still looks to be perfectly true. Though the conclusion drawn from argument (1) may be novel, (1) itself is not. In a slightly different form it was included in the group of problems known as the Insolubilia and can be found in the treatise Perutilis Logica of 1350 by Albert of Saxony. In Albert of Saxonys original the argument was (2) God exists This consequence is not valid
but it is clear that the premise is intended to be a necessary truth and any such will do. The argument can also be found in the work In Universam Logicam Qustiones attributed to the author now known only as Pseudo-Scotus (though he may have been a virtual contemporary of Albert).1 It may therefore go back to Jean Buridan who was known to be Alberts teacher and a major contributor to the Insolubilia literature. Albert of Saxony draws a rather different conclusion from (1) than I have. He argues that, although (1) is invalid the conclusion that states that it is invalid is not true: things are as the conclusion signies them to be and yet the conclusion is not true. By this means he can save SuffV since he can maintain that the argument is invalidthough, rather paradoxically, it is not true that
William and Martha Kneale speculate that he may have been one John of Cornwall. See The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1962, 1984. p. 771.
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it is invalid. The argument is invalid even though it is not possible for the argument to have true premises and a false conclusion. In modern parlance we would probably say that Alberts solution to the self-referential paradoxes is to reject one implicational direction of the Tarski biconditionals. Coincidentally, the height of the discussion of the Insolubilia, around 1350, occurred at the same time as the rst and most devastating outbreak of the Black Death. It was this same major outbreak that was responsible for the deaths of William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Albert of Saxony. Indeed it is plausible to suggest that this also marks the end of the Medieval world proper. For the Medieval outlook of the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries was largely based on the idea that the order and reasonableness of the world was a reection of Gods reason and order. To see that order break down in the Plague years and the reasonableness fracture in the light of the paradoxes was to court Atheism. Increasingly from the Fourteenth Century, belief rests on faith rather than reason, a reliance that was nally enshrined in the views of Luther, Calvin and Wyclif and the Protestant Reformation. Although the simplest of the Insolubilia, the Liar Paradox, was revived in the Twentieth Century in the light of the Set Theoretical paradoxes the discussion has rarely extended to arguments like (1) above. Truth has thus come to seem like an urgent and intractable problem whereas validity is assumed to be a settled matter. This seems an indefensible division: if truth has its problems then surely logical truth will also.2 To return then to my main argument, SuffV is false: we do not have a set of sufcient conditions for the validity of arguments. It is worth noting, however, that Anderson and Belnaps arguments against Classical Logic make the same point; they think that the Classical notion of validity enshrined in Val is insufcient and must be supplemented by Relevance conditions. My argument is entirely neutral on the question of relevance conditionsbut the argument above from (1) against SuffV is, I think, rather stronger than Anderson and Belnaps trading of intuitions on the so-called paradoxes of implication.3 If SuffV is false how can we be sure that NecV is not false as well? Perhaps there is some exotic argument, self-referential, or otherwise monstrous, that is valid even though it is possible that it have true premises and a false conclusion. Indeed, perhaps there is some argument that is valid even though its premises are actually true and its conclusion actually false. May the following argument
2 There is a signicant disanalogy between truth and logical truth and that is that necessities are usually taken to be properties of propositions whereas truth is often taken to be a property of sentences. Propositions cannot be paradoxicalon their usual construal. If this is correct then (2) is not valid because the corresponding conditional proposition is not a necessary truth. 3 I discuss Anderson and Belnaps views further in chapter ve.
52 not be an example? (3)
This premise is true This premise is true
The suggestion is that this argument has the form p therefore p and all substitution instances of that form are valid. Yet the premise can be consistently assumed to be true while the conclusion is denitely false, since it contains the false presupposition that it is a premise.4 But as tantalizing as it is to suppose that (3) is an example of a valid argument with a true premise and a false conclusion, the case will not, I think, work. This is because it is not really plausible to suppose that the argument is, in fact, an instantiation of the form p therefore p. The indexicals make it clear that whatever proposition the premise asserts it is not the same as the proposition asserted by the conclusion, as is clear if one tries to paraphrase the sentences without the indexicals. (3) is not therefore a counterexample to NecV. A more promising suggestion comes from David Stove. (4) All arguments with true premises and a false conclusion are invalid This argument has true premises and a false conclusion This argument is invalid.
Stove thinks that, although it is clearly valid, this argument has true premises and a false conclusion: (4) is therefore supposed to be a direct counterexample to NecV.5 Is Stove correct? I think not. His line of thinking seems to be that if the argument is validand its form surely suggests that it isthen, if its premises were true, its conclusion must be true as well. But the conclusion of (4) cannot be true if (4) is valid and so we have an argument that is valid but is such that if the premises were true then the conclusion would have to be false. And so we have a counterexample to NecV. This reasoning is mistaken, however. Stove assumes that the premises of (4) are true and then deduces a contradiction between that assumption and the conclusion being true. But there is no reason to assume that both premises are true. Given that the conclusion is false (as it must be if the argument is valid)
Note that the sentence is a near relative of the Truthsayer sentence This sentence is true which can consistently be taken to be true or false. In the Kripkean scheme it is ungrounded and therefore not made true at the minimal xed point of the inductive truth-denition, yet it will be true at other xed points. 5 D.C. Stove The Rationality of Induction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1986. Stove, very characteristically, refers to such examples as Pornology. For such things is he much missed.
4
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it is perfectly plausible that one of the premises should be falseand since it cannot be premise one it must be premise two. But if premise two is false then its rst conjunct is falseand so it is indeed false in an entirely self-consistent way. Argument (4) does not show that NecV is false. It is simply an example of a valid argument with a false premise. We may conclude, for want of any convincing counterexample, that NecV is truebut note that this is once again an inference to the best explanation and that our standard notion of validity holds good: there is a modal connection between the premises and conclusion of a valid argument.6 In the remainder of this chapter and the next we wish to examine how this is explicated (or fails to be explicated) in current Model Theory. In his closely argued book, The Concept of Logical Consequence, John Etchemendy argues that the standard presentation of semantics in First-Order Model Theorythat is, the view that derives from Alfred Tarskis famous 1936 paper (itself called On the Concept of Logical Consequence)fails to capture the essence of our intuitive notions of validity and logical truth. It fails to do so since it does not, contrary to Tarskis own claims, capture the modal nature of these concepts. Thus, if Etchemendy is correct, and I will argue that he is, the standard way of rendering the modal nature of these concepts tractable
6 Pseudo-Scotus has three attempts to give necessary and sufcient conditions for valid consequence. His rst is simply our Val: a consequence is valid iff it is impossible for the conjunction of the premises to be true and the conclusion false. He gives a counterexample to this proposal, as follows: every proposition is afrmative therefore no proposition is negative. The argument is valid but, though the conclusion is false (indeed, self-contradictory) the premise is not obviously false. I disagree with the assessment. In any world in which the premise is true the conclusion will be false. Pseudo-Scotus second attempt at a formulation is as follows: a consequence is valid iff it is impossible for things to be as the premises signify them to be without also being as signied by the conclusion. Against this Pseudo-Scotus has another not altogether convincing counterinstance: no chimaera is a goat-deer so a man is an ass. Here Pseudo-Scotus appears to be making a, now, rather standard complaint about relevance. (Though the example is actually invalid. Possibly the example was meant to be: a chimaera is a goat-deer so a man is an ass. Then, were things as the premises signify them to be there would still be no reason for things to be as the conclusion signies them to be.) The third account of validity says: an argument is valid iff it is impossible that the premises should be jointly true and the conclusion false when they are both formulated together. Against this suggestion Pseudo-Scotus brings the counterexample (2): God exists, therefore this consequence is invalid. The Pseudo-Scotus then remedies this third account by adding to the clause except for the single case in which the sense of the consequent is inconsistent with the sense of the inferential particle which marks the existence of the consequentia. It is a response that is obviously ad hoc, but presumably a full response would connect us up with the Liar Paradox. See W. and M. Kneale The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1962, pp. 2867 for their views on the Pseudo-Scotus arguments.
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is shown to be mistaken. Our First-Order Logic is all at an angle to the intuitive notion of valid consequence and logical truth that it was attempting to formalize. In the next section I will give an elementary example of the problem that Etchemendy has analysed and show that there is a solution in this simple case. This I think will bring out more clearly why the problem is more serious in other cases; I also wish to draw a rather different moral from that which Etchemendy himself draws.
3.2
T HE A MBIGUITY OF T RUTH TABLES
It was pointed out in the previous chapter that there are two quite different ways of interpreting truth-tables. One can either see them as testing propositional forms for logical truth and validity; or one can see them as testing propositions themselves for the same characteristics. It is the rst view, however, that has become the standard view among logicians. We can best illustrate the difference by looking at the following sample table.
not S
S and not S
true true false false
true false true false
false true false true
false true false false
If we think of S and S as propositional variables into which propositions can be substituted then the table is determining the possible values of the compound propositions. Each line of the table will then represent different propositional substitutions. For example, line one might be the case when S is the proposition snow is white and S is the proposition grass is green. Line three, however, might be the case when S is the proposition snow is red and S is the proposition the sky is blue. The nal column tabulates the results of these different propositional substitutions. On this interpretation of the table the expression S and not S is a function in two variables with arguments taken from the set of propositions and values in the set {true, false}. Call this the schema interpretation. On the second interpretation of the truth table S and S are actual propositions, say snow is white and grass is green respectively, and the table records the different combinatorial possibilities that result whese propositions are al-
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lowed to vary in truth values. Each row of the table thus represents a different possible world and the last two columns record the way that compound propositions are determined by their constituent atomic propositions. Line three, for example, represents a world in which snow is not white but grass is green. On this interpretation the expression S and not S is not a function in two variables it is simply a proposition which will vary in truth value from one world to another. We could, therefore, think of the proposition (changing the mathematical picture slightly) as a function in one variable, from the set of possible worlds to values in the set {true, false}. In chapter two I called this the counterfactual, or modal, account of the truth table. It is clear enough that the two interpretations are quite different. In practice, however, philosophers will often simply slide between the two conceptions, using the rst as a way of explaining the formality of logical truths, and the second as a way of explaining their necessity. But this should be, indeed must be, a judicious vacillation, since the two conceptions will only coincide in rather special circumstances. For example if S were itself a tautology then there would be no plausible interpretation for lines three and four of the above table on the counterfactual interpretationfor S could not then be false. In practice, therefore, only contingent propositions are chosen when one wants to move to the second interpretation of the truth table. But even this precaution is not enough to prevent absurdities from arising. For suppose that S were Mary is at least six feet tall and S were Mary is at least ve feet tall; then there is no genuine possible world where S is true and S is false, and hence the second line of our previous table is illegitimate and S and not S is false at every lineand therefore an impossibility. But since it imports a mathematical claim it could not quite be described as a logical falsehood. However whether it be a logical or a mathematical truthor some graceless hybrid of the twothe example makes it clear that one cannot always interpret the full truth table as giving us the genuinely possible worlds, even when the individual propositions are contingent. It is clear, then, that the second, modal, interpretation of the truth table will only generate the full array if the propositions are chosen carefully: they must be contingent and independent of one another. It is not necessary to take this precaution if one is working with the rst interpretation of the table. But that is not to say that some care is not required here as well. The full truth table array will only be generated on this schema interpretation if there are sufcient substituens. In practice this means that we cannot be restricted to the actual sentences of a language, since the expressive resources of a language are contingent; instead we must think of the substituens as abstract entities: propositions, which will be the meanings of all possible sentences. If the language in use hap-
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pens to fall shortand since its expressiveness is contingent there is no reason why it should be maximalthen possible sentences are standing by to ll-in the gaps. Both interpretations of the truth table, therefore, require abstracta either in the form of propositions, or in the form of possible worldsbut it is also clear that these abstracta are doing quite different jobs. On the rst interpretation of the truth table they are needed to ensure that we can say all that it is possible to say of the actual world; on the second interpretation they are needed so that we can say all that we want to be able to say of the non-actual possible worlds. So not only will the two interpretations generate the same tables only under quite special circumstances, their metaphysical underpinnings are really quite different. If the two interpretations will only coincide in special circumstances and have such different ontological needs, then the question arises as to why they are so easily conated. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that we can readily be induced to make the slide from actual values of possible sentences to possible values of actual sentencessince they seem, supercially, to be so similar. Indeed this slide, or something very like it, occurs in the two original presentations of the Truth Table method that appeared simultaneously in 1921in Wittgensteins Tractatus and Emil Posts Doctoral Thesis, published as the paper Introduction to a General Theory of Elementary Propositions.7 When Wittgenstein introduces truth tables, around proposition 4.31, it is with the explicit recognition that the lines correspond to the different possibilities of truth of the given propositions. As he says at 4.3: Truth-possibilities of elementary propositions mean possibilities of existence and non-existence of states of affairs. Thus for Wittgenstein the possible worlds are generated as the combinatorial possibilities inherent in the set of states of affairs. When Wittgenstein comes to the end of the proposition 4 series, however, he announces that The general propositional form is a variable (4.53) and throughout the 5 series propositions he is concerned with schemata and logical form. By 5.54, in fact, Wittgenstein declares that In the general propositional form propositions occur in other propositions only as bases of truth-operations. Although he does not say that the lines of the truth table now correspond to different propositions it would have been open to him to do sosince the notion of substitution is now available to him.8 Without being fully aware of the magnitude of the
Reprinted in From Frege to G del: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 18711931 (ed.) o Jean van Heijenoort, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967 pp. 264283. 8 In 5.01 he says, in fact Elementary propositions are the truth-arguments of propositions. This is as close as he comes to enunciating a general principle of substitution. The general concern with formality is enunciated at 5.13 where he says When the truth of one proposition follows from the truth of others, we can see this from the structure of the propositions. c.f.
7
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change Wittgenstein has shifted from the second, modal, interpretation of the truth table to the rst interpretation. In Emil Posts paper the slippage goes in the other direction. Unlike Wittgenstein, Post states the principle of substitution at the outsetand also notes that the principle was omitted from Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead (this, perhaps, being the cause of Wittgensteins haziness on the subject)but it is very difcult to see whether the symbols that he introduces to stand for propositions are dummy-names or variables. At the beginning of the paper they are called variables and treated as such, but when the truth tables are introduced the lines are referred to as possibilities.9 Thus he says: So corresponding to each of the 2n possible truth congurations of the ps a denite truth value of f is determined (p. 268). But it is very unclear whether these are the possible truth values of some denite proposition or whether they are the actual truth values of the many possible propositions. Nor is it difcult to understand why a certain amount of unclarity might have been an advantage here. After all, the rst interpretation of the truth table makes the proposition schemata intelligible (so that it generates the table), only if there is an implicit quantication over abstract entities, i.e. propositions. But given that we now have two interpretations of truth tables the question naturally arises as to the relation between them.10 We know that they will not coincide, except under rather special circumstances. Given that a table is set up to test some propositional schema, say S and not S, for tautologousness, what can we infer from the resultant table about a proposition with that formin particular, can we tell that it has, or lacks, some desirable modal characteristic? Fortunately, the answer to this last question is yes, we can. The reason is that even though the two interpretations will not always generate the same table, the modal interpretation will always generate a sub-table of the other. Thus whenever a particular form is tautologous, a proposition
5.131, also 5.54. 9 Lower-case letters are called variables and the upper case letters P and Q seem to be dummy-names of propositions. But Post uses the lower-case letters almost exclusively and treats them as though they were propositions in their own right. By possibilities Post may have meant epistemically possible (alternative) actual propositions. 10 Copi, for example, says in his Symbolic Logic 5-th edition: there is nothing necessary about the truth of B [Balboa discovered the Pacic Ocean]. But the truth of the statement B B can be known independently of empirical investigation, and no events could possibly have made it false for it is a necessary truth. The statement B B is a formal truth, a substitution instance of a statement form all of whose substitution instances are true. A statement form that has only true substitution instances is said to be tautologous, or a tautology. (p. 27). The implication is that the necessity of B B is explained by the tautologousness of p p, but the fact that the former will be represented by a line of the truth table of the latter only explains why it is true, it says nothing to suggest that it will be a necessary truth. For that one needs a further argument.
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with that form will always have every line of the truth table true, even if the substituens requires less lines. In other words, when the schema interpretation designates a form tautologous or valid the modal interpretation will designate a substitution instance of that form a necessary truth. (A point of which much was made in the previous chapter: valid argument forms have only valid substitution instances; so tautologous forms have only necessary truthsi.e. tautologiesas substitution instances.) The reverse need not hold, however, and we have already seen an instance of its failure. S and not S is not a tautologous schema but if we were to substitute for S Mary is at least six feet tall and for S Mary is at least ve feet tall then the resultant proposition would be a necessary truth, though not a logically necessary truth. This is simply because the one line that has false as the nal entry on the schema interpretation cannot count as legitimate on the modal interpretation. All of which is simply to say that there are more necessary truths than simple the logical truths. However, the temptation to conate the two interpretations has had the result that some philosophers have fallaciously concluded that all necessities must be logical necessities. Because they think that the formal criterion of tautologousness is equivalent to a statement of logical necessity they have thought that all propositions are free to vary independently of one anotherthe only constraint being logical constraint. Wittgenstein makes this mistake in the Tractatus. Early on, at 2.061, he asserts that States of affairs are independent of one another and at 2.062 that From the existence or non-existence of one state of affairs it is impossible to infer the existence or non-existence of another. This independence eventually turns into the thesis, after much discussion of the signicance of logical form, that Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility. (6.375). But unless one is very liberal with the meaning of the term logicalso that mathematical and conceptual necessities count as logical11 this claim seems false on the face of it and is unsupported by any argument. Wittgenstein has simply been seduced by the dual nature of the truth table and conated formality with necessity. To return, though, to our main line of argument: we have seen that there is a connection between the two different semantics for truth tables, and indeed that the connection is another manifestation of the point that was discussed in the previous chapter: valid inference forms have only valid substitution instances. But by giving us a bridge between formality and necessity it gives us
see 6.3751. Wittgenstein is driven to this implausible view precisely because he has already made the mistake that I indicate.
11
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a justication (in the case of a single system) for our intuitive notion of validity, outlined in 2 aboveand, perhaps even more importantly, it gives us an epistemic handle on modal concepts, something that we might have thought that we did not have.12 The important question to which we now turn is whether there is a way of extending this argument to other logical systems, including the most philosophically signicant system, the rst-order predicate calculus. It is this question that is addressed by John Etchemendy in his book The Concept of Logical Consequence. But before we go on to give Etchemendys argument it is worth recasting the above argument using his terminology. What I have called the modal interpretation of the truth table, Etchemendy refers to as a representational semantics; the other interpretationwhat I, looking to preserve the connection with the previous chapter, have simply called the schema interpretation Etchemendy refers to as a substitutional semantics which is a species of interpretational semantics. (Thus far I have not used Etchemendys terminology because I think that it gives a misleading impression that the two semantics are interpretations of the very same entitywhereas the object is different in the two cases: in one case it is a formula with a number of free variables, and in the other it is an actual proposition.) In a representational semantics a sentences meaningthe proposition it expressesis taken to be xed and its truth is determined by its relation to the worldor, if it is compound, by the way its component sentences contribute to its truth.13 Thus when we think of the sentence having a different truth-value in another possible world we are assuming that the only thing that has changed is the world that it has a relation toit still means what it does in the actual world. All of which is just to say that the proposition is xed and the world is the variable. (It is worth adding that trans-world entities are often taken to be metaphysically suspect, but propositions do need to be genuinely trans-world
Though we must be careful in our estimate of how much of our intuitive idea of logical necessity we have captured here. From one perspective we can see ourselves as having simply determined the necessity of logical truths, but if we turn it around and ask what modal logic we might obtain in this way, then the answer is that it is astonishingly weak, being Lemmons S0.5. 13 Of course there is another sense that can be attributed to the phrase representational semantics in which no one would think of a truth table as providing one, as Etchemendy also notes. That the sentence snow is white states the truth that snow is white is due to extralogical facts of linguistic construction, reference and predication, and none of that is unpacked by the truth table. The truth table simply assumes that the semantics for the language is given and xed and then looks at how the truth value of the sentence with that meaning would fare in different possible worlds. It is thus as though we carried the sentence across into different possible worlds and watched the effect on the sentences of which it is a constituent.
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for possible worlds even to be intelligible.) We can begin to see the problem by noting that, in the paper On the Concept of Logical Consequence, Tarski gave a very general argument for the coincidence of the two kinds of semantics, or, more accurately, for the ability of an interpretational semantics to guarantee the necessity of logical truths in a representational semantics. We look at this argument and Etchemendys response after we have described the extension of interpretational semantics to the predicate calculus.
3.3
S UBSTITUTIONAL S EMANTICS
The argument given in the last section to connect the representational (modal) semantics of propositional logic with a substitutional (schema) semantics clearly depends on the truth-table decision procedure for that logic, and, in particular, on the ability of the truth-table to be interpreted in two different ways. But there is no reason to expect that argument to extend to other logics where there is no decision procedure, or where there is no possibility of ambiguity. This is why the suggestion that there is an argument that will connect these different semantics for all logics should make us particularly suspicious and vigilant. But to present Tarskis argument, and Etchemendys response to it, it will be necessary rst to give a brief account of the idea behind substitutional semantics, and thereby Tarskis motivation for developing his account of satisfaction and truth, as we now nd them in standard model theory. The idea of a substitutional semantics for a propositional logic is reasonably clear. An expression such as p p is a function with a single variable p. Propositions are substituted into the variable position to yield a denite compound proposition with a denite truth value. It is analogous to taking an expression like x2 + x + 4 = y and substituting particular numbers into the variable position x to yield a value for y. We can make the analogy closer by thinking of the propositional formula as p p = y, where y can take only the values true or false. Tautologies are then the constant functions with the value true for all substitutions; contradictions are constant functions with the value false for all substitutionsjust as f (x) = x (x + 2) is a constant numerical function.14 Substitution works by having a set of substituends which constitute the domain of the functions, and where the range is some set of values. The idea of extending substitution to propositional expressions is often attributed to Bolzano, but it is at least implicit in all earlier discussions of logic going back
14 Propositional logic is unusual in that we are simultaneously considering a set of functions which have a different number of variables.
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as far as Aristotle. Generalizing this account to formulwith different sets of terms taken as variable is now reasonably intuitive. We decide which sets of terms are going to count as xed and which are going to count as variable, and we assign sets of substituends, from the stock that the language has to offer, to the variables. Thus we must think of the language as broken down into lists of grammatically similar terms. On the one hand we have the list of xed terms F and on the other, sets of lists of substituens for the variable terms V i . Thus under normal, and familiar, circumstances the list F might consist of the following terms: and, or, not, if. . . then. . . , if and only if, some, all. The entries for the variable types V consists of a many-columned set of lists V 1 , V 2 , V 3 , etc.
names Mary George London New York Sydney . . .
predicates heavy white round King . . .
functions plus square multiplication . . .
A logical truth with respect to some particular choice of xed terms is a true sentence which remains true whenever any terms in the lists V 1 , V 2 , V 3 , is substituted into the appropriate place in the sentence. The logical parsing may be coarseso that all possible indicative sentences are entered into a single list of variable terms (and with F as above) as in propositional logicor it may be very ne, so that all terms are treated as variable and none are xed. Under the coarsest possible parsing all terms are xed and none are variable. This gives us a partial ordering (indeed a lattice) of possible logics, with a different set of logical truths for each choice of xed and variable terms. The minimal element of this partial order has no terms xed, while the maximal element has every term xed. Thus for the maximal element every true sentence is a logical truth since there are no allowable substitutions: it is therefore vac-
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uously true that every true sentence remains true under every substitution into the variable places. Again, we might consider the analogy with algebraic expressions. The function f (x) = x2 + 4x +2 has one variable and three functions that are xed in meaning: exponentiation, multiplication and addition. These play the role of logical constants. In addition there are the non-logical constants 1, 4 and 2. If we are looking for a more general form for this function we might consider it to be nx2 + ux + v. We obtain the original function by lling in particular values for the new variables n, u, and v. Yet this function form is only an instance of a more general function form au xn + bv xm + cw and even this can be generalized further if we do not treat exponentiation, multiplication and addition as xed. Thus, depending on what we treat as semantically xed and what we treat as constant, we get a lattice of different expressions that vary in the number and character of their variable positions. This partial ordering of logicsthe scare quotes indicating that many will be so bizarre as to not really deserve the namewill exist for every given language, that is, for every given vocabulary of terms. We can thus think of there as being two parameters that must be xed to determine a logic: rstly, the xed and variable terms must be specied, and secondly the language must be broken into sets of terms and apportioned to the variables. When we have done this we arrive at the basis for a logic: it may be a predicate logic, a tense logic, a modal logic, or something even more exotic.15 We have two things here that we must be careful to distinguish: a recipe for constructing generalised logical languages, and a statement about the way to consider and treat variables that is modelled on the way we treat them in general algebraic situations. Yet both conict to some extent with our pretheoretic intuitions. In the former case the conict arises because we dont think that we should be completely free to choose what is regarded as a logical constant: surely there should be some general constraints that limit what can count as a logic? If we choose every term to be xed then, as already noted, all true sentences will be logical truths and every true material conditional will correspond to a valid argument. Yet surely this is not really a logic? A genuine logic requires some connection to exist between the premises and conclusion of a valid argumentif the premises are true then the conclusion must be true. How has this necessity been captured in this limiting case of a
I do not claim that the above is sufcient to make a logic, however. If one can nd no plausible rule(s) of inference then perhaps what we have are simply idle schemata. This element is missing from Etchemendys account.
15
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logic? As we will see, this is the question that is at the heart of the dispute over Tarskis account of logical consequence. But the second problem is that we think that logic should not be dependent on the resources of the language that we use: if we have a set of logical truths then, even if the language had been less expressive, the logical truths should have been the same. After all, we think of the logical truths as being a species of necessary truths, and we can hardly think that these vary according to the linguistic resources of one group of language users. Surely the necessary truths are not going to be conditional on such contingent facts as how rich a vocabulary a language has? Yet it is precisely this dependence that substitutional semantics forces upon us. To illustrate with a very articial example: suppose that we have the nonlogical sentence New York is a city and we make both proper names and predicates into variable terms so that in this instance the form for the sentence is Fa and both F and a are variables. Consider the two toy languages below with their lists of variable terms laid out in two columns. L1 New York London Sydney Jack L2 New York Sydney . . . is larger than a mile square . . . is heavily polluted . . . is a city . . . is less than six feet tall . . . is larger than a mile square . . . is a city
Under L1 the sentence New York is a city is not a logical truth since the admissible substitutions yield New York is less than six feet tall or even Jack is heavily polluted and both of these are false. But note that with the same choice of xed termsnamely, the empty setbut a more restrictive language, New York is a city does turn out to be a logical truth. For if L2 gives the available substitutions then the sentence remains true no matter what we substitute for the name and predicate of the sentence. So with the same set of xed terms the sentence New York is a city is a logical truth for one language but not for the other. It is worth seeing why these problems didnt arise when we were considering propositional logics and truth tables. The rst reason is that obviously the logical constants are xed as the truth functional connectives. The second reason is that there is a tendency to consider the substituends as abstract entitiespropositionsrather than sentence tokens. In fact even when this is
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not explicitly done it tends to be smuggled in implicitly in the form of possible sentence tokens. This is why no one worries about truth functional compounds that are so complex that the corresponding truth tables would require more sentence tokens than there are or have ever been. There are always possible sentence tokens standing-by in the wings. When we move to the model theory of rst-order quanticational languages we encounter the same problem: how to dene the substituends so that any limitations in our lexicon dont distort our account of logical truth and valid consequence? Freges own development of quanticational logic by-passed these problems in the same way that we saw in the propositional casethe way that is implicit in the analogy with algebraic expressions: consider the substituends as abstract entities. Indeed we might consider that the need for such objects as propositions and concepts is due to two separate demands: 1) the need for entities that are lexically individuated, as sentences and their components are, and, 2) not subject to the contingencies of denition and niteness in the way that sentences are. Only if there were something that met those two conicting demands could logic be developed formally, on the analogy with mathematics. Tarskis account of satisfaction is intended to meet this need in a more decisive way. We will see how it was intended to work in the next section.
3.4
F IRST O RDER M ODELS
Model Theory begins with a particular, restricted, languagea rst-order languageand proceeds to nd interpretations for that language in particular structures. We begin, therefore, by discussing what makes up a rst-order language. (I go through these, seemingly, elementary points in order to make a few remarks that are not often made. It can be skipped without loss to the main argument.) We start with symbols that form the alphabet of the language. These come in two kinds: logical symbols and non-logical symbols. The former consist of i) variables: x, y, x1 , x2 ,. . . , y1 , y2 , . . . ii) quantiers and connectives; iii) the equality symbol = (optional); iv) punctuation symbols: brackets. The non-logical symbols of the language consist of i) predicates: F, G, F1 , F2 ,. . . G1 , G2 ,. . . ; function symbols f, g, f 1 , f 2 ,. . . g1 , g2 ,. . . ; constants: a, b, c,. . . (with subscripts, as becomes necessary). In addition, the predicate and function symbols have an -arity which can be denoted with a superscript and which indicates the number of term position required by the predicate or function. So, for example, the successor relation is a 2-arity, or binary, predicate, while human is a 1-arity, or monadic, predicate. Addition and multiplication are 2-arity functions.
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Once we have the alphabet we can form expressions. The progression here is from terms to atomic formulas to (general) formulas. Terms are either constants, or variables, or functions of n-arity, followed by n number of constants or variables. The terms play the role of nouns in the rst-order language. An atomic formula is of the form i) t = s where t and s are both terms (if = is a logical constant); ii) an n-arity predicate followed by n terms. A general formula is either an atomic formula, or a negated formula, or of the form a b, where a and b are formulae and stands for any of the usual binary connectives; or it is of the form (x)A, or (x)A, where x is some variable that is being quantied over and A is a formula. This is an inductive denition and the important point, for present purposes, is that a formula is built-up from atomic formulae by the application of quantiers and connectives. A variable x is bound in a formula A if it is preceded by a quantier in which x appears. A formula in which all variables are bound is a sentence. In a sense the above denes, not a language, but the resources from which a rst-order language may draw. We can dene a rst-order language L as a set consisting of i) a denumerable set of variables; ii) a set, possibly null, of constants; iii) a set, possibly null, of functions; and iv) a set of predicate letters. If the language contains = as a primitive logical symbol then the set of predicate letters is allowed to be empty; if not, however, then there must be at least one predicate letter, or there will be no atomic formulae, and hence no formulae. As a rule those who come to Model Theory from mathematics are inclined to make = a primitive logical symbol, while those who come from a philosophical background are inclined to leave it out. In practical terms it makes no difference which one decides to dobut it is always well to keep such decisions clearly before us. We now have a set of rst-order languages and we wish to give them interpretations. We may consider an interpretation to be a non-empty set D called the domain, or the universe, of the interpretation, and a family F of functions from the non-logical symbols of the language to D with the following properties. There is a function whose domain is the set of predicates that assigns to each An an n-ary relation on Dor, equivalently, a subset of Dn . There is a function whose domain is the set of function symbols that assigns to each f n a function from Dn D. There is a function whose domain is the set of constants c that assigns to each c an element of D.
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Since each of these is a function no symbol can have two meanings, but there is no prohibition against a relation, or function, or element of D being named by two different symbols. And since the functions are completei.e., no symbols in the language are left uninterpretedwe can see the rationale for having many different rst-order languages: the languages are only as big as is demanded by the models.16 To complete the account we need only to give a description of the satisfaction of formulas with variables. To do this we take the domain and form a second set which consists of all the denumerable-lengthed sequences of elements of the domain (it is not often noted that this will in general require the Axiom of Choiceplacing it at the heart of logic itself). Now we take a sequence which is a member of and dene what it means for that sequence to satisfy a sentence, whether open or closed. Let * be a function based on which is such that terms of the rst-order language are mapped by * to the elements of D. In particular, a variable xi is taken by * to the i-th element of and an n-placed function fi which is the i-th element in some xed enumeration of the n-placed functionsof the form fi (t1 , . . . tn ) is taken by * to fi (*(t1 )... *(tn )). (In other words the function * maps n-functions to their values when they operate on elements in the domain.) Obviously there will be as many different * functions as there are sequences in .With these basic denitions of the action of * we can inductively dene satisfaction for open or closed sentences of a rst-order language. (i) If A is an n-place atomic sentence Ai (t1 ,...tn ) and the interpretation assigns the predicates extension to some set of n-tuples then satises A iff (*(t1 ),... *(tn )) belongs to that set. (ii) Let A be a sentence of the form A. Then satises A iff does not satisfy A. (iii) Let A be a sentence of the form A B. Then satises A iff either satises A or satises B or both. (iv) Let A be a sentence of the form A B. Then satises A iff either satises A and satises B.
Hunter, Metalogic, confusingly requires each symbol in the xed language to be interpreted and then treats all but a few symbols as if they were meaningless (he allows only a single expansion to add denumerable new constants but this really adds nothing since the resulting language still has only a denumerable number of constant symbols and the same result could have been achieved by relabeling.)
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(v) Let A be a sentence of the form AB. Then satises AB iff either satises A or does not satisfy B. (To shorten we may treat material equivalence as derived from AB and BA.) (vi) satises (xi ) A iff all sequences of that differ from in at most the i-th place satisfy A. All of these conditions are perfectly standard and require no comment. However it is worth making an incidental point about the meaning of the universal quantier. In standard presentations, including the one above, the universal quantier is treated as a logical symbol with a meaning that is xed independently of the interpretation of the non-logical symbols. But this is apt to be slightly misleading, for it encourages the idea that its object of reference is actually independent of the interpretation. But (xi ) does not mean all, or everything, it means everything in this domain, or every element of the set of the current modelit is thus partially indexical. 17 Of course the same point applies mutatis mutandis to the existential quantier. When we shift from one model to the next the quantiers alter their reference accordingly. The failure to see this shift is one of the things that is, I think, responsible for the counterintuitiveness in the so-called Skolem Paradox. But there are deeper consequences of the confusion between the ordinary language quantier all, and its formal counterpart, that will emerge in the next chapter. A sentence A is said to be satisable iff there is an interpretation for which there is at least one sequence in the associated with such that satises A. If A is a closed sentence then A is satisable in iff it is satisable by every sequence in the interpretation . A formula A (whether open or closed) is true for the interpretation , written as |= A, or |= A, iff every sequence in of the interpretation satises A. A sentence A is false for the interpretation iff no sequence in of the interpretation satises A. For convenience we abbreviate these to -true and -false respectively. An interpretation is a model of a set of sentences iff every sentence of is true for the interpretation . Needless to say an interpretation is a model of a single sentence A just in case A is -true. A sentence A is logically true (or valid) just in case it is -true for all interpretations i.e. every interpretation of A is a model of A. And nally, a set of sentences logically implies a sentence A iff in every interpretation every sequence that satises also satises A. This
This point was made with respect to second-order quantiers by George Boolos in On Second-order Logic in The Journal of Philosophy, vol. lxxii, 16, (1975) 509527.
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in rough outline is the idea of Model Theory for rst-order predicate logics.18 Much of the added complexity of the Tarski and Vaught later satisfactional semantics is required to extend the idea of truth and falsity to open sentences, i.e. formulae with free variables (though in their paper the point is rather hidden). In this respect Tarskian semantics for predicate logic deviates signicantly from the kind of semantics developed for the simpler propositional logics. For example, in Tarskis semantics for predicate logics although closed sentences are always either -true or -false, open sentences may be true, or -false, or neither. (They will be neither when they are satised by some sequences in but not othersa situation that cannot occur with closed sentences.) But more importantly for our purposes, the account of logical consequence is in one respect stronger in Tarskian First-order Model Theory than the account needed for propositional logic. This is because in propositional logic the account of logical consequence is simply: B is a logical consequence of A iff there is no interpretation in which B is false while A is true. Now if we were restricted to closed sentences then the corresponding denition might do: B is a logical consequence of A iff B is true in every interpretation in which A is true. But this is not the denition of logical consequence for a rst-order predicate logic for it fails when we have open sentences. Thus (x)Fx will be true in an interpretation whenever Fx is true in that interpretationbut it is not
See Elliott Mendelsons Introduction to Mathematical Logic (second edition) New York, D. Van Nostrand (1979) and fourth edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1997); also A. Tarski and R. L. Vaught Arithmetical Extensions of Relational Systems Compositio Mathematica 13, (1957) 81102. This last seems to be the rst time the modern conception of a model appeared in print in an article by Tarski; Mendelsons presentation follows Tarski and Vaughts to a large extent, though it is more detailed and more precise. The term model rst seems to have been coined in English in the late 1940s and appeared in a 1948 paper by John G. Kemeny entitled Models of Logical Systems in The Journal of Symbolic Logic; in Abraham Robinsons 1950 paper On the Application of Symbolic Logic to Algebra which appeared in Proc. Intern. Congr. of Mathematicians, Camb., Mass. published by the American Mathematical Society, 1952, 68694 this is an outcrop of his 1949 thesis work on the metamathematics of algebra; and in Kleenes An Introduction to Metamathematics in 1952 with the implication that it was by then a familiar term. Tarski seems to have rst used the term in his papers Contributions to the Theory of Models I, II and III of 19545 (i.e. rather late). It is possible that Tarski used a cognate term earlier, in his Polish work, but whether he did is hard to verifyfor we would need to know whether a Polish word would even then have had the English word model as its natural translation. All that we can now tell is that the translator of Tarskis papers for the 1956 volume has retrospectively imposed the term onto Tarskis earliest papers making it seem that the term was in currency as early as 1927. This also gives the false impression that there was no development between Tarskis fundamental work in the 1930s and the mature accounts of the 1950s. But if Tarski did not coin the term then it would be interesting to know who did and what analogy they had in mind. All correspondence welcome.
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true that the former is a logical consequence of the latter, not on the denition of consequence that we have given above. This is because there is an interpretation in which there is a sequence satisfying Fx which does not also satisfy (x)Fx. Let D be the set of all animals and let F stand for is a horse; then there is a sequence that satises the former that does not also satisfy the latter (for the latter is false). For closed sentences, however, the account of logical consequence reduces to the simpler condition: if B is a consequence of A then, if A is true in an interpretation, then B will be true in that same interpretation because all sequences satisfy A and therefore all, because the same, sequences satisfy B. It is obvious that the difference between the general account of logical consequence and the one that applies only to closed sentences is quite substantial. Many presentations, however, follow Tarski in not explicitly extending the account of consequence to general formulaequite wrongly in many cases since they need the stronger conditions.19 Occasionally the mistake is quite explicit: open formulae are treated as though the weak account of consequence were sufcient. It is worth isolating the denitions of logical consequence and logical truth so that we have them clearly before us. Denition: A formula A is logically true (or valid) just in case it is -true for all interpretations . Denition: A set of formulae logically implies a formula A iff in every interpretation every sequence that satises all the members of also satises A. If are a set of closed sentences then logically implies A iff every model of is a model of A. (This is, in fact, Tarskis denition in his 1936 paper). If logically implies a sentence A then A is said to be a logical consequence of . (Henceforth, I will drop the fully general conditions and concentrate on the case where we have sentencesi.e. closed formulae.)
In Chang, C.C. and H. Jerome Keisler Model Theory 3rd ed. Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990 there is a partial extension to open formulae by dening what happens when a set of sentences have as a consequence an open formula. I believe that Mendelson must be given credit for giving the notion in its full generality. The above mistake occurs in Ebbinghaus, H.-D., J. Flum and W. Thomas Mathematical Logic (second edition) (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1994) pp. 3335.
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3.5
TARSKI AND L OGICAL C ONSEQUENCE
This brief excursion into the basics of rst-order model theory reveals how it side-steps the language with its contingent, and potentially insufcient, resources and goes directly to the set of elements which constitute the domain. We do not substitute linguistic items into the variable positions of formulae, we consider sequences of things. This allows us to build up by recursion a picture of the relations between items of the (rst-order) language and the world (represented by the set of elements of the domain). It also allows us to understand what satisfaction means when we have a domain that is very much larger than the number of names (i.e. constants) that the language has. Thus, even if the language is quite limited, we will still be able to say that there is something that makes a sentence true or false; the sequences of elements of the domain will exist even when many of those elements fail to have names, or when a property fails to be denoted by a predicate. But if the Tarskian account of satisfaction solves the problem of the contingency of the linguistic resources, we still face the second problem, namely that we have left unconstrained what is to count as a logical constant. Of course we cannot read that off from the account of model theory given in the last section, because there we are thinking of one particular way of choosing the set of logical constants. But in Tarskis 1936 paper On the Concept of Logical Consequence there is an attempt at a very general account of logical truth and logical consequence that goes beyond the most familiar logical systems and that is intended to work even when the logical constants are chosen more liberally than we do in rst order logic.20 Tarski begins his paper by outlining the (earlier) purely syntactic account of derivability using a certain set of rules and notes that it is incomplete as it stands because there are arguments where we have a sentence that is an intuitive consequence of a set of statements but that cannot be derived from them by the standard rules. This is the situation of incompleteness (we will return to it in the next chapter). But he notes that, though we may be able to remedy this specic defect by formulating an innitary rule of induction, we cannot hope to solve all such problems by formulating new rules because Godels Incompleteness Theorems assure us that the valid consequences of a reasonably rich theory will always outstrip what we can derive within that theory. Any purely syntactic account of logical consequence is thus doomed to failurewe must look to a semantic account.
Alfred Tarski On the Concept of Logical Consequence reprinted in Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics (trans. J. H. Woodger) 2nd ed. edited and introduced by John Corcoran (Indianapolis: Hackett 1983). All page references to this edition.
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Tarski next notes that a purely substitutional semantics will not work and for reasons that we have already noted: the resources of a languagethe availability of names and predicatesis contingent and variable and we cannot hope that the genuine logical consequences will be fully captured in this way. Indeed, he says The condition (F) [a statement of substitution] could be regarded as sufcient for the sentence X to follow from the class K only if the designations of all possible objects occurred in the language in question. This assumption, however, is ctitious and can never be realised. (p. 416) The rejected suggestion is an important one, however. The way we got around the gap between the tautologous forms and the necessary truths of a propositional logic in section two, above, was by making sure that all possible substituends were considered, and that truth tables could be understood as an assessment of the possible truth values of any given substituend. But if all possible objects were available in a general quanticational context then we would have the beginnings of an answer to our problem. A purely substitutional model theory would allow us to see that a logical truth is one that must be true because no possible substituends could provide a counterexample (and mutatis mutandis for logical consequence). It is unfortunate then that, as Tarski says, rst order languages do not provide designators for all possible objects. Tarski then gives a sketch of his account of satisfaction and notes that it overcomes the problem of the contingency of the linguistic resources. He then goes straight to his model-theoretic account of logical consequence. The sentence X follows logically from the sentences of the class K if and only if every model of the class K is also a model of the sentence X. (p. 417) This is essentially the view that we have already outlined in the last section though restricted to sentences rather than general formulae. Tarski then claims that this account matches our intuitive account of logical consequence, in particular that it captures the modal character of logical consequence. It seems to me that everyone who understands the content of the above denition must admit that it agrees quite well with common usage. This becomes still clearer from its various consequences. In particular, it can be proved, on the basis of this denition, that every consequence of true sentences must be true, and also that
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The Art of Necessity the consequence relation which holds between given sentences is completely independent of the sense of the extra-logical constants which occur in these sentences. (p. 417)
Thus Tarski believes that simply moving to a satisfactional semantics solves the problem of logical consequence, and shows how to capture the intuitive notion in a precise way. Now Etchemendys complaint against this Tarskian solution can be put very simply: in the denitions of logical consequence and logical truth (either for sentences or formulae, in fact) there is no mention of the necessity of these sentence-relations and sentencesall we nd are double universal quantications, rst within an interpretation, over all sequences, and then over all interpretations.21 Intuitively, however, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, and as Tarski seems ready to agree throughout his paper, a sentence is logically true only if it is necessarily true, only if it not be possible that it be falseand there seems nothing that corresponds to that notion here. Nor is there anything that seems to coincide with the idea that a valid implication is one in which it is impossible for the conclusion to be false when all the premises are true. We were promised modal wine and all we seem to have been given is non-modal water. This is why we should be surprised and sceptical when Tarski claims to have given an account of logical consequence that coincides with the intuitive notion. For how can it follow from the model-theoretic denition of logical consequence that every consequence of true sentences must be true? Where did this must, this suggestion of necessity, come from? Etchemendy tries to show that Tarski has made a mistake here; but to reveal the logical error that Tarski must have made he must rst try to provide the proof that Tarski says could be given for the claim, but that he omitted. Now Etchemendy hazards that Tarskis missing argument is the following: Suppose that <K ,S > is the argument form corresponding to the argument <K,S>, and that <K ,S > is satisfaction preserving on all sequences. Assume further that all the sentences in K are actually true while S is actually false. Our goal will be to derive a contradiction from this assumption. . . The contradiction is virtually immediate. For we know that there must be at least one sequence that assigns to each variable occurring in <K ,S > that member of the appropriate satisfaction domain which corresponds to the expression
See John Etchemendy The Concept of Logical Consequence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
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Validity and Necessity the variable replaced. Since we have assumed that the members of K are true but that S is false, it follows that on this assignment <K ,S > cannot be satisfaction preserving. But this contradicts the hypothesis that the argument form was satisfaction preserving on all sequences, and so we conclude our proof. (p. 86)
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Etchemendy believes that this is the source of Tarskis claim that the above denition of logical consequence delivers the correct necessary relations. He says, We have shown that if S is a Tarskian consequence [i.e. satises the model-theoretic denition of logical consequence] of K, and if all the members of K are true, then S must be true as well. Furthermore, we can see from our proof that this holds quite independently of our selection of logical constants (p. 86). He then goes on to point out that the argument contains a scope fallacy in the necessity operator: specically, that the argument merely shows It is a necessary truth that, if S is a Tarskian consequence of K, then, if all of the members of K are true, then S will be true also and not what is desired, namely, If S is a Tarskian consequence of K, then, necessarily, if all of the members of K are true S will be true also. Or perhaps even, It is a necessary truth that, if S is a Tarskian consequence of K, then necessarily, if all of the members of K are true, then S will be true as well. The difference between these three lies in the origin of the necessity: in (i) the necessity simply marks the fact that the consequent follows from the denition of Tarskian consequence. It is as though we had said that bachelors are dened as unmarried therefore if X is a bachelor then X is unmarried. We are not capturing any deep property of logical truths here, merely rewording an analytic statement. We were aiming to capture (ii), since this does say something substantive about the relations between premises and conclusionsit says that if S is a Tarskian consequence of K then there is a modal relation between S and K. But, as we have already noted, there is nothing in the modeltheoretic denition of logical consequence that will yield up this modal relation. (If there were, we would presumably have (iii).)
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Yet it may be objected that Etchemendy does not do enough to convince us that Tarski has committed a modal scope fallacyafter all, he has simply adduced an invalid argument on Tarskis behalf and pointed out that it is, indeed, invalid. But this would be unfair to Etchemendy. There simply is no argument, other than the one that Etchemendy adduces, that would secure the conclusion that Tarski wants. However, toward the end of the paper, Tarski makes a point that would be quite false if he had indeed considered the justication for his position as Etchemendy conceives it. For he says that if we were to make all of the terms in the language logical constants then logical implication would reduce simply to material implication. But if Tarski is thinking of the matter as Etchemendy does then he should have been aware that it makes no difference what the logical constants are; the argument would go through just the same, giving these logical consequences the same spurious necessity. The only possible alternative hypothesis that I can see for Tarskis error is that he temporarily misconceived the idea of satisfaction and supposed that when satisfaction goes beyond substitutional semantics to bring in all possible objects in the domain, i.e., even those that are not named, he mistook this claim about the unnamed items of the actual world for a claim about all possible worlds. This would be an understandable mistakeall the more so in a time before our current clarity about modal semantics. He may have thought that he was making precise, extensional, sense of a set of notionsnecessity and possibilitythat were vague and beyond the scientic pale. Moreover this way of understanding Tarskis project is more consonant with the rest of his philosophy. Thus Tarski is giving, not a conceptually adequate analysis of the notion of logical consequence, but an extensionally adequate replacement for what may, at the time, have seemed a scientically intractable, intensional, notionmuch what he had attempted to do with the notion of truth.22 This suggestionput in modern termsamounts to the idea that Tarski mistook an epistemic possibility for logical necessity. It is curious, however, that, when pressed, Etchemendy also seems to think of necessity and possibility in epistemic terms (see Etchemendy (1990) p. 82). Thus if this suggestion is
There is an excellent guide to Tarskis philosophical views in the letter published not long ago by Morton White. (See A Philosophical Letter of Alfred Tarski The Journal of Philosophy, vol. lxxiv, no. 1, 1987.) The letter was written in 1944, and reveals Tarskis very Quinean attitudeseven years before Two Dogmasto the question of logical revisability, as well as his assimilation of necessity to epistemic entrenchment. Tarski there reveals himself to have been espousing the replacement of vague intentional terms with precise, scientic, extentional equivalents. This will justifyin the next chapterour thinking of the Tarskian view as the Tarski-Quine elimination of necessity in favour of set-theoretic based alternative. In my view this makes it much plainer what Tarskis motives were in The Concept of Logical Consequence.
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right then Etchemendy is in danger of making the same error as Tarski. I argue in Heathcote (2003) that there is no coherent notion of epistemic possibility.23 Of course, it is impossible to say with any certainty what was in Tarskis mind. The only thing that is clear is that the model-theoretic account of logical consequence does not, in fact, coincide with the standard modal notion. Tarski began by rejecting a purely syntactic denition of consequence and used incompleteness to argue for a semantic notion. But if we were to ask by what criterion should we judge the semantic account of consequence? then the answer must surely be that it will succeed only if it not be possible for the consequent of an inference to be false whilst the premise set is true. But if we suppose that Etchemendy is right in his diagnosis of Tarskis mistake we can see why it should have been clear that it was never likely to be sufcient. For even if the argument had been successful in showing that logical consequence is a kind of necessary implication, or logical truth is a kind of necessary truth, that would not have been enough. To make sure that the necessity has the right properties we would also need to show, for example, that not all statements are necessary, that some are impossible, some are contingent, etc.24 Perhaps we should ask for even more that this, for if a necessary proposition is necessarily necessary then, on the model-theoretic criterion, should it not be the case that a sentence that is true in all models is such that it is true in all models that it is true in all models? But it is not clear that this S4 principle even makes sense here. Hence, the idea that we have found a model-theoretic, extensional, surrogate for necessity should always have appeared more dubious that it did. It took Etchemendys thorough analysis to make it obvious that it will not work. Before we go on it may pay to pause and review the argument that we have given in this chapter. We started out by noting that from the earliest times the connection between the premises and conclusions of a valid argument has been taken to be a matter of necessity. This was emphasised by Aristotle and reiterated in all of the Medieval discussions of logical implication. But truth functional logic does not, by itself, allow us to capture that notionin other words, truth-functional logic is incapable of being the logic of truth-functional logic. It does not even allow us to prove that tautologies are necessary truths. However, due to a fortuitous ambiguity in the nature of truth tables we can show that tautologies are, in fact, necessary truths. Can we extend this happy result to general rstA. Heathcote KT and the Diamond of Knowledge Philosophical Books, 2003 Not all logics with necessity operators permit contingency to be dened. Only T based systems do. See Max Cresswells Necessity and Contingency Studia Logica, 47, 1988, 1469.
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order quanticational logic? Tarski thought that he could give a simple argument that would guarantee such an extension, but, as we have seen, and as Etchemendy was the rst to demonstrate, Tarskis argument is fallacious. We are thus left with a signicant puzzle: is it in fact true that rst-order logical truths are necessary truths and that rst-order logical consequence is a species of necessary implication? If not, then rst-order logic will fail to qualify as a logic in the requisite sense. In the next chapter I look more closely at the relation between model theory and the modal character of logical truth to see if there is not a solution to this problem.
Chapter 4
Models and Modalities

. . . an easie Logick may conjoyne heaven and earth in one argument. . . Sir Thomas Browne
t the beginning of the previous chapter we noted that the modal characterisation of validity provides at least a necessary, if not quite a sufcient, condition for the application of that concept. However, the substitutional account of logical truth does not correspond to this modal condition. In the case of elementary propositional logic this does not matter very much because, thanks to the simple combinatorial structure of the substituends, there is a ready translation into the modal criterion. But it is obvious that there can be no general argument for the agreement of the substitutional and the modal for any logic that is, for any choice of xed termsand Etchemendy is quite right to point out that the argument that Tarski appears to give is fallacious. This leaves us, however, with a pressing problem: is there another special argument that allows us to assert that the logical truths of, at least, rst-order logicthe logic, after all, that most philosophers care aboutare all necessary truths? Does the substitutional account admit here of a modal interpretation? If the answers to these questions are both no then Model Theory will not be about what most philosophers have thought that it was about for at least the last fty years. And if that is so then the essentialist claims for rst-order logicthat it is, indeed, the one, true logicwill begin to look very dubious. But I will argue that the situation is even more involved than this suggests, for even if there is an argument to link the substitutional and the modal it may have to be bought at the cost of the First-Order Thesis itself. Either way the First-Order Thesis is in danger of collapse. In what follows I argue that it is, indeed, unsustainable. 77
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4.1
T HE N ECESSITY OF S ET T HEORY
The idea that models are possible worlds is deeply embedded in the history and philosophy of logic. For example, at the very beginning of their seminal work, Model Theory, Chang and Keisler explicitly make the identication: At the most intuitive level, an intended interpretation of these statements is a possible world in which each statement is either true or false.1 We saw in the last chapter that there is a systematic ambiguity in the Truth Table that allows us easily to slip between the substitutional and the modal interpretation in the propositional case. This ambiguity does not permit us to identify models with possible worlds but it does explain why we do not usually encounter obstacles in passing from one interpretation to another. But Chang and Keisler do make such an outright identication and they repeat the claim in the case of rstorder logic, where we have no reason to suppose that we can pass between the two. Thus they say: Therefore, a possible world, or model for L consists, rst of all, of a universe A, a nonempty set. . . 2 (my emphasis). And comparing rst-order logic with propositional logic they say: The whole question of the (rst-order) truths and falsities of a possible world (i.e., model) is just not a simple problem.3 It is clear enough from this that for Chang and Keisler model is synonymous with possible world and it is rather easy to see why this might be so: models just look like alternative possibilities. It is noteworthy, however, that this modal interpretation of rst-order models does no actual mathematical work in Chang and Keislers presentation.4 There is, however, an obvious and immediate reason for being cautious about a straightforward identication of models with possible worlds, and this is that the model structure of rst-order logic is extremely rich, too rich for there to be a straight-forward one-to-one map from models onto the possible worlds. For if every model represented a possible world then there would be no models that represent impossible situations. Yet we know, for example, that there is a model of Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory + the Axiom of Choice (ZFC) that has the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) true and another that has it false. Yet since CH is a purely mathematical claim we know that if it is true it is
Chang, C.C. and H. Jerome Keisler Model Theory 3rd ed. Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990. p.4. 2 ibid pp. 19-20. 3 ibid p. 26. 4 The identication is made even more forthrightly by Elliott Mendelson in Introduction to Mathematical Logic (fourth edition). After giving the model-theoretic denition of logical validity as truth-in-all-interpretations he says (in a footnote): The mathematician and philosopher G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) gave a similar denition: B is logically valid if and only if B is true in all possible worlds. (p.65)
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necessarily true and if it is false it is necessarily false. So one of the models of ZFC is necessarily false and therefore cannot represent a possible world. This means that we cannot simply identify rst order models with possible worlds, not at least if we want to treat possible worlds with full ontological seriousness, and not just as a way of representing our epistemic limitations. Nor does it seem entirely true to say that, in general, models do look like possible worlds. When we nd non-standard models of Peanos axioms that have uncountable domains it does not look very plausible to say that we have found a possible arithmetic that is uncountable. Rather we would say that we have found something that resembles arithmetic in certain formal respects, but that is actually quite different. Indeed it is not at all easy to say what these non-standard Arithmetics might be, and there appears to be no standard interpretation that might point-up their philosophical signicance. But the point is that there has been no overwhelming tendency among philosophers to think that different possible worlds have their own non-standard arithmetics, or even that arithmetic can vary across possible worlds. If all the arithmetics exist then they all exist in all possible worlds. But even though there is, arguably, no straightforward identication of all models with possible worlds it may be suggested that a subset of the models might represent such worlds. An argument due to Vann McGee seems to promise just such an embedding.5 The argument is as follows: let be a rstorder model for , i.e., in which the sentence is true in the actual world W@. Go to some possible world Wi in which the sentence is false in the structure *. In Wi the structures of the world are, as usual, sets with urelements (individuals or atoms that are not themselves sets) but there is an isomorphic structure which is purely set-theoretical, i.e. where all the individuals are themselves sets. Call this structure (s for spectral, since this structure has a s rather attenuated existence). If is false in * then it will be false in since s they are isomorphs. But since is a structure of pure sets it will exist in evs ery possible worldsets, like numbers, having a trans-world existenceand so will exist in the actual world. But then will be an actual rst-order strucs ture in which is false. So if is not a logical truthif there is a possible world in which it is falsethere will exist a structure in which it is false (and, of course, mutatis mutandis for logical consequence). In other words we have embedded isomorphic copies of the possible worlds amongst the set-theoretic structures of the actual world. The possibilia are now actualiaif indeed the
The argument was originally presented in a review of Etchemendys book in The Journal of Symbolic Logic 57, 1992, 254-255 and again in Two Problems with Tarskis Theory of Consequence Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1992, pp 273-292.
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structures of set theory are actual. It may be easier to see this argument if we turn it around. Suppose that is a logical truth: then it will be true in all of the actual models. But it will also be true in all possible worlds (by the intuitive account of logical truth) and, by the set-theoretical dummying construction, the spectral isomorphs of these will be embedded in the actual models. Thus when we dene logical truth in Model Theory and quantify over all models we are ipso facto quantifying over all possible worldsor isomorphs of same. Truth in all models guarantees truth in all possible worlds.6 This argument overcomes the central problem with the modal interpretation of rst-order models, namely that there are two points on which models diverge from possible worlds: unlike possible worlds, models are sets formed from actual objects; and unlike possible worlds, at least as they are standardly conceived, models are (sometimes) contingentbecause the urelements that go into them are contingent. So a model whose domain consists of the musical works of William Byrd is restricted to the number of works that the composer managed to produce in his eighty years. Had he lived longer there might have been more; had he lived less long there might have been fewer. But these mere possibilities go quite unremarked in Model Theory, which is only concerned with the sets that can be formed from what actually exists. Had there been no Byrd at all there would have been no works of Byrd and hence no model consisting of same. Thus when in Model Theory we quantify over all models, we are quantifying over some things that only contingently exist. This threatens to make logical truth and consequence contingent unless we have a way of
This argument is rather similar to Duns Scotus argument concerning the innite extent of Gods knowledge. It is well-known that the modern concept of a possible world being the model for necessities comes from Scotus; but Scotus also embedded these possibilities in the actual world by insisting that they were all represented in the innite mind of God. This is used as a premise in the following argument: Whenever you have a potential innity, if all its members were to exist at the same time, you would have an actual innity. This is clear if you consider the consequences of any alternate hypothesis. Consider the intelligibles which we know by thinking of one after another. They are potentially innite and they are all actually known by God, because he knows whatever can be. Hence he knows an actual innity. (In Medieval Philosophy from St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa (ed.) John F. Wippel and Allan B. Wolter O.F.M., New York, Free Press, (1969) p. 414. (my emphasis)) Scotus has thus ensured that any possible model will exist in the actual world since God exists in the actual world. This is a simple variant of McGees argument. (Scotus could not eliminate the possible worlds without eliminating the ground for Gods necessary existence. Likewise, McGee cannot eliminate possible worlds in favour of their set-theoretic mock-ups without taking away the basis for the necessity of set theory.)
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ensuring that the structure of pure sets is sufcient. This is what McGees argument accomplishes: if there are non-actual models in other possible worlds then set theory can ensure that a spectral isomorph of them can mimic them in the actual world. The existence of spectral isomorphs ensures that the actual world is always sufciently well-stocked with models. But note that this Contingency Problem is only solved at considerable cost, for we are now obliged to take sets with full ontological seriousness; and moreover we are forced to believe that they are robustly trans-world entities. Deny either of these and McGees argument will not work, as he himself recognises.7 The contingency problem shows that the deciency in Bolzanos account survives mutatis mutandis in Tarskian semantics. That decit, recall, was that a language may lack crucial expressive resources, so that some sentences turn out to be logically true that would not have had the language been richer. In other words, substitutional semantics makes logical truth seem to depend on the purely contingent resources of the language. Tarski sought to remedy this deciency by having his analysis go directly to the objects themselves. But now the problem is not with the contingency of the language but with the contingency of the objects that actually exist. Had the ontology of the world been different in any way whatever there would have been a corresponding difference in the models that are available for rst-order analysis. The way out of Bolzanos and Tarskis difculty is the same: ensure that there are sufcient abstract entities to ll the gaps left gaping by the contingent existence of physical objects (where these include natural languages). Thus in the historical Bolzanos account, propositions, rather than sentence-tokens were used, precisely to ensure that logical truth was not dependent of the resources of particular languages. So also, to ensure that Tarskis account does not depend on the physics or the biography of this world we must have sufcient abstract objects to ll the gaps. Thus it turns out that abstracta are the luxuries we nd we cannot live without. Before leaving McGees solution to the Contingency Problem it is worth noting that there is one respect in which our calling it the contingency probSome philosophers believe that all sets, even those with urelements, exist in every possible world. If this were true it would solve the contingency problem in one stroke, since all possible models would then exist in the actual world. However there seems to be no philosophical reason to believe it true and it leads to absurd consequences; for it would mean that the set whose elements are the Golden Mountain, Elizabeth the Firsts daughter, and the Tenth planet, would exist in the actual world even though the elements dont. But sets have objects for elements not the names of objectsand if the objects dont exist then the set is empty, by the principle of extentionality. McGees argument provides a way around this by translating to a structure in pure setssince these, presumably, do exist in every possible world, because the empty set exists in every possible world.
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lem is apt to be misleading; for it suggests that the divergence between Model Theory and the modal criterion of validity is due to the contingency of the physical objects of our world, and that were they to be necessary existents the divergence would disappear. This is not true, however; the problem lies not with the contingency of the objects of our world but with the contingency of the objects of other possible worlds. Or, to put it another way, the problem is not that the actual is not necessary but that not everything that is possible is actual. What we need is that the actual be as well-stocked as it is possible to be. That way there will always be sufcient models. McGees argument ensures that the sentences Model Theory declares to be logically true will all be necessary truths. (The converse, of course, does not follow from the above argument: we do not know that all the necessary truths will be truths of Model Theory.) But since no originator of Model Theory apparently envisioned the need for an elaborate set-theoretic justication for this connection, the question arises as to why the two conceptions, the model-theoretic and the modal, agree to the extent that they do. The answer goes back, I think, to the historical roots of logic. Experience gained during the period from Aristotle to the 1940s strongly suggested that rst-order quanticational inferences have a modal character. First-order inferences look to be truth-preservingand its not just that they happen to be truth-preserving, as a matter of contingent fact, but that they are necessarily so. Indeed our very idea of necessity was honed and developed by the Medieval attempt to more fully understand the character of logical inference. The gradual evolution of the concepts of necessity and possibility from their inchoate Diodorean form in Hellenistic logic, through to the modern notion, in Duns Scotus, Ockham, and later Leibniz, makes their connection with rst-order inference almost analytic. Tarskian model theory succeeded precisely because it identied the same set of sentences as logical truths. And it was the philosophers ability to describe the set in both ways that led to the acceptance of the Tarskian scheme. In this way models were mistaken for possible worlds. However, the problem with this is that it merely provided a reason to believe that a certain set of rst-order sentences have two different properties: the property of being true-in-all-possible-worlds and the property of being true-inall-interpretations. It provided no reason to believe that these two properties were the same; extensional equivalence is, after all, merely that: two properties that determine the same set. We were given no reason to believe that they determine the same set because they are the same attribute under the skin. Yet surely it was this extensional equivalence that led to the two concepts being taken to be the same. Indeed I suspect that it was this that originally misled Tarski into thinking that the concept of a model was an adequate conceptual
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analysis of logical validity: Tarski mistook an extensional equivalence for an intensional equivalence.8 But even this was claiming too much, for we have no real reason to believe that they are indeed extensionally equivalent. At best we have a reason to believe that the sentences that are model-theoretically valid are a subset of the sentences that are intuitively valid To conclude, then, this rst part of the argument: we have seen that rstorder models are not possible worlds but that, provided we are allowed the very rich resources of set theory, we can at least show that the sentences declared valid by rst-order model theory have the desirable attribute of being necessary. Our point has been to demonstrate the necessity of set theory for the interpretation of rst-order logical truth. The question arises, however, as to how we x the set theory itselfand which set theory is the correct one? This we take up in the next section.
4.2
T HE I NSUFFICIENCY OF S ET T HEORY
In the previous discussion sets have entered into our account of rst-order logic in at least two ways. Firstly, they are the basis of all rst-order models: standardly, any non-empty set can be a model. And secondly, sets are the elements in a very large structure into which we are able to encode possible rst-order models. (Of course, sets have entered in an inessential way when we have spoken of sets of sentences but we are here only concerned with their essential uses.) In both cases we have been tacitly assuming that there is a xed universe of sets to which we can appeal, and that it is possible to speak of this universe as in some sense maximal. Are these assumptions true? The question is of some importance as we dont ordinarily think of logical truth as being hostage to the choice that we might make between competing mathematical theories in an apparently quite different realm. It is obvious when we consider McGees argument that the particular set theory needs to be exceedingly capacious since, essentially, every possible world must t inside it. It seems clear that McGee intends Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the Axiom of Choice (or ZFC, for short9 ) with its intended
8 Just as it seems he did in the case of the denition of truth. Indeed that diagnosis of Tarskis error in the truth case has been made by Etchemendy also, in his earlier paper Tarski on Truth and Logical Consequence Journal of Symbolic Logic 53, 1988, pp. 5179. Wilfrid Hodges, in conversation, has also stated that he believes that this was Tarskis point. However it is worth saying that even if Tarski principally cared to establish only extensional equivalence, that he expressed himself frequently in ways that suggest that he thought that he had established more than that. It is this that Etchemendy has, quite correctly, noticed. 9 Confusingly, the Axiom of Choice is often taken for granted, and ZFC is called ZF. In what follows I will do likewise: hence ZF will be an abbreviation for ZFC.
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model, the Cumulative Hierarchy of Sets. This set theory has no urelements but is large enough to admit a translation function from possible models with urelements. It is worth saying that other choices for the axioms were possible: we could, for example, have chosen a class-based theory like Von Neumann Bernays-Godel Set Theory (or NBG, as it is usually known). We return to this possibility in due course. McGee is content to leave the matter vague in the rst instance. When we come to the underlying set theory for Model Theory itself, however, the case is quite different. It is a point that is usually passed over in logic texts, that if models are non-empty sets it will matter to the denition of logical truth which axiom system and model of same we choose. For example we cannot think that this set theory is the standard ZF because ZF in its usual presentation is a theory that does not have urelements. But we certainly want our model theory to be able to say things like either it is raining or it is not raining, or if John is a parent then John is a father. Indeed to be robbed of the ability to say such things would be to lose the very heart of the logical enterprise. The cumulative hierarchy as a model of ZF will therefore not do since it consists only of pure sets.10 Fortunately it is not difcult to remedy the deciency by adding a set (or class) U of urelements to the models of ZF and adjusting the axioms accordingly. The resulting set theory might be called ZFU in contrast to the regular ZF which ordinarily wears its foundational set subscript silently.11 But an even more important need is that the set theory be, in some sense, maximal. We do not want our set theory to miss any setswe want it to be dened over all setsfor otherwise we will miss some models. The problem is that we have no obvious formal way of saying this, for we know that there is no set of all sets, that the collection of all sets do not form a completed totality (to put the point in a way that Cantor himself might have put it). Instead the best that we can say is that the collection of all sets is a class. But the problem is not just that we cannot easily say what a maximal collection of sets might look likeit is also that the set generating operations that are built into an axiom system like ZF are not sufcient to give us all the sets that there might
10 This appears to be a signicant difference between model theory as understood by mathematicians and model theory as understood by philosophers: mathematicians will almost always have ZF set theory in mind, whereas philosophers are likely to be thinking of a naive theory of sets with urelements. But as we can see both groups are mistaken: mathematicians, because we need urelements; and philosophers because only a formal, axiomatic theory, will avoid inconsistency. 11 This has been done, for example, in Mendelsons Introduction to Mathematical Logic (4th ed).
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be. Set theorists have therefore sought plausible principles that will take them beyond the limitations of the axioms. Thus we can split the issue of maximalityinsofar as it is relevant here into two distinctly different questions. (i) To what degree is set-theory, particularly ZF, extensible? (ii) Is it extensible in such a way that any extension could be said to be maximali.e. so that no other set could be added without resulting in inconsistency? We consider each question in turn. In ZF all sets are decomposable down to some nal set of elements on which they are founded. When we enlarge ZF to give ZFU we simply increase the number of elements that cannot be further decomposed. If, however, we admit sets that do not have ultimate elements, that can be decomposed ad innitum without reaching an individual, then we will have a vastly enlarged set-theoretic universe. Such sets are called non-well-founded sets and there have been claims made in recent years that their introduction would solve a number of outstanding important problems, from the Liar Paradox to problems with circular information. It is too early to say, however, what effect this enlargement might have on the rst-order models.12 But there is another, perhaps more important, way in which the axioms of ZF set theory are insufcient by themselves, and that is that they are neutral on the question of the existence of large cardinals. These very large sets have been postulated to existusually with the assistance of various reection principlesbut are such that they are not implied by the axioms of the theory. Such cardinals, called variously measurable, huge, superhuge, Woodin, etc., go far beyond our normal intuitions about sets but are not obviously inconsistent. There are, therefore, good reasons to suppose that they exist.13 But the investigation of these large cardinals proceeds more in the manner of the natural sciences than standard mathematics, and investigations are driven by the
The theory of non-well founded sets has been developed by Peter Aczel and is called ZFA or ZF + AFA where this addition is called the Anti-Foundation Axiom. Details can be found in Peter Aczels Non-Well-Founded Sets, CSLI Lecture Notes Vol. 14, CSLI Publications, Stanford: California, 1988. See also Jon Barwise and Lawrence Moss Vicious Circles, CSLI Lecture Notes Vol. 60, CSLI Publications, Stanford: California, 1996. Also Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy The Liar: An Essay on Truth and Circularity Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 13 The good reason being that anything in mathematics that is not impossible is obviously necessary, and therefore must exist. (Thus what is universally denied of God is almost universally accepted of mathematical entities.) And recall that we cannot deny this necessary existence to mathematical entities without the gulf of the Contingency Problem opening up once again.
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above-mentioned reection principles, whose logical status is far from clear. The crucial point for our purposes, however, is that if these large cardinals do exist then they make available an enormous number of models for rstorder logic, going far beyond ZF. Indeed, so long as our investigation of the set-theoretic universe is unnished, so will be our understanding of rst-order logic. There is a third way in which we can extend ZF, and that is by making it two-sorted, by including classes. But note that though this has some advantages, it is not quite an answer to the original problem. We wanted to increase the number of sets, so as to leave none out; including classes will not accomplish that. Moreover, as will see, classes lead us away from out problem in more subtle ways as well. Let us try to sharpen the problem, by considering what implications the failure of maximality has for our account of logical truth. But rst we rehearse the usual reason for beleiving that there can be no set of all sets. Thus, denote this non-existent universal set by V. If V existed then we would have V V , and obviously, by denition, there can exist no set that is not in V. But V would also have to be the union of the self-membered and the non-self-membered sets, thus V = {x : x x} {x : x x}. (4.1)
But we know by Russells paradox that there is no set of all non-self-membered sets and so V cannot exist either. Or, to put it another way, since there do exist sets that are not self-membered (even though there is no set of all such sets) it follows that either V does not contain such setscontrary to its denition or it does, and thus contains as a subset the set of all such sets which, by Russells paradox, we know doesnt exist. Thus, again, V does not exist. ZFC restricts the comprehension axiom in such a way that Russells paradox is blocked, but so, also, is the existence of V. (V thus seems damned either way.) Here, the problem is that Cantors Power set axiom holds, thus S, P(S) > S, where P(S) = {A : A S} (4.2)
where S is any set. Since the power set of a set is strictly larger than the set itself, if V exists we will have Cantors paradox, namely that P(V ) > V and also P(V ) = V . Thus V cant exist. The non-existence of V is not just a feature of ZFC, but is common to other set theories that pursue the same strategynamely, stratication of sets into layers, combined with forbidding predications that extend across upperunbounded tiers of the resulting hierarchy.
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Now we have our problem. The denition of logical truth is a universally quantied statement where the quantier ranges over all interpretations. We could formalise it thus, with s a sentence, T the value true, and M an interpretation remembering that M can be considered as a function14 : s is a logical truth i x(Mx x : s T) (4.3)
Now if we ask: can the RHS be satised? the answer is that it cant, because it requires us to refer to ALL interpretations, and this means ALL sets. For recall that an interpretation was simply an arbitrary set on which some functions were dened. So if we think of the interpretation which is being assumed by the quantied expression on the RHS it could only be V, the (non-existent) set of all sets.15 Consequently, the Tarskian denition of logical truth is unsatisable. There are, strictly, no logical truths. (Note: it is not that there are logical truths but no set of all logical truths there are no logical truths at all.) This means that though we need the sets to be maximal in order to dene logical truthand though it is not difcult to extend the axioms to bring more sets into viewwe can never have all of the sets. The usual thing to say at this point is that V is a class not a set. Thus Tarskis account of logical truth forces us out of ZF and into a two-sorted set theory such as NBG. But this also means that we have to modify the account of logical truth accordingly: to give us satisfaction in the class of all interpretations. It is normally assumed that this can be done, and if we are allowed a degree of informality it can. But we must remember the nature of Tarskis project. He wanted to replace scientically imprecise notions with concepts that were scientically immaculate. And by these standards the enterprise must be judged a failure. For, it is a point that is too quickly glossed over, that we can say nothing about classes; because classes cannot be members of either a set or a class, no class can have any propertyeven the property of being a class. For if we could say of a class C that it had a property F then C would be in the extension of Fbut then it would be a member of a set. Thus we can give a class a proper namesuch as Vbut we cannot strictly compare this class to anything else: say the set, or class, of possible worlds; because then we would have stepped across the line into predication.
An interpretation can be regarded as a function that maps sentences into the set of two truth values. An interpretation is a model for a sentence if it maps the sentence to the value true. 15 This matter has been discussed by Richard Cartwright, who calls it the standard view among logicians. However Cartwright himself disagrees with the conclusion. See Cartwright Speaking of Everything Nous, 28, 1, (1994) pp. 120. I think Cartwright omits the nature of quantication at the meta-level: a model is a set, and so a model of all models must be a set.
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What are the implications of this for McGees argument? We have seen that McGees argument establishes a conditional: (Quant*) If S is a (model theoretic) logical truth then S is true in all possible worlds. This is analogous to the conditional we established in the last chapter for propositional tautologies. (Prop*) If S is a tautologous form then (under reinterpretation) S is true in all possible worlds. The rst point is that the conditional Quant* should be able to be established without illicitly quantifying over all sets, because all that is required is that for every possible model, distinct from some actual model, there corresponds a model in pure sets. Strictly, we dont seem to be quantifying over all sets here. However, it is not clear that there is not an illicit quantication at a different point, when we speak of all possible models that are distinct from any actual model. It is entirely possible that that collection is too big to form a set, and that it will be a class. The second point is that Quant* does not in the end tell us all that much about how much about the proportion of the logical truths we have captured here. For suppose that we had just one sentence S that we had marked as a rst-order logical truth. Then Quant* would tell us that it was true in all possible worlds, but it would be obvious that we would have no guarantee that a sentence not declared to be a rst-order logical truth is not true in all possible worlds. So, in the present case, McGees argument tells us that rstorder logic does not overshoot, but it can tell us nothing about whether, and by how much, it undershoots. And invocations of the completeness theorem will not help, for all that tells us is that, if the model theory undershoots, then so does the proof theory to the same degree.
4.3
T HE F IRST-O RDER T HESIS
Once again, to take stock: we have been trying in this chapter to get a measure of the similarities and dissimilarities between the model-theoretic notion of validity and the intuitive (modal) conception. We have found that though they do not coincide there is a way of showing, providing we are prepared to make some quite strong assumptions about the reality and nature of sets, that
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all statements counted as logical truths by rst-order model theory are necessary truths. The converse does not hold, however, and there are reasons for believing that rst-order logic is leaving open some judgments of validity that the intuitive conception would not; because of the expressive weakness of rstorder languages the set of models outruns the genuine possibilitieswitness the Continuum Hypothesis. But rst-order models also fail to cover every possibility due to the restrictive character of the set theory on which they are built. Indeed, as we have seen, when we try to apply the theory of rst-order quantication to the assertion, within Model Theory itself, that a logical truth is true in all interpretations, we nd that it is undened. It is clear from this point of view that Model Theory is not capturing our intuitive modal criterion of validity, and that the divergencies show up in some surprising ways. Surprising, that is, to those who hold the view that First-Order Logic is all that can properly be called logic, the view that is often referred to as the First-Order Thesis. In Chapter One we mentioned several virtues that (rst-order) logic is thought to possess and that serve to distinguish it from mathematics, or physics, or psychology, or what have you. The rst is the idea that logic is metaphysicsfree: it does not involve us in awkward metaphysical disputes, nor seem to ask us to be committed to burdensome or dubious ontologies. With the minor (and easily forgotten) exception of the truth-bearer issue, rst-order logic has seemed very unlike either second-order logicwhich, as we will see, has been damned frequently as merely set-theory in disguiseor quantied modal logicwith its awkward problems of trans-world identity. In fact, what has been called the First-Order Thesis is precisely the view that rst-order logic is the only real logic there is, the other logics being, in various ways, metaphysically compromisedbeyond some pale where lie mathematics or physics proper. This property of being metaphysically uncompromised goes along with another, closely related, virtue: (rst order) logic is also thought to be topicneutral, it is not about anything. It is not about the weather, or numbers, or set-membership, or the relation of being-taller-than. Logic is neutral among all of these alternatives. It is, as Quine has said, ontologically indiscriminate.16 And yet all of these indiscriminate ontologies are somehow governed by the same logical laws. Of course both of thesetopic-neutrality and metaphysical freedomare recognisably Quinean claims and they comport well with the Classical and Medieval view of logic.17 On this view logic is epistemically and
see his 1990 paper Immanence and Validity in Selected Logic Papers (enlarged edition) pp. 24250. 17 Of course nothing is ever simple, least of all in Quinean criticism, for in addition to hold16
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ontologically secure and distinct from the richer subject matters of mathematics. One can be sceptical about mathematical entities but logic, being committed to no entities, offers no foot-hold for scepticism. Logic is the frame over which the world is draped, its skeletal structure, as it were, and we make a mistake if we think it part of the world. It is possible to see in these views a further manifestation of Deductivism: (rst-order) logic is special, it is epistemically secure in a way that other, nondeductive, fallible, modes of reasoning are not; and it is metaphysically secure because it is not ontologically burdened in a way that non-standard logics and mathematics are burdened. Yet to frame the matter in this way is immediately to see the threat posed by an unanalysed notion of necessity for rst-order logical truth. If we must accept the necessity of logical truths the rst-order thesis begins to look rather hollow, for we would be back, presumably, with the complexities of modal logic, trying to keep track of identity (or counterparts) across possible worlds. The Tarskian analysis of logical truth in terms of models is thus essential if one is going to try to maintain the First-Order Thesis in its strong Quinean form.18 Indeed the philosophical rejection of necessity, so central a part of Quines philosophy, would be made a nonsense if there were not the Tarskian model-theoretic analysis to ll the appropriate role in the explication of logical truth. (And the fact that it does not ll that role surely
ing to the rst-order thesis he also, notoriously, holds to a gradualism in the difference between logic, mathematics and physics. So the epistemic difference between them is meant to be merely a matter of degree: we should be able to accommodate experience that runs counter to the expectations of our physical theories by changing logic. Likewise we should take our postulations as veried by the whole of our scientic explanatory success. Needless to say I think that these two parts of Quines philosophy of logic do not sit at all well together. Just to mention one point: surely if we are able to postulate what the whole of our explanatory enterprise needs, then we should be free to postulate intensional entities like possibilities and necessities and meanings. Their justication is provided by Quines own form of holism. So what Quine has excluded in the early parts of Two Dogmas for rather dubious reasons, come rushing in the back door of the permissive nal section. 18 Thus whereas Tarski saw himself as analysing the necessity of logical truth in terms of satisfaction in a model, Quine I think sees himself as eliminating necessity in favour of that latter notion. It is notable, for example, that Quines Philosophy of Logic contains only two indexed mentions of necessity and they both occur in discussions of opaque contexts and neither in the discussion of logical truth. (There is a third, unindexed, mention in which Quine explains the appearance of necessity as merely a matter of epistemic entrenchment. p. 100) Indeed we nd Quine explicitly embracing the view that logical truth is simply truth under all substitutions. This is, however, systematically ambiguous between all available substitutions and all possible substitutions. The former is what Quine wants, but is clearly inadequate, while the latter is adequate but not something that Quine could embracegiven his stance on modalities. Thus, once again, we can see that the modalities that Quine expels out the front door have come back in through the back.
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counts as the severest blow to Quinean ambitions.) We need, therefore, to examine the claims of rst-order logic to see whether its supposed strengths might not be coeval, and complicit, with its weaknesses. In particular we want to see whether some of the deciencies of rst-order logicin particular those that are connected to the background set theory can be overcome if we move to another, stronger, logic. It helps in this context to have a notation that places rst-order logic as one logic among many; to this end logicians call (the language of) rst-order logic L where the rst represents the fact that less than a denumerable number of terms may occur in a sentence and the second represents the fact that less than a denumerable number of conjunctions and disjunctions may occur. Different logics can be marked with different superscripts and subscripts. Thus second-order logic is LII . In fact this permits ner discriminations between logics because the term rst-order does not permit us to distinguish between logics, for example those that permit innitely long sentences, that are all in some sense rst-order. We have already seen one example of the expressive weakness of rstorder languages. Consider again Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory (ZF). It can be described in a rst-order language (with identity), but it is most notable for the fact that it does not determine the size of its universe. Hypotheses can be framed concerning the existence of large cardinals that are neither provable nor refutable from its axioms. The existence of measurable, inaccessible, huge, etc. cardinals have been postulated, with good reasonbut cannot be proven to exist from the axioms of ZF19 . This makes for a particularly simple dilemma: if such cardinals do not exist then ZF is too weak to proscribe them, and if such cardinals do exist then ZF is too weak to imply them. Either way ZF is too weak. We will return to this point shortly. We have already seen that rst-order theories do in fact overgenerate possibilities: ZFC does not determine the truth or otherwise of the Continuum Hypothesis, so something is left as a possibility that should not be. Moreover this expressive weakness has been manifest since the beginnings of the formal isation of the theory in the early decades of this century. Lowenheims 1915 proof of the claim that if a set of sentences is satised in an uncountably innite model then it will be satised by a model of countable cardinality, showed that rst-order logic is too weak to pin down the countable/uncountable distinction in the domains of its models. On top of this we have the classic limi tative theorems: the Godel Incompleteness Theorems, the Tarskian Unden This is slightly different to the failure in the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem: there the axioms were too weak to pin down the cardinality across models; here the problem is that the axioms are too weak to pin down the cardinality within the standard model. At root, however, these are due to the same cause: the expressive weakness of rst-order language.
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ability of Truth Theorem, the Upward Lowenheim-Skolem-Tarski Theorem, etc. All of these indicate that the expressive weakness of rst-order theories runs rather deep. But even though rst-order logic seems rather weak, there is a remarkable theorem due to Per Lindstrom20 that shows that it is the strongest logic which is both countably compact21 and satises the downward Lowenheim-Skolem 22 (mentioned in the last paragraph). Lindstroms paper showed that Theorem if you try to strengthen rst-order logic in recognisable ways, say by adding new quantiers, then the new logic will either fail to be countably compact or will not satisfy the Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem. This is a mixed blessing. Model theorists often prefer a logic to have both properties because they provide a ready means for making models tractable, for allowing new models to be produced from old, etc.; for the philosopher, however, the Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem is a limitation that looks quite unnecessary and leads to all sorts of counter-intuitive consequences23 : why should one not prefer a strengthened logic in which there is a proper distinction between countable and uncountable models? Indeed one way to obtain such a logic is simply to add the quantier There exist uncountably many. . . The resulting logic is countably compact and there exist a set of axioms for the theory that are complete, but the (downward) Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem does not hold (which is entirely to be expected). Put in this positive light Lindstroms theorems show that we can escape from some of the limitations of rst-order logic by making some well-motivated additions to the language of the logic. It shows that rst-order logic is, in a sense, a maximally minimal logicany strengthening of which will push it across certain natural boundaries into another expressive band. But there may be another, less disclosed, reason why model theorists and philosophers have so far not seen the Compactness and Lowenheim-Skolem Theorems as the unmistakable signs of expressive weakness that they seem to be, and that is that the tendency to conate models with possible worlds must make it seem that the more models one can construct the more possible
20 First order predicate logic with generalized quantiers Theoria 32, 1966, 186195 and On Extentions of Elementary Logic Theoria 35, 1969, 111. 21 A logic L is said to be countably compact (or usually just compact) when every countable set S of sentences in L is such that if all its nite subsets have models then S does also. 22 Lowenheims 1915 theorem is here referred to by its usual name: the Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem, since it was improved by Thoralf Skolem in 1920. The upward theorem is really quite different and was rst proved by Tarski in 1927 though the proof was never published. (See Robert L. Vaughts Alfred Tarskis Work in Model Theory The Journal of Symbolic Logic 51, 1986, 861882.) The rst published proof was by Malcev in 1936. 23 The countable compactness property is another matter because of its close relation to completeness proofs. (But see below where the -incompleteness property is discussed).
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worlds one has found access to. Thus expressive weakness comes to wear the benevolent face of expressive freedom. If one then bolsters this with the view that rst-order logic is the one, true logic then the space of rst-order models will appear as a mathematical natural kinda signicant and solid unity in Quines phraseworth exploring in its own right. Indeed it will look like all of the possible mathematical structureseverything that is permitted by logic. (Not, of course, possible non-mathematical structures.) The advantage of adding quantiers that explicitly quantify over particular innite sets is that cardinals of that size can be dened within the logic. Of course that is not at all surprising, as they were put therebut it does mean that an enriched logic has fewer degrees of freedom, and thus can pin down a particular large set. Nor does it seem arbitrary to make such additionsafter all, why should a logic not be able to recognise the difference between the innite and the nite, when it is currently able to recognize only the distinction between the nite and innite, and nothing. Why should the latter be a matter of logic but the former not? The ability to x the size of ones Set Theoryor at least its lower bound goes some way to solving one of the problems of the last section, which was that we need a sufciently large set theory to give us both a maximal number of models, and to permit spectral isomorphs of all possible models to t inside. Obviously we need the number of sets to be very large and having a quantier that at least xes a generous lower bound is an advantage. But, arguably, it does not go far enough. We should look elsewhere for the extension of rstorder logic that we need. Another very obvious way one can strengthen rst-order logic is to allow oneself to quantify over properties and relations: the resulting logic, secondorder logic, seems both a natural and philosophically plausible extension of our rst-order intuitions. Philosophical tradition, however, has largely thrown its weight against it. Mainly under the inuence of Quines minatory pronouncements philosophers have been convinced that there is something dubious, improper or shady about quantifying over anything but objects, the elements of the domain.24 From an abstract point of view this seems hard to justify; if it is proper to predicate things of objects, so that the domain of a model is divided into subsets (in the case of monadic predicates) or ordered n-tuples (in the case of n-adic predicates) then there seems to be no good reason why we should not quantify over these sub-structures, speaking of all, or some of them. After all,
See W.V.O. Quines Philosophy of Logic second ed. Harvard University Press 1970, 1986 pp 66-70. The second edition is here identical to the rstshowing that Quines view is unchanged, or was as of 1986.
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it is not as though there is anything illegitimate about such predications (and if there were it would reect back onto rst-order logic as well!). They seem, in other words, to be perfectly respectable objects of quantication. Why then does Quine object to this additional quantication? Quite apart from his explicit objectionswhich we will come toone has the feeling in reading Quine that quantifying over properties is seen as immediately equivalent to buying back Universals: they are properties that have been reied as entities. Thus he says: To put the predicate letter F in a quantier, then, is to treat predicate positions suddenly as name positions, and hence to treat predicates as names of entities of some sort.25 The suggestion seems to be that this is a kind of semantic category mistake. There is no reason, however, to believe this to be true; merely putting a predicate in a quantier does not automatically mean that predicates are names. (Indeed one feels that Quine is simply begging the question here.) I suggest that we may keep the properties and our quantication over them, but simply reject the idea that everything that we quantify over must be an entity. We can be realists or nominalists about properties without being forced into a position on the matter by the simple fact of quantication. How came it that simply saying all. . . and some. . . has been invested with the magical power to solve metaphysical problems? But Quines explicit objection to second-order logic is that it is really just set theory in disguise. This is a view that is still almost universally held and the most common reason for second-order logic being dismissed. There is something right about this, as well as something quite wrong. As George Boolos has shown, second-order logic does not itself presuppose any great set theoretic ontologycontrary to Quines claim that its set-theoretic commitments are vast: the logic itself is committed to the existence of nothing more than the empty set.26 No other statement asserting the existence of a set of a particular size will be valid because it will not be satised in a domain that is smaller.27 But what is true is that the valid sentences of second-order logic are
Ibid pp.6667. There are further signs of nervousness about universals when Quine says, Predicates have attributes as their intensions or meanings (or would if there were attributes) and they have sets as their extensions; but they are the names of neither. (p. 67) But if they really have no intensionsbecause there are no attributesbut they do have extensions, then they do indeed function very much like names after all. Something may function like a name, however, without being a name and without there being an entity that corresponds to it. We cannot simply read metaphysics off of language. Note also that Quines precautions would not be sufcient to prevent us from quantifying over the subsets of a domain, or even of attributes. We can simply make these the elements in a new domain and use rst-order quantication. 26 George Boolos On Second-Order Logic The Journal of Philosophy 72, 1975, pp. 509527. 27 The non-existence of a sentence that asserts the existence of at least one member of the
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often bound up with the truths of set-theory in awkward ways. For example, there is a sentence of second-order logic that will be valid if the Continuum Hypothesis is true and another that will be valid if it is not. There is another sentence that will be valid if and only if measurable cardinals exist.28 This makes second-order logic seem more metaphysically compromised than rstorder logic: with the latter the problem was simply that the semantics as a whole seemed to rest on some, apparently logically remote, facts about the extent of the set-theoretic universe, whereas in the former case those decisions seem to have infected the logic in a quite explicit way. We might see this as a sign of second-order logics untness to be called a logic properas Quine apparently does. Or we may see it as a sign of the greater honesty of second-order logicby making its reliance on the set-theoretic universe plain for all to see, wearing it up-front in its validities, as it were. Indeed it is plausible to suggest, given that the notion of a model is fundamentally the same in the rst- and second-order cases, that it is simply the second-order logics greater expressive capacity that allows what is hidden as a background assumption in the rstorder case to be rendered transparent. We can thus turn Quines complaint around: rst-order logic disguises its set-theoretic dependencies, and secondorder logic lays them bare. But the dependencies are fundamentally the same in the two cases. We might also note that a rst-order model is simply a set with particular structure, and where the logical relations can all be viewed as statements about the membership relations on this set. Thus, given the obvious domain, either Charles is bald or Charles is not bald is simply the truth of set theory that relative to the set of the domain, an element is either in a particular set or its complement. In fact it is possible to develop rst-order logic entirely within ZF so that logic is simply reduced to set theory. 29 Yet no-one dismisses rstorder logic as simply set theory in disguise. What second-order logic adds is quantication over these additional structures on the underlying set. The difference is therefore more a matter of degree than of kind. If one liked one could say that rst-order logic is about membership, while second-order logic
domain is interesting. Since all domains do in fact contain at least one element one would think that this fact would be expressibleand would therefore be a second-order logical truth. Here the stumbling block appears to be the lack of expressive capacity of second-order logic. The closest I can nd is the valid second-order sentence (X)(x)Xxwhich says that something has a property. 28 This idea that the valid sentences of a logic should not depend on the entire set-theoretic universe but only on those sets that it is explicitly quantifying over goes back to work by John Barwise. A logic for which this is so is called Absolute. Second-order logic is not absolute. 29 H.D. Ebbinghaus, J. Flum and W. Thomas Mathematical Logic (second ed.) New York: Springer-Verlag, 1994, ch. 7
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is about the subset relation (and therefore about sets). Second-order logic certainly uses more of the apparatus of ZF but since it is a proper extension of rst-order logic it could only be set theory in disguise if, in some sense, rst-order logic was also. In terms of its metalogic, however, second-order logic isfrom the Model Theorists point of viewvery much less well-behaved than rst-order logic: countable compactness fails, as does the Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem, and every set of axioms is incomplete. On the positive side, rst-order truth is denable: there is a second-order open sentence that is true in the language of arithmetic of the Godel numbers of the rst-order truths of arithmetic. Unfortunately this theorem on the denability of arithmetic truth doesnt mean that second-order truths are denable. Full arithmetic truth thus remains elusively lost up a hierarchical ladderbut of logics now, not languages. But here we are concerned with three points: Are there any plainly valid arguments that 2nd order logic captures that rst-order logic doesnt? Is 2nd order logic better able to pin down the very large sets that the model theory of rst-order logic needs? Is 2nd order logic able to overcome the problem of the undenability of rst-order validity?
We consider each in turn. Our rst concern is with whether there are logically valid arguments that rst-order logic does not capture but that a plausible extension, like secondorder logic, does. The example concerns the countable compactness of rstorder logic which, again, says that if every nite subset of a countable set of sentences has a model then the countable set has a model also. Suppose that we have an innite set of sentences: 1 is in the extension of P, 2 is in the extension of P, 3 is in the extension of P, . . . i is in the extension of P, . . .
Models and Modalities Call this innite set of sentences N. Then we think it follows from N that: K: every natural number n is in the extension of P.
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But take the negation of K: it is not the case that every natural number is in the extension of P. Abbreviate this last sentence to K. Then K + N is a countable set of sentences, each of whose nite subsets is consistent and therefore has a model, yet is obviously such that the countable set itself has no model (because it is inconsistent). This inconsistency was called by Godel and Tarski -inconsistency. It is obvious from the above that N+K is logically valid and yet it is not rst-order valid because rst-order logic is countably compact. The argument is, however, second-order valid. Oddly, Tarski used the existence of such valid arguments not against rstorder validity but against analysing logical consequence syntactically in the manner of the formalists, since there is no inference rule which would license the above derivation. By the completeness theorem, however, any limitation of the syntactical apparatus must also be a limitation of the semantic conception of rst-order validity. Therefore this argument for the expressive weakness of rst-order languages was present at the outset: in Tarskis original 1936 paper on logical consequence.30 It is difcult to see, therefore, why Tarski (and other Model theorists) ever believed that the rst-order models were coextensive with the possible worldsor, what amounts to the same thing, that the set of sentences declared to be logically true by rst-order model theory is the same as the sentences that are logically true under the modal criterion. He himself had noted the very argument that showed that they could not be. The important issue for our purposes, however, is whether we can overcome the limitations that we have uncovered in the model theory of rst-order logic by looking at whether second-order validity better matches our intuitive idea. We have already seen that second-order logic does not, by itself, make any claims to the existence of sets beyond the empty set, but that some settheoretic truths are mirrored in the logical truths of second-order logic. This at least suggests that, provided we have independent arguments for a rich settheoretic ontology that our assertions about that universe will be enshrined in a set of second-order validities. It sounds marginally better that logic should depend upon logic than that logic should depend upon an extraneous area of mathematics. Will second-order logic be able to pin down the models of the set-theoretic axioms that we need for our background set theory, and will this help in allowing rst-order logical truth to be denable? The answers would
Etchemendy made substantially this point in his Tarski on Truth and Logical Consequence Journal of Symbolic Logic 53, 1988, pp. 5179.
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appear to be yes and no, respectively. The rst, rst. We have already noted that the Compactness and Lowenheim-Skolem Theorems fail and the upshot of this failure is that a model of a second-order set theory will have, what are called Categorical models, i.e., they will be dened up to isomorphism by the axioms. It will not be possible therefore to take a sub-model as a model of the same axioms. Thus if we have a particular set theory, even one enriched by reection principles to give us the large cardinals that, arguably, we need, we are able to express this in a second order theory and be sure that the logic wont allow that model to be shrunk. Thus secondorder logic gives us the set-theory that we need for rst-order logic, making the latter parasitic on the former. The second, negative, answer is due to the fact that the domain of a model of second-order logic is still required to be a set. We cannot quantify over all sets without meeting Russells Paradoxfor then there will be a sentence that asserts that there is a property such that for all sets, the sets have that property iff they are not self-membered. But then we would have a set of all sets that are not members of themselvesand we know that this is self-contradictory. It is only by disallowing such large sets that we are able to avoid paradox; we can speak of the set of all non-self-membered sets relative to a set which is the domain of some model. But we cannot quantify over all sets, for just as doing so within set theory renders it inconsistent, doing so within second-order logic would render it inconsistent. So also we cannot speak of all rst-, or second-, order models within second order logic. Hence moving to second-order logic will not make the model-theoretic denition of logical truth denable. Instead we nd second-order logic making explicit a restriction that was implicit, and hidden, in the meta-theory of rst-order logic. We should see this, I suggest, as another manifestation of second-order logics greater transparency. However, it does mean that moving to a background set theory where models are permitted to be proper classes is the only hope we have of being able to formalise the concepts of logical truth and consequence. In conclusion then, we have good reason to think that model theory is an inadequate analysis of the intuitive idea of logical truth. It fails as a conceptual analysis, as an extensional equivalent to the modal denition, and it fails to be consistent from object to metalanguage. Given the extent of the failure it is worth ending this section on a positive note. Much of the complaint has centered on the failure of the Tarskian analysis to come up to our expectations, where these have been conditioned by the history of logic. Perhaps, and here I am in agreement with McGees closing sentiments in his 1993 paper, we should see Model Theory as successfully pursuing a new task rather than as unsuccessfully completing an old one. It seems that Model Theory is an inves-
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tigation of the relation between a language and structured sets, such as groups, rings, algebras, etc.and therefore, principally of the vertical structure of set theory, rather than a horizontal covering of the logical possibilities. But when we view it in this light it is no longer appropriate to draw a sharp line between logic and mathematics. We can and should move beyond rst-order logic if only because in this new context its pretence at being metaphysically unburdened and topic-neutral looks to be entirely hollow. Or at least so I shall argue in the next section.
4.4
S KOLEM R ELATIVITY
Our aim in the previous discussion was to argue that the usual conception of rst-order logic is mistaken: the model-theory of rst-order logic is dependent on, and beholden to, set theory in at least two different respects: rstly, because at bottom models are simply structured sets and, secondly, because ensuring the necessity of rst-order logical truths can only be accomplished by taking set-theoretic proxies of possible worlds. Thus rst-order model theory is neither decoupled from its surrounding mathematics, nor is it free from vexatious metaphysical disputes. Thus it does not stand apart from, and above, other mathematical and metaphysical reasonings, but swims always in the same ocean, subject to the same currents. The contrary view is, however, and as we have noted many times before, a piece of philosophical orthodoxy with roots that go deep into the historical tradition. It is a view that has carried in its wake a number of inuential philosophical doctrines; it is to these that we now turn. One who accepts the rst order thesis will very likely be tempted by another philosophical thesis as well: Skolem Relativism. This is a philosophical interpretation of the (downward) Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem, indeed one that was favoured by Skolem himself. Roughly it is the view that since a set of rst-order sentences that is true in an interpretation will be true in an interpretation whose domain is countable, we do not need to believe in uncountably innite sets: uncountability is relative to a model.31 In terms of rst-order truth, the uncountable sets of modern set theorysets that seem to be guaranteed by such axioms as the power set axiomare not required (a remarkable situation given that the Power Set axiom itself is a rst-order sentence). As we remarked earlier the (downward) Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem is essentially
Daunted by the sizes of the large cardinals many set theorists have felt attracted to a Skolem Relativist position. Paul Cohen is one such, Abraham Robinson (a possible) another, Akihiro Kanamori still another.
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a sub-model theorem and the idea of Skolem Relativism is that a difference that does not show up as a difference in the truth values of rst-order sentences is no real difference at all. The Skolem Relativist takes the moral of all of this to be that claims made within models may not be anchored in the differential truth values of rst-order sentencesand thus may not, in the nal analysis, be genuinely meaningful. In philosophical terms it is an underdetermination argument: the model is underdetermined by the formal properties of the language. Seen in this light many of Quines distinctive philosophical positions look to be variations on a Skolemite theme, including: indeterminacy of translation, ontological relativity, holistic revision and even the denial of intensional entities. All of these look like claims about the degree of slack involved in rst-order languages, in particular in the assignment of meanings to the predicates and non-logical constants, once we have xed their extensions. Take a fairly abstract version of indeterminacy of translation as a representative example. We have two languages L and L* and we wish to see whether, given a procedure for xing the extensions of the constants and predicates (up to behavioural equivalence), and for identifying the logical connectives, L and L* must have isomorphic models. In other words, given a partial mapping of one to another, will this extend to an equivalencemust the natives mean what we mean, given that we seem to agree on the extensions of our terms? Since the quantiers are not fully dened this is not quite a model but it clearly comes very closein fact we might see it as a theory that has had the quantiers eliminated. The natives theory is a non-standard model of our basic theory of the worldor, of course, ours is of theirs. And if the argument works for two different languages it will obviously work for one: even if we x the extensions of constants and predicates and the meanings of connectives this will not x the meaning, that is the intended model, of our discourse: we may never know what we mean. Quines argument is simply taking the lesson of model theory very seriously: we can always expect non-standard models if we have a rstorder theory. What Quine has added is an ingenious set of arguments designed to show that rst-order languages are by the standards of a strict empiricism the only languages that can be given determinate interpretations. This Skolemite position has been pushed even further in the same direction by Hilary Putnam in his Models and Reality.32 Suppose that we were to eventually arrive at a complete theory of the world, then we would be able to nd a non-standard model for this theory that had a different domain. In
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in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, xlv, 1980, pp. 46482.
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terms of differential truth values there will be no difference between our intended model and the non-standard one. Again, we can never know what we mean. And since all models are equal on this view there will be no such thing as a standard, or intended, modelone that captures reality in a way that the others do not. Realism is only internal to models and there is no external perspective from which to judge them: reality itself is simply the ction of a model that is somehow singled out from among all the competing models as privileged. This is clearly model theory spiked with more than a little dose of Kantian Idealism. How should we respond to Putnams challenge? In two ways, I suggest: rstly that it is possible, even likely, that the nal theory may not be a model; and secondly, it is possible, even likely, that the nal theory may not be rstorder. Let us take each point in turn. We have already noted that the collection of all models will not be a set but a proper class, just as the collection of all sets is not a set. It is very likely that when we reach the nal theory it will include a great deal of current mathematics and thus will need to include an account of the class of all vector spaces, all sets and all models, etc. Such a theory will not be a model of any set of rst-order sentences because it will not be a model at all: its domain will be a class. Thus the nal theorylike our current theorywill, in a sense, not really be a theory at allor only in a very attenuated sense, for it is really too big. We will only have an understanding of what these super-theories are like when we have a better understanding of classes themselvesbut this seems at present a long way off.33 The second point is that the nal theory is not likely to be cast as a rstorder theory, again no more than our current theory is. If the nal theory includes modal logicindeed if it includes modalitiesthen the theory will not be rst-order and we will have no reason to expect a Lowenheim-Skolem type theorem to apply. So if the nal theory must include logic and mathematics, as surely it must, then Putnams argument will be blocked. It will also be true that our nal theory will include many irreducibly second-order statements, from topology, measure theory, group theory, indeed any branch of mathematics that has to generalise about the properties of its rst-order objects of study. This is, then, yet another reason to think that Putnams argument will not go through.34 But there is another reason for believing that the Skolem Relativist posisee Jon Barwise and Lawrence Moss Vicious Circles, CSLI Lecture Notes Vol. 60, CSLI Publications, Stanford: California, 1996, Chapter 20 for the beginnings of such a theory. 34 Stewart Shapiro has argued this in Foundations without Founndationalism: a case for second-order logic Oxford University Press, 1991
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tion is mistakeneven in the case of sets, for which it was originally intended and that is that, as we have noted earlier in the chapter if (pure) sets of large cardinality are possible then they must be actual by the principle of the transworld existence of abstract entities. And we cannot deny this principle without cutting-off the model-theoretic account of logical truth from its intuitive modal anchor. So unless the Skolemite is prepared to argue that uncountable sets are impossibleand I know of no-one who has done sothen they must be actual. So whereas the Skolemite believes that we are not forced to believe in that which is eliminable, the above argument suggests that we are not permitted to believe in anything less than all that is possible! Putting these arguments together we can see that we appear to be stuck with the class of all models and therefore with the class of all setsand these sets can be as large as consistency allows, right up to the n-huge cardinals and beyond. We live in a rich universe indeed! One of the attractions of the rst-order thesis is that it conforms well to the ontological limitations of a simple empiricism. We observe only things and their properties; we do not observe necessities, or sets, or functions, or algebras, or probabilitieseven though these are the tools of every working scientist and the great success of science is inconceivable without them. So rst-order logic is a coat that is cut to suit the observable cloth. What we can directly perceive turns, ultimately, into the foundation of logic itselfand then what remains undetermined is, as in a self-fullling prophecy, further relegated to being merely the content of a model. But it is too easily pretended that logic is something other than simply one useful mathematical theory among others. And also that its ontological needs are far from insubstantial.
4.5
M ODAL L OGIC AND F IRST-O RDER L OGIC
Perhaps we should always have been a little surprised at the idea that model theory was capturing the intuitive idea that logical truths are necessary truths, simply because we have an account of necessary truth in modal logic and it in no way corresponds to that found in model theory. In fact it is worth reviewing the points of divergence. In modal logic the semantics comes in two stages. Firstly, we have a set of objects W, normally called worlds, and a relation R over that set, normally called the accessibility relation, and the ordered pair of these two <W,R> is called a frame and denes the particular modal system in which some particular sentence is assessed. The semantics proper is given by a model M of the sentences in question with respect to a given frame <W,R>, or in other words an ordered pair consisting of a frame and a model <<W,R>,M>, where M is a
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value assignment in the usual sense (following the usual rules governing connectives and quantiers). Seen in this light the difference between rst-order models and possible worlds is obvious enough, for in rst-order logic there really is only one world under consideration and the relation R is simply the reexive relation, that says that the world can see, or is accessible to, itselfsince it is natural to make the idealizing assumption that if a sentence is assessed as true that we know that it is assessed as true. But if we attempt to think of this as a frame for capturing the intuitive modal character of rst-order validity then we get entirely the wrong answers. For consider a frame consisting of just the actual world W@ and a reexive relation: suppose that a model assigns the value true to a sentence p; then p will be a necessary truth since it is true in all the worlds accessible to itsince that will just be W@ itself. So we have p 2p as valid and since we also have 2p p we obtain the trivialization 2p p. In other words we could say either that necessary truth will simply collapse into truth or that truth will be inated to necessary truth. Either way it is obvious that the actual-world model theory of rst-order logic is not capturing our intuitive idea that logical truths are necessary truths. A quite different way in which it might have been thought that models are equivalent to possible worlds arises if we try to think of true-in-a-structure as analogous to true-in-a possible world and as giving rise to its own modal logic. Thus it is natural to think that the modal logic of model theory might end up being S5, as our intuitive conception would demand, with truth in all models dening a necessity operator. When we follow through the details of the analogy, however, all does not go smoothly. The reason is that the dened modal operator turns out to have only rather weak properties: indeed it satises the axioms K and D but not T and hence constitutes a Doxastic Modal logic and not an Alethic one. The reason it does not satisfy T is that we would have to interpret 2p p as saying that if p is true in all interpretations it is true. But ps truth is meaningless here apart from it being true in an interpretation. But this is just what D: 2p 3p says. Therefore we must either give up the idea that models are like possible worlds or we must give up the distinction between truth and possible truth. And once rst-order models become the worlds of a frame we still have to make sense of a model dened over that frame. There seems to be no advantage therefore even in thinking that logical truth is bimodalwith models constituting one dimension along which a sentence may vary and possible worlds another, for models simply reappear as valuations on the possible worlds.35
35
It is easy to forget this as we may rely too heavily on the pre-Kripkean idea that necessary
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Thus we can see why, despite some supercial points of similarity, it is not possible to interpret models as possible worlds. They really are just different animals. And it is only a strong desire to be rid of the modal that has allowed philosophers to imagine that model theory is an adequate replacement. It may be worth ending this chapter on a sceptical note. Thus far I have tried to establish two claims. That the model theory of rst-order logic does not correspond to our pre-theoretic modal notion. That rst-order logic does not have the metaphysical independence that it is often thought to have and that is thought to set it above other logicsand establish its claim to be the One, True logic.
As we have found, these two points are rather intricately intertwined. The argument that establishes a connection between the notion of a model and a possible model requires a substantial armature of sets, no less than does model theory itself, with its unformalised quantication over all models. But in a sense our argument has been rather one-sided: we have been comparing rst-order model theory with a pre-theoretic conception of the modal character of logical truth and giving the impression, perhaps, that the rain falls only on the former. When we turn our arguments against modal logic, however, we nd that the formalisation of necessary truth may be as complex and as entangled as the account that we nd in rst-order model theory. The complication that I wish to draw attention to is this: we have already noted the sense in which second-order logic is, in Quines phrase, set theory in disguise, namely that there will be sentences that will be logical truths iff some claim that is independent of set theory, like the Continuum Hypothesis, is true36 ; we also know from work by S. K. Thomason that modal logic is a rather strong fragment of second-order logic. It follows that we should expect modal logic to be likewise compromised. If this is so then we should not expect a clear demarcation and delineation of the possible worlds, but for them rather
truth is truth in all possible worlds where we think of each possible world as providing the variation in the truth values. This, I think, has been the source of much confusion. We would ordinarily think this true in an S5 type system where every possible world is accessible to every otherbut even this fails to hold in a Kripkean semantics where the frames of S5 break the set of possible worlds into equivalence classes and we do not strictly have truth in all possible worlds. This is a point that is all too easily skated over. 36 As noted previously this is what is meant by the claim that second-order logic is not absolute (the phrase, and indeed the theory, is due to Barwise).
M ODELS AND M ODALITIES
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to have an involvement with the undecidable questions of the set-theoretic universe. But perhaps we should expect that on more general grounds. After all, the set of possible worlds will be differently constituted if the Continuum Hypothesis is true than if it isntlikewise, and even more conspicuously, if there are large cardinals. What is available to be a member of a possible world makes all the difference to how many there are. Indeed we would expect the collection of all possible worlds to be a proper class rather than a set. And if it is a proper class then we should expect to be confronted once again with the problem of the unformalisability of talk of a necessary truth as that which is true in all possible worlds, for that will once again present us with quantication that cannot be dened model-theoretically. It is, then, strictly meaningless to speak of a logical truth as one which is true in all possible worlds. Logical truth is undenable. Of course, we can solve this problem, as before, by developing a theory of classes and extending model theory to allow quantication on a class. But we are some way from knowing whether that is even possible. We conclude this chapter, then, on a pessimistic note: it is not obvious that the notion of logical truth can be disentangled from the complexities of set theory and classes, either in the model-theoretic or in the modal conception. But perhaps we should not be too surprised at this; either way logic draws on structures, and what structures there are inevitably takes us into the deepest parts of set theory and indeed mathematics in general. In a sense rst-order logic is about the commonalities between structures. Only a purblind adherence to the rst-order thesis can prevent us from seeing this as the positive conception that it is. But this does not mean that we should abandon our ideas about possibility and necessity, nor think that they lie forever beyond our ken. They do too much work for us to relinquish them so easily. And if they do contribute to our scientic framework then that is reason enough to believe that they have some reality. In the next chapter we look at the way that our conception of reasoning has warped our ideas of the pragmatics of argument.
Chapter 5
Circularity and Deductivism

ver the previous chapters I have been arguing that Deductivism has led to a distortion in our idea of logical truth and valid consequence, stripping it of its modal character and replacing it with an anodyne set-theoretic substitute. The result is not only unsatisfying from an analytic point of view, it also imports the philosophical complexities of set theorythe incompleteness of the axioms, the existence of Large Cardinalsinside logic itself, and will result in the undenability, on its own terms, of logical truth. But I now wish to argue that Deductivism has had a second negative effect, one not so easily diagnosed, nor its etiology traced: that it has produced a signicant methodological confusion over the nature of circular reasoning. I will also argue that the problemonce correctly discerned, can be seen to be related, rather surprisingly, to a number of other philosophical theses about reasoning. But rst we examine circularity. (I will throughout use circular reasoning as a synonym for the fallacy of Begging the Question or Petitio Principii. Others have attempted to make distinctions here but I will not.)
5.1
P HILOSOPHICAL P RELIMINARIES
Aristotle made two attempts to characterise circular reasoning. In the Prior Analytics, where his concern was with purely formal criteria for the validity of arguments, he attempted to characterise circularity in a purely formal way. Roughly the idea seems to be that an argument is circular if one of the premises is sufcient by itself to imply the conclusion, either because it is identical to it or because it is a mere rewording (up to logical equivalence). In the Posterior Analytics, however, where his concerns are broader, epistemologically speak-
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ing, he characterises proper reasoning as proceeding from the more certain to the less certain, and circularity as a violation of this proper ow. But perhaps because this second account is rather vague, or perhaps because the rst offers the hope that circularity might be brought within the scope of formal logic, it has been the account contained in the Prior Analytics that has become the dominant one, and one nds it in many introductions to philosophical reasoning.1 For convenience I will refer to it as the formal account of circularity. There is, however, an obvious and immediate problem with the position: how do we count premises? Arguments given in natural language are not naturally divided up into discrete premises and we always have some freedom in how we are going to individuate them. We could, for example, always represent the premises as one long conjunction if we so wished. Given this it is not clear how the formal account can possibly work, for we could take an argument which is circular under one presentation and render it non-circular simply by conjoining the premises. Seeing this problem many authors liberalise their accounts: an argument is circular if a premise is alone sufcient to entail the conclusion, or if a conjunct of one of the premises is so. This is to no avail, however, and a different problem will assert itself. To see this we might reason as follows: according to the formal account that Aristotle has given p therefore p is circular, as is p, q therefore p. But we can conjoin the premises so that p & q therefore p is circular; but p & q is logically equivalent to q & q p, so now, under the idea that logical equivalence preserves circuitousness, we have q & q p therefore p is circular. We have the unintuitive consequence that modus ponens is a form that is circular. And we could have done the same thing with disjunctive syllogism: p & q is logically equivalent to q & (q p) and so the latter is circular if the former is. Indeed, it might be suggested, since any valid argument to a conclusion p is logically equivalent to one with the premises expressed in conjunctive normal form with p as one of the conjuncts we can make any valid argument circular just by re-expressing the premises. Thus all valid arguments are circular on this account! We might try a different tack along similar lines by dening a circular argument as an argument whose conclusion logically implies one of the premises. The ideawhich was anticipated by Richard Whately, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Centuryis that since a valid argument is one whose conclusion must be true if the premises are true, a circular argument is one where one of the premises must be true if the conclusion is true. This is certainly not true
See, for example, J.W. Cornman, K. Lehrer, and G. S. Pappas, Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction (third edition). (New York: Macmillan) 1982, pp. 1213. One can nd the view that the conclusion must appear as a single, isolated, premise in order for an argument to be question begging in Augustus De Morgans Formal Logic.
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of arguments in general and it does seem to capture something of the circular aspect of circular arguments. We might refer to it as a reciprocal validity. By itself, however, it will not work for it would make the invalid, and non-circular, argument pq therefore p circular. What if we were to add the condition that the argument must be valida reasonable thing to do since whatever a circular argument is it must surely be valid as well? Unfortunately, that would make the argument p & q therefore p non-circular, and if we try to remedy this by having the conclusion imply some conjunct of one of the premises then we will be back to the previous dead-end in which all valid arguments end up being circular. There seems to be no way to formally demarcate the circular from the non-circular, and we either catch everything in the net or nothing at all.2 To some this conclusion has recommended itself as a simple solution to the problem: all valid arguments are indeed circular! John Stuart Mill was one philosopher who maintained this view. In his System of Logic he noted that: It must be granted that in every syllogism, considered as an argument to prove the conclusion, there is a petitio principii. When we say, All men are mortal Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal; it is unanswerably urged by the adversaries of the syllogistic theory, that the proposition, Socrates is mortal, is presupposed in the more general assumption, All men are mortal. . . 3 Let us call the view that all valid arguments are circular Mills Thesis. A philosopher who holds this kind of view could either holdas apparently did Mills anonymous adversaries of the syllogistic theorythat there are no good deductive arguments, or he could hold that circular arguments are not bad after all. In the rst group are those who maintain that mathematics as a whole is circularthough a circle with a suspiciously large radius, so that it no longer appears to be a circle at all. We might also count Sextus Empiricus, here. In his Against the Logicians II, he complains, much in the spirit of Mill above:
I do think that there is something to be said for reciprocal validity, and I will therefore return to it later. 3 J. S. Mill A System of Logic, Bk. II, ch.3, 2.
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Circularity and Deductivism To speak more generally, premises are things apparent, and it is a question whether things apparent really exist; and things questioned are not at once [accepted] premises but must be conrmed by something. By what means, then, can we establish that the apparent thing is really such as it appears? Either, certainly, by means of a non-evident fact or by means of an apparent one. But to do so by means of a non-evident fact is absurd; for the nonevident is so far from being able to reveal anything that, on the contrary, it is in itself in need of something to establish it. And to do so by means of an apparent fact is much more absurd; for it is the very thing in question, and nothing that is in question is capable of conrming itself. (pp. 357359)
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In the second group are those who, like Richard Robinson, think that there is no way of explicating the fallaciousness of this so-called fallacy: we should make judgements of validity or invalidity and ignore the issue of question begging. In short, no apparent circular arguments are really bad, after all. In my view neither position has anything to recommend it and both are driven by a counsel of despair: that there is no way to effectively demarcate the circular from the non-circular arguments. But let us suppose that there were a way, within the formal view, of distinguishing between the non-circular valid arguments and those that are circular: what should our response be? Surely we should try to alter the logic by removing the bad argument forms, beginning with the inference p therefore p. Interestingly, there seem to have been no attempts in this direction; the nearest one can nd are comments to the effect that this inference form is degenerateor, as it has been said, merely a case of stuttering. Here is Anderson and Belnaps (negative) assessment of this view. Strawson [in his Introduction to Logical Theory, p.15] says that . . . a man who repeats himself does not reason. But it is inconsistent to assert and deny the same thing. So a logician will say that a statement has to itself the relation that he is interested in. Strawson has got the cart before the horse: the reason that A and [A] are inconsistent is precisely because A follows from itself, rather than conversely.4
Anderson, A. R. and N. D. Belnap Jr. Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity Vol. I (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 1975, p. 8. What Anderson and Belnap say after this quotation does not really explicate their extraordinary suggestion.
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Thus according to Strawson A validly follows from A because it is impossible that if A is true that A should also be falsein line with the modal account of validity. Anderson and Belnap disagreerather implausibly, I suggestbut their disagreement is beside our present point. Even a logical reformulation as radical as that proposed by Anderson and Belnap does not reject the paradigm of circular argumentation; indeed it makes it the basis for the contradiction between A and A! But I will return to Anderson and Belnaps view shortly. The absence of any attempted revision of classical logic to expunge the question begging argument forms is perhaps the greatest evidence against the formal account of circularity, for we desire our logic to capture all and only the good formal inferencesand if there were a clear way of demarcating the good argument formsthose that are valid and non-circularfrom the bad ones, then it surely would have been done by now. But before we pass on from this discussion of the formal view it is worth noting that, contrary to the usual assessments, Mills Thesis does not actually follow from the reformulation of the premises argument that is meant to establish it.5 For example, the argument form q&q therefore p is not circular, either intuitively, or by taking successive steps to reformulate a transparently circular argument like p, q therefore p. So, even if we were to grant the reformulation claim, Mills Thesis does not follow and is, in fact, false: all valid arguments are not circular. This is also a point to which I will return shortly. (Of course, it does not help to make the formal view any more plausible.) Yet despite the fact that there seems no way to make the formal view work it continues to be a popular position.6 It offers the hope that formal logic may be sufcient for understanding all aspects of reasoning and argumentation that there are no further dimensions to these activities that go beyond formal logic. In short, I suggest, it is motivated by Deductivism.7 What might the alternative be? In Aristotles time and throughout the Middle Ages there was a developed tradition of Dialectic that encompassed Rhetoric and Sophistry. It has since fallen into disrepair and disrepute, and its loss has rendered the philosophical terrain alien, for concepts that made sense under that richer system of classication now appear orphaned and unmotivated. This, I suggest, is what has happened to Petitio. It was an argumentative fault that lost the cloud of theory in which it once made sense. Aristotle was right in the Posterior Analyticsand in the Topics and De Sophisticis
In particular Frank Jacksons Conditionals (Oxford: Blackwells) 1987, ch. 6. See for example Robert Hoffmans On Begging the Question at any Time Analysis, 32, (1971). 7 And facilitated by the mistake of believing that since there is a paradigm case of circularity that is formal, i.e., p therefore p, then all such cases will be formal.
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Elenchus: circularity is a fault in an argument that leads to the argument not providing a convincing reason to believe the conclusion. It is a matter of epistemology; as Keynes said, a fallacy of proof, not of inference. This is how Aristotle put the matter in Posterior Analytics. All teaching and all learning of an intellectual kind proceed from pre-existent knowledge. This will be clear if we study all the cases: the mathematical sciences are acquired in this way, and so is each of the other arts. Similarly with arguments, both deductive and inductive, they effect their teaching through what we already know, the former assuming items which we are presumed to grasp. (71, a) If one reasons in a circle in an argument then one has given the interlocutor no reason to believe the conclusionone has prevented him, or her, from learning. If one does it to oneself then one has deceived oneself about the evidence for ones beliefs. In fact the problem of Petitio is symptomatic of the wider problem of understanding the epistemic role of argument and reasoning. We reason to extend our beliefs, making reasoning a tool of discoverybut are our conclusions not already contained within our premises, meaning that the disbelief that attends a conclusion should spread back into the premises? And how can we learn what we already seem to know? And is there a difference between necessary and contingent matters here? As the Posterior Analytics makes clear, Aristotles own view on these matters is complicated and often unconvincing. Despite the existence of a rich tradition of Dialectic, the whole problem of the epistemic role of reasoning, involving as it does large problems about our mathematical knowledge, is not something that we would expect to see nished and polished at any stage of the philosophical traditionsince it is hardly nished now. But as logic has taken shape as a formal discipline, this rich (if inchoate) set of ideas has lost its original purpose and the part containing Petitio now exists in the netherworld of Informal Logic, quite disconnected from wider issues in epistemology.8 Yet
8 Disparagement of informal logic is not uncommon and not entirely undeserved. Here is Gerald Masseys judgement: Richness of classication and poverty of theory are directly related. As evidence thereof, compare the taxonomic wealth of neo-Aristotelian logic with the classicatory austerity of the logic of sentence connectives and quantiers. The myriad and intricate schemes for classifying fallacies suggest that there is little theory behind the science of fallacy. This suggestion misleads only in implying that there is any theory at all behind it. The unvarnished truth is this: there is no theory of fallacy whatsoever! in The Fallacy Behind Fallacies Midwest Studies in Philosophy 6 (1981), p. 490.
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it is the absence of this wider epistemic dimension that has left us with a developed theory of logic and yet only very confused ideas about how to use it. I have already offered some reasons for believing this pessimistic view in chapter two, but here I wish to attempt a positive solution to the problem of circular reasoning. It will turn out that a number of apparently unrelated problems can be unied in this waythat is, can be seen to be different manifestations of a single basic neglect. As Aristotle said, we reason from the more certain to the less certain, so as to discover. We need to have a theory of credences that will extend to this general circumstance. In this way we can utilise one of the sharpest tools of modern epistemologybut also hone it for a new purpose.
5.2
T HE N ATURE OF C IRCULARITY
Aristotles view is that reasoning proceeds from the more to the less certain, from premises in which we have a high degree of belief to conclusions with an initially low, or undened, degree of belief. For, Aristotle believed, if this were not the usual situation there would be no point in arguing; we reason, after all, to discover. Let us call these degrees of belief credencesmaking no assumption for the present as to how they ought to behave. Then Aristotles view is that an argument is a case of credential ow, downhill from high premises to low conclusion. The initially low credential value for the conclusion is raised up by this process.9 Begging the Question is, then, a violation of the proper direction of credal ow: we have attempted to raise the low by means of itselfwe have assumed as true the very thing that is in question. Indeed we might properly think of it as a case of credal inconsistency: if the initial credence for the conclusion p is low, how can it also be high when p occurs in the premises? My contention is that Aristotle was right: the epistemology of deductive reasoning is a matter of correct credal ow. Yet, curiously, there is no formal machinery that describes Aristotles view, and the current account of the credal relations between premises and conclusions would reverse Aristotles judgement, making deductive inference a matter of going from the less certain to the more certain. For on the standard view, representing credences as subjective probabilities, the probability of the conjunction of the premises of a deductive argument is always lower than the probability of the conclusion.
In the early Thirteenth Century William of Sherwood made a similar point about the function of arguments: . . . the acceptability of an inference lies not merely in the necessity of the consequence but is inseparable from its producing belief regarding a doubtful matter. Reported in C. L. Hamblins Fallacies, London, Methuen, 1970, p. 122.
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But if the conclusion is always of a higher probability than the conjunction of the premises, then any doubt that attaches to the conclusion must convert into an equal or greater doubt about the premises. The doubtful conclusion drives the premises down! Also, it is hard to see how we can represent our ability to learn through inferencemaking all of mathematical discovery a complete mystery. This suggests that the credential relations within an argument are not well represented by subjective probabilities. For the moment, however, I will pursue an irenic course. I suggest that we think of credence measures on the space of sentences (or propositions) as analogous with topologies on a set of points: there can be more than one topology on a set and the different topologies can reect different superstructural properties. In the credence measure case these are our epistemic concerns and epistemic limitations. The standard probability measure captures some aspects of these concerns but not alland it positively misrepresents our limitations. Thus we should investigate other measures beside the standard one. The credal measure is to be a measure on propositions with certain familiar features. Firstly, it takes real values in the unit interval. Secondly, it respects the logical relations between propositions (throughout I will stick to truth functions of propositions, leaving quantication to one side). We can sum this up in the following list of features. (i) if (A) = n then (A) = 1 n (ii) if (A) = n and (B) = m then (A & B) = min{n, m} (iii) if (A) = n and (B) = m then (A B) = max{n, m} The min function is simply the smallest value of the following argument set, and the max function is the greatest. It is obvious from (ii) and (iii) that we can extend the measure to arbitrarily long conjunctions and disjunctions. It is also obvious that Commutativity and Associativity are preserved. It is less obvious, but nevertheless true, that the De Morgan Laws are satised. Suppose that the minimum of {n, m} is n then ((A & B)) = 1 n; then that is equivalent to the maximum of {1 n, 1 m}(thus if 1/3 < 1/2 then 2/3 > 1/2). Likewise, the usual Distribution Laws hold. The intuitive justication for these conditions, as well as the three above, is that we want our credence measure to respect our ignorance. Thus if I have a high degree of condence that the sun is a ery orb but a low degree of condence that there are trams running in New York, then the conjunction should be exactly as low as the lower and the disjunction exactly as high as the higher.
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From this we can extend the measure to the other truth functional connectives. Thus from the denition of material implication we have: (iv) if (A) = n and (B) = m then (AB) = max{1 n, m} And for material equivalence we have: (v) if (A) = n and (B) = m then (AB) = min[max{1 n, m}, max{1 m, n}]. We are now in a position to give the revision rule for deductive arguments, which I will call the Deduction Principle. It is this (abbreviating the premises to a single conjunction): Deduction Principle: Suppose that A |= B and that I have (A) = n and the initial measure 0 (B) = , then proposing the argument A |= B changes 0 (B) to A (B) = max{n, }. Intuitively, proposing an argument from a conjunctive premise A raises ones condence level in B from some initial low gure up to that of A. So, for example: if I believe that, if there is a crack in the bridge that it will collapse (let us suppose that the engineer has told me this), and I also come to believe that there is a crack in the bridge (I see it with my own eyes) then my initial low credence measure for the bridge will collapse goes now to the high gure that I accord the premises. This is just as one would wish. I have become convinced of something as a result of being convinced of certain other claims and then having deduced the consequences. But the Deduction Principle also entails another aspect of argument giving: the propounding of an argument for a claim should never cause the credence measure on that claim to drop. If I have a certain degree of condence in a proposition then giving an argument from hard-to-believe premises should not cause me to doubt that proposition any more than I did previouslymy credence measure should simply be unaltered. This too seems right. Any argument from premises more implausible than the conclusion itself should simply leave me cold. Credences dont ow uphill. Of course if I were to want to have an argument that lowers my credence measure for a proposition I need only nd one that raises my credence for the negation of that proposition. But the point is that I can do no less than this: a deductive argument is always an argument for a proposition. Any argument against a proposition must in the rst instance be an argument for its negation. The Deduction Principle has another desirable consequence as well.
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Theorem: Suppose that 0 (B) = then B (B) = . This is immediate from the Deduction Principle. Let us suppose that the initial measure 0 (B) = and we propound an argument B |= B then the revised measure B (B) must be for max{ , } is . The revised measure could not be less than or we would have violated the condition that propounding an argument cannot make the credence measure drop. But it could not be more than either, for then would be greater than itself. This theorem makes it clear that what is wrong with question begging is that the propounder of a question begging argument is tacitly assuming that the credence measure on the conclusion could be raised by itself. The interlocutor, on the other hand, knows that it cant. But we would also want it to be the case that burying the conclusion amongst the premise set as simply one premise among many is also question begging. The Deduction Principle agrees that it is. Suppose that 0 (B) = , as before, and we were to give an argument A,B |= B, where A is an abbreviation of a set of premises; then A,B (B) = since the conjunction of A and B has the value min{n, } (where n is the minimum measure of the set A) and if n is less than then A is irrelevant since 0 (B) cannot fall lower, and if n is greater than it is irrelevant since it is not min{n, }. Therefore A,B (B) = . Likewise, it is obvious that taking a mere rewording of the conclusion as a premise is also question begging, since the credence measure is again the same in both premises and conclusion, and will be treated as such by the Deduction Principle. (Note however that a rewording in which the credence measure is not the same need not count as question beggingsee below for an example.) Our normal judgement is that circular reasoning is bad reasoning and we can express this by taking, what I will call, the Normative Adjunct to the Deduction Principle. This says that a particular argument is a good argument if it raises the credence measure on the conclusion and is bad reasoning if it does not. Obviously most reasoning is intended to convince and thus will be expected to satisfy the Deduction Principle; sometimes, however, a reasoner will fail and it is these failures that we judge according to the Normative Adjunct. But we want a proper characterisation of circularity to do more than simply show why paradigm cases are wrongwe also want it to show why other perfectly good arguments are free of the fault. This is particularly important in the case of Begging the Question, for, as we have seen, with particularly loose formulations it is difcult to prevent a slide in which all arguments seem to exhibit the fallacy. In fact it is worthwhile repeating such a formulation to see how the slide works. Suppose again that we have an argument i) B |= B,
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then it is the paradigm case of Question Begging; but adding another arbitrary premise will not make it less so, and therefore ii) A, B |= B is also Question Begging. But conjoining the premises will make no difference here, so iii) A&B |= B is Question Begging as well. But if a trivial reformulation of the premises preserves their Question Begging status (call this the Trivial Reformulation Thesis) then any set of premises logically equivalent to A&B will be Question Begging; but A, AB is logically equivalent to A&B so now we have iv) A, AB |= B is question begging. Thus the Trivial Reformulation Thesis takes us to the, intuitively wrong, conclusion that modus ponens is Question Begging.10 What has gone wrong here? Certainly arguments i)iii) seem to beg the question and we have already seen that the Deduction Principle supports that judgement. The move from argument iii) to iv) is not so clear cut, however, and we have every reason to believe that iv) is not Question Begging. It follows that this must be the step that the Deduction Principle will have to fail to legitimise if it is to be in accord with our pre-theoretic intuitions. Let us examine a particular case to see how it fares. Suppose once again that I have, initially, only a small reason to believe that the bridge will collapse, so that 0 (B) = ; I am told, and come to believe, that if the bridge has a crack in it that it will collapse, and I see with my own eyes that it does have a crack in it. Let me represent the two resultant measures on these propositions by (AB) = m and (A) = n respectively. Now since we know the measures on A and AB and the latter is a numerical function of the measures on A and on B we can solve the equation to get the new measure on B, which is the only unknown. In fact n should be very close to 1 since A is observationaland it will do no harm to represent it here as exactly 1. Likewise the measure on AB should be very high since it represents my degree of condence in the engineers opinion. Let us represent it as 0.8. Then we have: (AB) = max{1 n, m} = max{0, m} = 0.8 which implies that m = 0.8. This is the new measure on B. My credence measure on B has risen from to 0.8 as a result of presenting the argument. We can now see why iii) above is question begging but iv) is not. As we saw earlier the credence measure on A&B has the measure on B as an upper bound, whereas the measures on the premises in iv) are given independently of the initial measure on B and jointly determine its new value. This can be
10 This argument is from Frank Jacksons Conditionals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), Ch. 6. I discuss Jacksons view further below.
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expressed by noting that, in iii), A is always strictly irrelevant and could be a contradiction for all the effect that it has on the argument. In iv), however, the impact of the measure of A on the nal measure of B is crucial. That is why modus ponens is so important; it is an argument form that is extremely sensitive to the measures on its constitutive propositions. Thus note that if A had been a contradiction, or otherwise unbelievable, and consequently given a measure of 0, then (A &AB) = min{n, max{1 n, m}} = min{0, max{1, m}} = 0 and it would be impossible to determine the value of m, since it has been swamped by the value of the contradiction. It could be anything between 0 and 1. The confusion over the fallacy of Begging the Question, in particular, the thing that has led to claims that all deductive arguments beg the question, has been the giving of a modal interpretation to a non-modal condition. Let us distinguish between two claims: (A) If a proposition is doubtful then anything that implies it is as doubtful. (B) If a proposition is doubtful then anything that implies it must be as doubtful. The difference between (A) and (B) is not simply a matter of added emphasis in the secondit is rather a matter of the resiliency of the back-propagation of the doubt. (A), for example, looks to be true. If a proposition D has a particular credence measure of then one ought to accord all sets of premises that entail D the same measure , as indeed the Deduction Principle requires. But this is all done within a particular evidential framethe evidence that led to one giving the value to D is unchanged when one considers the backward spread of to the collections of propositions that jointly entail D. (In fact this backward-spreading is clearly a generalised form of modus tollens, generalised from the usual Boolean-valued measure to our normalised real-valued measure.) In (B), however, the presence of the modal term (must) can lead us to think that the measure given to the proposition D is resilient against new evidence, in the sense that it will be preserved across shifts in evidential frame. On this reading, if a proposition is doubtful then the doubt will infect any premises that imply it, no matter how much one might have thought that one had good new reasons to believe them. It is this interpretation that leads to
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the view that all valid arguments beg the question. How could they not? If I doubt the conclusion then I should doubt anything that implies it. In this way I become dogmatically xed in my doubtnothing is ever able to change my mind. But, of course, it is not true that all valid arguments are circular, and it is not true that the doubt that attaches to a proposition spreads to anything that implies it, come what may. For, given new reasons to believe the entailing propositions, I should have a new credence measure for the conclusion. When we shift from one evidential frame to another the Deduction Principle tells us how to revise our measure on the consequences of our reasoning. But it is also obvious that certain argument forms, such as A,B |= B are bound to be circular, because no matter what evidence there might be for A, the measure on B is an upper bound on the premises. In other words, certain argument forms positively prevent us from shifting to a new evidential frame. That is why we identify these as question begging.
5.3
R ELEVANCE AND C ONDITIONALS
This gives us the key to solve another outstanding problem with Deductive arguments: the so-called paradoxes of strict and material implication. According to the Deduction Principle the revised measure on the conclusion of an argument is equal to the measure on the conjoined premises provided that is greater than the initial measure on the conclusion. But if the premise is a contradiction its credence measure ought to be 0 and so is incapable of raising the credence of the conclusion, whatever that happens to be. Similarly, if the conclusion is a tautology then no premise could raise its credence since it is already maximal. We could express these two claims by saying that even though anything follows from a contradiction, a contradiction can supply no reason to believe what follows from it; a tautology, on the other hand, can be supplied with no reason to believe it, by anything that implies it. In other words, both out the Normative Adjunct to the Deduction Principle. They are both cases of epistemic, rather than logical, failure. We think of arguments as supplying us with reasons to believe the conclusionthat is primarily why we are interested in themand here we have two argument-types that fail to do that. We then mistake our dissatisfaction for a worry about their validitywhen it is no such thing. Once again, this seems like the correct diagnosis, at least to the present writer. The Relevant Logic Program begun by Anderson and Belnap has been a great stimulation to investigations in Proof Theory but it has resulted in no satisfactory alternative to classical logic. And in an attempt to block the
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derivation of every proposition from a contradiction it has been necessary to eliminate perfectly respectable argument forms, such as Disjunctive Syllogism. There has been no Relevance-based Logic that has had just the right set of theorems according to its own philosophical lightsand the results of trying to expunge the paradoxical theorems have often had a surgery-by-matchlight appearance. It is possible to see this running-together of epistemic and logical concerns in Anderson and Belnaps original presentation Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity. There they say: But saying that A is true on the irrelevant assumption that B, is not to deduce A from B, nor to establish that B implies A in any sensible sense of implies. Of course we can say Assume that snow is puce. Seven is a prime number. But if we say Assume that snow is puce. It follows that (or consequently, or therefore, or it may validly be inferred that) seven is a prime number, then we have simply spoken falsely. A man who assumes the continuum hypothesis, and then remarks that it is a nice day, is not inferring the latter from the formereven if he keeps his supposition xed rmly in mind while noting the weather. (p. 14) We can, of course, agree with Anderson and Belnap that someone who believes that snow is puce could not thereby come to know that seven is a prime number by a deductive inference. But this is just to say that some valid classical inferences are not epistemically useful. But no matteronly someone logically confused would think that a false premise could be believable, and therefore a suitable way of establishing belief in some necessary consequence; just as someone would be confused if they reasoned from a contradiction to an arbitrary proposition thinking that the inference offered a reason to believe the conclusion. Only if one already recognised the necessity of the necessary truth and the impossibility of the contradiction would one be in a position to say that the rst followed from anything and everything from the second. The paradoxical nature of these inferences lies not in their being logically invalid (because they violate some idea of relevance) but simply in their being epistemically useless.11 They seem paradoxical only because they out our default expectation about deductive reasoningthat the premises offer a reason to believe the conclusion.
One should perhaps say, reecting on reductio ad absurdum, that their only epistemic use is in identifying their own modal status.
11
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But, of course, there is more in Anderson and Belnaps rejection of Classical Logic than simply their overlooking an epistemic dimension to reasoning, there is also what they make of the so-called paradoxes of material implication. Here is a representative statement. The archetype of fallacies of relevance is A.BA, which would enable us to infer that Bach wrote the Coffee Cantata from the premise that the Van Allen belt is doughnut shapedor indeed from any premise you like. (p. 30) This, along with similar statements, is difcult to make sense offor there is no sense in which we can infer that Bach wrote the Coffee Cantata from the premise that the Van Allen radiation belt is doughnut-shaped, and to suppose otherwise is to suppose that the argument form p therefore q is valid! Nor does the fact that Bach did indeed write the Coffee Cantata change the situation in the least. A true conclusion is not all that is required to make an argument valid. Anderson and Belnap seem to suppose that A.BA can be interpreted to mean if A is true then B entails A, for any B (or if A is true then we can infer A from B, for any B.) But it does not mean this. Anderson and Belnap rather agrantly conate the claim that if A is true then BA is in fact true with the much stronger, and quite false, claim that if A is true then BA is a tautology (and thus corresponds to a valid argument). They seem to have been misled in this by the fact that A.BA is itself a tautology. But the corresponding argument form for this tautology is p therefore qp and this, once again, certainly does not say that if p is true then p follows from anything, but rather that p logically implies the material conditional qp.12 By allowing themselves to move freely, and recklessly, between material implication and logical implication, Anderson and Belnap create the appearance of paradox where none exists. When one examines Anderson and Belnaps arguments against material implication one nds that they almost invariably turn on an equivocation between material and logical implication and a casual disregard for the distinction between arguments and argument forms (as well as statements and statement forms). Their argument has been successful, to the extent that it has, because they have allowed it to ride on the back of an undoubtedly true claim: that material implication does not coincide with the ordinary English sense of if. . . then. Indeed, they use this lack of coincidence to lever their
12 If more needs to be said here note that this argument form is valid even when what is substituted for p is false, making it doubly clear that it cannot be given the gloss that is implied by Anderson and Belnap.
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claim that certain features of material implication constitute paradoxes. But of course once we concede that the material conditional is not identical to our ordinary indicative conditionalthough we need not concede, I think, that it is not of the same specieswe have no reason to think of these unusual features as paradoxical at all. Certainly statements such as A.BA are oddities (interpreting as ) but Anderson and Belnap need to show more than that material implication has odd features. To show that it is no kind of implication at all they would need to show that it lacks the essential features of any conditionaland this they fail to do. Indeed, as far as this author can see, their arguments against material implication are simply non-sequiturs. It doesnt follow that there are any paradoxes of material implication merely from the fact that material implication has different properties to our ordinary intensional implication. Why should we not count the material conditional an important discovery, or inventiona semantic analog of the element Americium (Am95 ) rather than a naturally occurring element, like gold?13 After all, not all natural kinds are found just lying about in naturematerial implication is a creature of the laboratory. But what has this to do with circularity? This: we might see Anderson and Belnaps positive proposal for a logic of Relevant Entailment as in effect a logic of circular reasoning, taking the formal idea of circularity as the basis for making certain excisions in the proof structure of classical logic. For note that the arguments that the formal idea of circularity would leave intact are precisely those that the Relevantist wishes to excise, namely q& q therefore p, and q therefore p p. These argument forms are irrelevant implications but they are also non-circular. (And note that if we vary them slightly to make them relevantly valid we will also ipso facto make them circular: thus q&q therefore q is circular even though it is an instance of the previous!) In a sense, then, relevance and circularity are complimentary conceptsa logic that tries to trim classical logic of the bad in one sense, will trim it of the good in another. (Perhaps we might even think of them as dual to one another.) But there is a more important reason for being interested in Anderson and Belnaps proposal. We might take them simply to have shown, in impressively mathematical detail, the sheer degree of divergence between a truth-functional conditional and the conditionals we ordinarily use. But if I am right in what I have been saying in this chapter: that they misdiagnose the fault as one of logic, whereas it is really a fault of epistemology, then we might try to capture
Of course this is not to say that no good has come of Anderson and Belnaps work. The system E of entailment that they devise would still be of interest even if their criticisms of classical logic are found to be ill-conceived.
13
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the difference between the two conditionals with the credence measure that we have given earlier. Indeed, we might be encouraged in this by the abovementioned alignment between relevance and circularity. To begin we may note that the reason the material conditional is called a weak conditional is that I should assent to its truth under very weak conditions. I should agree that pq is true not only when I know that p and q are both true, but also when I know only that p is false, or when I know only that q is true. And, of course, the only circumstance which should lead me to think it false is when p is true and q is false. Thus the conditional if the sun is a ery orb then sh can swim may seem to assert a connection between the sun and the abilities of sh, a connection that would need to be veried if we were to know that the conditional is true. But if the conditional is a weak conditional then all that we need to do to see that it is true is to conrm that the sun is indeed a ery orb and that sh can swim. Moreover, if both these claims turned out to be false then the conditional would still be counted true. All of this means that I should have a lower credence for the above proposition read as a standard conditional than as a weak material conditional. How much lower? Well, in this case very much lower. I should in fact have quite a high credence for the material conditional and a low credence for the ordinary conditional, the former close to one and the latter close to zero. With a different example the divergence may not be so great. Thus if I put this key in the lock then the door will open may score highly on both readings of the conditional, though for quite different reasons. (In one because I know my keys and in the other because the door is already open.) The conditional if John parks there he will be towed may also have a high credence under both interpretations, though again for possibly different reasons. In fact, the credences for the two kinds of conditionals are independent of one another and need coincide in only one circumstance: when I have reason to believe that the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Then the conditional should have a low credence under both interpretations. Nevertheless, although they are independent the credence for the weak conditional should always be higher than the standard conditional. In fact, it should represent an upper bound on the credence for the standard conditional. Thus if the credence for the weak conditional is low the credence for the standard conditional must be even lower. The standard rules of inference for conditionals (modus ponens, modus tollens, and hypothetical syllogism) are acceptable on either interpretation of the conditional (though, of course, the Rule of Replacement is not) and therefore standard arguments will go through on either interpretation. Thus suppose I put forward a simple argument such as the following:
Circularity and Deductivism (1) If a swallow is here then summer cant be far behind. A swallow is here. the summer cant be far behind.
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My credence for the rst premise is high because of my belief in the lore of birds, and the second premise is purely observational, and therefore likewise high. My credence for the conclusion is thus forced to be high. And since my credence for the rst premise is a lower bound on my possible credence for the same premise read as a weak conditional my degree of belief in the conclusion would be even higher, though articially so, if it were interpreted as a material conditional. We are now in a position to give a more denitive answer to a question that was posed earlier: how do we prevent every argument from seeming to beg the question? We have already seen part of the answer, but there is more to say against it. As already noted, in arguments where we are assigning credences to a conditional it takes more evidence, under the standard interpretation, to make us have a particular degree of condence, than under the material one, and thus we cannot simply use the Logical Reformulation Thesis to take us to and from a simple conjunction of atomic statements. (Note that if our credence for the standard conditional were invariably higher than that for the material conditional we would not have this problem.) So the Reformulation Argument is blocked at the right stage, between p & q therefore p and q & (q p) therefore p and q & (q p) therefore p. But this will only forestall certain reformulations, namely those involving standard conditionals, and if we are to block the Reformulation Argument we must have a more general defence. But we have it surely in the observation that when we move from q & (q p) therefore p to p & q therefore p we are already performing the deduction that the argument was intended to perform. We put forward an argument in a particular form because that is the form in which the evidence has been presented to us. To move to a logically equivalent formulation via the Logical Reformulation Thesis is to assume that we have at our nger tips all of its logical consequences and equivalences, a mere one of which our argument was intended to work out. We argue to discover the consequences of what we know and if we already knew all of the consequences then we would have no need to argue. A view that thinks that we already know all of the logical consequences of what we believe is just not talking about us. The measure that we have given in this chapter is designed to accommodate our need to argue. High credences to premises ow down to the conclusion of an argument which are raised in the process. Certain argument forms, like p & q therefore p will invariably beg the question because, as the text books
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say, we are assuming as true the very thing that is in question. We cannot give p a high credence in the premises and have it low or undened in the conclusion. Other argument forms will equally certainly not beg the question. But whether an argument begs the question is ultimately a matter of epistemology, not logicit is a matter of correct credal ow. We can also see from this the signicance of arguments that have reciprocal validitywhere the argument is both valid and such that the conclusion entails one of the premises. Then credences cant ow to the conclusion without also owing to just one of the premises. It thus gives us the circular ow that is indicated in the name circular reasoning. It is this that marks the error. As the Zen Koan has it: you cannot make water ow uphillnot, at least, without a great deal of pushing and threatening. We can also see why Anderson and Belnap inveigh, passim, against irrelevant premisesthose that are not used in the deduction of the conclusion.14 Such additional premises do not affect the validity of the argument, so what is wrong with them? The answer is that they affect the credence that we must give to the premises combined. Recall that the conjunction of the premises is given the minimum value of the set of credences of the conjuncts. Adding a premise with a very low credence will lower the credence of the premises as a whole. If that premise is not actually used then the credence that can be given to the conclusion has been affected needlessly. Better to eliminate anything that is not used in deducing the conclusion. Again, it is not the occasion for a call to revise our logic, but to look to our epistemic requirements.
5.4
T HE M EASURE OF N ECESSITY
It may be objected that we have provided a new credence measure for propositions needlessly, since there is already a perfectly good credence measure in standard subjective probabilities. Why not simply use that which has proven itself over the years and for which we have many useful theorems? Why introduce something new when the old will do just as well? The answer to these questions is contained in the complaint made above, that we do need to reason and argue to discover the implications of what we believe. We cannot take ourselves to be ideal rational agents who know instantly and infallibly the logical consequences of everything that we know, who antecedently know all logical and mathematical truths and have assigned them all probability one. Yet that is what we are presumed to be by the strict Bayesian who would represent our credences by subjective probabilities and
14
In Anderson and Belnap op cit. ch. 1.
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our belief change by conditionalisation. All such an ideal agent needs to do is gather evidence and informationthe deduction is presumed to be taken care of. Such ideal agents in discussion with one another have no need to argue they just need (as Joe Friday would have said) the facts. And since they dont need to argue, they will not beg any questions.15 This logical omniscience is not merely an idealisation it is strictly an impossibility. As is evident from the undecidability of the predicate calculus and the incompleteness of Peano arithmetic and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theorynot to mention the richer logical systems discussed in the previous chapterthere is really no plausible sense in which there could be an ideal agent that knows all of the logical and mathematical truths. Even with just the logical truths there must be a serious doubt that it is meaningful to speak of knowing all of them. In how much time? By what method? And what counts as logic here? The Bayesian has idealised our reasoning capacity to focus our attention on the mechanisms of empirical belief changeand that is no bad thingbut if we wish to understand the mechanisms by which we make discoveries in mathematics, or reasoning in general, then we must look elsewhere. The measure that I have proposed is designed to overcome these deciencies in the standard view. That it can account for the fallacy of begging the question is perhaps already an indication that it is on the right track. I now wish to argue that it can be generalised to give an answer to a much larger and more signicant problem: how to represent our belief in necessities. It is clear, Bayesianism notwithstanding, that we can have doubts about the truth of necessary propositions, and that such doubts can continue unresolved for a very long time. Consider Fermats Last Theorem or Goldbachs Conjecture concerning the sums of primes, to name just two. Moreover, we can change our mind about a necessary proposition, believing at one moment that it is true and that at another it is false. But we cannot represent these doubts as a measure of the probability of a necessary truth being false, because it is not
Frank Jackson op cit has tried to give an account of circular reasoning from within the Bayesian framework. But although I think his analysis the best that is in the literatureand his paper has been the springboard for my own effortI do not think qua Bayesian he is entitled to his conclusions. The Bayesian ideal agent is logically omniscient and this omniscience marks the main difference between our measure and the Bayesians subjective probability measure: in ours the revised measure on the conclusion is less than or equal to that on the premises, whereas for the Bayesian the conclusion must be at least as probable as the conjunction of the premises: P(A1 &.....& An ) P(B). Hence, strictly, the Bayesian cannot update through inferring because it has instantly happened as soon as he has acquired the new evidence. Jackson has an argument that tries to show that ideal reasoners will still need to argue (p. 103) but it is not at all convincing, and it consists in claiming that ideal epistemic agents are ideal, they are what we aim at, and that we aim at being arguers.
15
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even possible, let alone probable, that a necessary truth be false. Indeed that is why the Bayesian must assign a probability of one to the necessary truths. But not only can I have doubts about a necessary truth being true I can also have doubts about it being necessary. Consider the Parallel Postulate: long before we came to think of it as contingent and false we had come to think of it as necessary and true. In a sense then, our doubts concerning a necessary proposition can extend along two dimensions, one axis representing truth and the other representing necessity. This explains why my doubts about two different propositions can be strictly incommensurable. Consider the case of possibilities: my doubt as to whether it is now raining is really quite incomparable to my doubt as to whether it is logically possible for it to be now raining. There seems to be no simple linear relation between the two; evidence does not accumulate to take me smoothly from one to another. All of this suggests that any credence measure on modal propositions will have to be rather different from the credence measure that we proposed in 1 above. And yet we would want it to reduce to that measure when the proposition is contingent. I suggest, therefore, that we adopt a credence measure for modal propositions that is complex-valued. In fact it will be a complex-valued function with propositions taken as the arguments for the function. I will argue that the introduction of this function solves a number of outstanding problems and promises a unied treatment of our epistemic states. Let us begin by noting that we would expect any credence measure, realor complex-valued, to obey the following simple rule for negations. If I believe in proposition A to degree n then I should believe in A to 1 n, and therefore A to 1 (1 n) = n. We might call this the Negation Rule for credences. For real numbers this means that, if we want the credence to always be positive, then it will have to have a maximum value of one, or to be normalised. A complex-valued measure behaves in an analogous, though not quite identical, way. Our aim will be assign to each proposition (for some agent at some time) a complex number which will represent the degree to which it is believed. (A complex number is a number of the form a+bi where a and b are real numbers and i is called an imaginary number and is equal to the square root of negative one.) When b is 0 then the imaginary part of the number is 0 and we are just left with a real number, a. Thus the real number eld is a sub-eld of the complex number eld. This will turn out to be an important fact for the representation of credences of modal propositions. Because we want the complex credences to have the real-valued credences as a limiting case we want the real coefcients a and b to be normalised, that is we want 0 a,b 1. Now if we take a, the real component of (A) = a+bi, to be the degree to which we believe A to be true, then we might take the
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coefcient b of the imaginary component to be the degree to which we believe A to be a necessary truth. (It is a little imprecise but we might think of b as a measure of the proportion of possible worlds at which we believe A to be true provided that we have no reason to believe that A is false at a possible world: the more worlds, the more reason we have to believe that A is necessary.) Thus for a simple, highly believable, necessary truth, A, this means that my complex credence (2A) will equal 1+i, since it will have a maximal credence along both the real and imaginary dimensions. Now by the Negation Rule (2A) should have a credence of 1(1+i) = 0i. Moreover, if we have a proposition A that we believe is impossible, so that it is 2A, then we should have (2A) equal to 0+i. That is, we have every reason to believe that it is false at the actual world and indeed false at every possible worldor that its falsity is necessary. The negation of this claim, which would be 2A, says that it is not the case that A is impossible, or that A is possible, and it should have a credence of 1 (0 + i) = 1 i. We thus note that the complex conjugate of the assertion that A is necessary is that A is possible, since the conjugate of a + bi is a bi; also the complex conjugate of A being impossible is that A is not a necessary truth. How should we understand these complex credences? If the coefcient b is 0 then the complex numbers just reduce to real numbers and we have the degree of belief that A is true in the actual world. Thus 0i could be said to represent the actual world. In fact if we consider the range of credences between A being possible and A being necessaryi.e., between 1i and 1+ithen we can see that b takes values between 1 and +1. This may be thought of as a proportional measure of our belief that A is true at some worlds, ranging from one through to all, with 0 representing our belief that it is true at our world. (In a sense then we represent an average, or median world!) We can make sense of the range from 0i and 0+ii.e., from it not being the case that A is necessary to A being impossiblebecause the real component represents the belief that it is false and the imaginary component, ranging from 1 to +1, represents the measure of the possible worlds where it is thought to be false. Thus the real component of the credence tells us what the proposition A is thought to be (true or false) and the imaginary coefcient represents at what proportion of worlds it is thought to be what it isor, to view it differently, how strongly it is believed to be necessary. We can perhaps more easily see the modal relations with the corresponding complex credences by setting them out on what I will call a complex double square.
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A is possible credence 1-i
Actual World
A is necessary credence 1+i
False to True
A not necessary credence 0-i
A is impossible credence 0+i
The double square allows us to see at a glance the relation between modal propositions and their full credences. Across the diagonals the propositions are contradictory, while those on the right hand side imply those at the same level on the left-hand side. And as already noted, the credences for possibility and necessity are conjugate to one another. Many philosophers may have a sceptical reaction to the idea of complex credences: they may believe (to adapt a dictum of Kroeneckers) that though God has made the real numbers, the complex numbers are entirely the work of Man. (And after all, do they not bear the mark of their origin in their name, for are they not partly imaginary?) Even philosophers who are constructivists about all numbers often seem to want to make a distinction between the natural and real numbers on the one hand, and the complex and other exotic numbers, such as quaternions, the innitesimals, and the surreals, on the other! And if one does think that complex numbers are simply artifacts of the abstracting process then one will likely think that complex credences could not possibly represent degrees of belief. How could the patently ctitious be functionally efcacious in the brains structuring? Yet it is an argument in favour of the non-arbitrariness of complex credences that, as we have seen, they so nicely mirror the negation relations among modal propositions. And in general, numbers are like puddings: the proof of them is in the eating, not in idle intuitions of naturalness. Thus if we want a justication for using complex numbers to represent credences we will
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nd it in the use that we can make of them. There are two respects in which our customary notions are decient: rstly, in how they deal with mathematical inference, and secondly, how they cope with a posteriori necessities. Let us take each in turn. We clearly do not know all logical and mathematical truths and presented with an arbitrary claim we will, in general have no decision procedure for determining its truth or falsity. To know whether a claim is true we therefore have to resort to nding a proof of it, and that, as we know, is often no easy matterindeed, it will sometimes be impossible, for sometimes there will be no proof either. But when there is a proof our nding it represents a genuine discovery, and such discoveries ought to be represented by a change in our credences. But how should this be done? We have already noted that 1+0i represents truth of a proposition at the actual world, with the 0i signifying uncertainty at whether the proposition is true at any more worlds than the actual world (we know that it is true at a possible world because it is true at this one). We can signify that a proposition is true at all possible worlds, if it is true, by assigning a credence of 1+i and we can indicate uncertainty at its truth but certainty at the fact that if it is true then it will be necessarily true, by assigning it n+i, where, of course, n is less than one. A mathematical proof can then be thought of as an assignment of a complex credence to the conjunction of the premises, or axioms, which the proof then transmits to the conclusion. The conclusion can be no more certain at the end of the proof than the premises were, so we might think of it as changing from 1/2+i (which represents our initial complete uncertainty at it truth) to n+i which is the credence for the conjunction of the premises. The constant imaginary coefcient represents the fact that from necessities only necessities will follow. Moreover, this is simply an application of the Deduction Rule which we gave in 1. We can also consider a more complicated case. Suppose that we are sure neither of the truth of an axiom, nor of its necessity, so that its credence is n+mi. If we were to combine it with other axioms (whose credences, for the sake of argument, are higher) then the credence on the deduced conclusion will go to n+miup from 1/2+0i, which is the complex credence that represents uncertain truth and uncertain necessity. The uncertainty over the necessity of the one weak axiom, no less than its uncertain truth, is transmitted to the conclusion. In fact we can extract from this a generalisation of the Deduction Rule. Suppose that the n axioms that are to be used in a proof have credences a1 +b1 i, a2 +b2 i, a3 +b3 i,. . . an1 +bn1 i, an +bn i, then the new credence for the conclusion of the proof will be min{a1 ,a2 , a3 ,. . . an1 , an }+ min{b1 , b2 , b3 ,. . . bn1 , bn }i. In other words the complex credence accorded to the conclusion should be no more than, but also no less than, that which it can receive from the weak-
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est axiom in the proof. Our uncertainty about the premises is transmitted to the conclusion. We can also see the rationale for reductio ad absurdum. If we have derived something that is a contradiction then it should, since it is logically impossible, have a complex credence of 0+i. But then the negation of the conjoined premises should have a complex credence of 1+i by the negation ruleit should be necessarily true. Thus the credence for the conclusion is an upper bound on the credence of the premises. Our credences, then, can give a satisfactory account of belief change subsequent upon mathematical proof. Yet it also allows us to understand our degree of belief in a posteriori necessities, for my degree of belief that water is H2 O should not register the same as my belief that Bush is President of the United States. With the former I have empirical reasons to believe it true, but analytic reasons to believe that if it is true then it is necessarily true; while with the latter I just have empirical reasons to believe it true. I can thus have doubts about the truth of the two beliefs, but I cannot express my doubts in the same way: with the latter it is logically possible that it be false, but with the former it is only epistemically possible, since if it is true then it is necessarily true, and therefore not logically possible for it to be false. This difference ought to be reected in the credences assigned to the two beliefs and on our scheme will be. My degree of belief in an a posteriori necessity will be n+i, where n is presumably quite close to 1; my degree of belief that Bush is President of the United States is n+0i = n. This also serves to separate my credence for a posteriori necessities from my credence for a simple logical truth, for the latter will be 1+i. Once again, this seems like an improvement on the traditional scheme in which credences are subjective probabilities, for there it is completely obscure what credences could consistently be assigned to a posteriori necessities. Our nal example of the usefulness of complex credences comes from a topic we have already discussed: conditionals. As was noted in 2 above, the principal difference between a conditional in ordinary language and the material conditional is that the former expresses a connectionof varying strength between the antecedent and the consequent, whereas the latter does not. I put this earlier by saying that it takes more evidence to believe a genuine conditional because one must have a reason to believe that the connection actually obtains. But what that evidence is evidence for is a modality. Believing if there are solar ares then there will be an Aurora Borealis is a matter of believing that the latter must happen if the former happens. But we dont, perhaps, believe that they must go together in every possible worldperhaps there are some where the connection doesnt hold. So we are dealing with a quasi-necessity at best, and one that is, moreover, a posteriori. Where should we nd it then in our double complex square? I suggest that we should nd
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it around n + mi where n and m are both just less than one. The real coefcient represents my belief that the causal connection holds and the imaginary coefcient represents my uncertainty as to what worlds it obtains in.
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We may also think of the imaginary coefcient as representing my denite belief that the connection holds in less than all the worlds that there are. By working with complex credences we may be able to solve two outstanding problems: the assertibility conditions for conditionals and the epistemology and metaphysics of causality. It is well known that the assertibility of a conditional is not equivalent to the conditional probability of a consequent given the antecedentsomething that also stands against identifying credences with probabilities. But this is also an argument against Humes subjectivist theory of causation, for there the causal necessity is equated with the expectation of the effect given the cause, where the latter is a subjective probability called, by Hume custom or habitcontrary to our knowledge that the probability of a causal conditional cannot be the same as a conditional probability. One might hope that a more ne-grained system of credences will allow for a genuinely realist account of causation. But I will not pursue this further here since it will take us into problems of a rather different complexion from the ones that weve been considering.
5.5
C ONCLUSION
I have been arguing in this chapter for a revision to our conception of degrees of belief. Thinking of degrees of belief as subjective probabilities has forced us to accept drastic idealisations that do no justice to our actual epistemic condition. Firstly, subjective probabilitiesbecause they are forced to conform to the Kolmogorov axiomsrequire us to assign probability one to all necessary truthsmathematical and logicalprior to our having gained any experience, despite the fact that some are beyond our reach, and others can only be known subsequent to our having experience. Secondly, and partly as a consequence of this, all of the logical consequences of what we learn are instantly known to us as we learn, meaning that there is never anything to be discovered through inference. It is all a fait accompli. And thirdly, subjective probabilities seem to give the wrong answer on conditionals, giving us a conditional probability that is always zero or oneand thus, in effect, a conditional that is either necessary or impossible. These idealisations have had a signicant undesirable consequence, in that they have tended to obscure the link between inference and epistemology. If we reason to discoveror, in argument, reason to facilitate discovery in others then our system of credences ought to reect that fact. That it has not done so has left us with a faultthe fault of circular reasoningyet no clear way to understand it. Lacking an adequate system of credences philosophers have been inclined to fall back on the only classication of inference fault available,
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namely, that which seeks to classify faults formallyas though inferential validity were not restrictive enough. The same mistaken diagnosis can be seen to be responsible for the relevant logic program of Anderson and Belnap, for there, also, an epistemic fault has been misdiagnosed as a logical faultagain, as if classical validity were too liberal and needed trimming. But we might also turn the explanatory arrow around and see the absence of a realistic system of degrees of belief as a testimony to the thrall in which weve been held by formal logic. If formal logic is all there is and all there need be, then we dont need the auxiliary scaffolding of credal measuresor so it may have been thought. Formal classications can be allowed to do all the work. (And surely this explains the relative lack of acceptance of subjective probabilities outside a narrow group of specialists.) So once again we may trace these problems back to Deductivism. As early as Sextus Empiricus, circa 200 a.d., we can see the mileage that a clever sceptic can get from the lack of a clearly dened epistemic role for logic. If a conclusion is acceptable then an argument is unnecessary and if it is unacceptable then it is pointless. By using an argument to undermine reasoning Sextus hoped to confound those who wished to believe that philosophy could ever hope to discover anything. He was wrong, of course: there is a perfectly good use for deductive inference. It is just thatas I have been concerned to argueit cannot exist alone. Reasoning is a thick concept, not a thin one. By trying to make deductive inference do all the work it becomes disabledallowing us to understand less and less, and ultimately, even less of itself. It is the causes and effects of this impoverishment that I turn to in the next chapter.
Chapter 6
The Impoverishment of Empiricism

o far we have been looking at the distortions produced by a particular philosophical tradition on the use and understanding of logic, but now it is time to examine that tradition itself. How did Deductivism come to such prominence, and how did it cause the effects it did? How did the difculties within the position go unnoticed for so long? In this chapter we will try to give some answers to these questions. In particular I will argue that the Empiricist tradition that arose from these roots and that has continued largely unchanged to the present day, was rendered incapable of giving a proper account of mathematical truth. It has been the absence of any convincing theory of mathematics that has made Empiricism such a weak and unstable ally in the scientic revolution of the last three hundred years. Laying these faults at the door of Deductivism will be our main task in these pages. But along the way I will also suggest that Empiricism has been fatally shaped by aspects of Ockhamist theology, views that made sense in their Fourteenth Century religious context but that look completely out of place in the atheist Hume, or indeed in later Empiricist philosophers.
6.1
T HE M EDIEVAL O RIGINS
The early Medieval tradition was dominated by the gure of St Augustine of Hippo. Heavily inuenced by Platonism and his early Manicheanism, Augustine saw genuine knowledge as a matter of divine illumination of the forms; our knowledge of the empirical world was, by contrast, governed by mere opinion, since it arose through the imperfect senses. This division makes epistemol135
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ogy mirror metaphysics, since it creates a perfect knowledge of a perfect realm and an imperfect knowledge of an imperfect realm. (It is a division we nd preserved intact in the Meditations of Descarteswho should perhaps be thought of as a late Augustinian.) It is a common complaint that such a division led the early Medievals to ignore, and even despise, the empirical worldthus squandering the opportunity to develop a genuine science. Such complaints seem overstated in the face of the technical achievements of Norman and Byzantine architecturebut however we assess this claim it is clear that the undeniable benet was the sharp development of reasoningspecically deductive logicin the years leading up to the Thirteenth Century. The idea that reasoning, when it was correct, was assisted by Divine Illumination made it the primary tool of philosophic enquiry in the Medieval world. This owering of deductive logicassisted by the works of Boethius, (that had never been lost to the West) enabled Medieval philosophers to quickly reproduce the discoveries of Aristotle and the Stoic logicians, and to press even further ahead. It had an early owering in the audacious attempt by St Anselm to prove both the existence of God and the Incarnation by reason alone, unaided even by Scripture. The rediscovery of the manuscripts of Aristotle in the Twelfth Century, and their dissemination in the Thirteenth, radically altered this philosophical climate. Logicians seemed to have found little to surprise them, but the empirical world became, perhaps for the rst time in over a thousand years, a suitable object of secular, rational, enquiry. Thus, one half of the Augustinian worldview was revised in a more positive and optimistic, direction, contributing to what has been called the Twelfth Century Renaissance. The most signicant gure of this periodthe early Thirteenth Centurywas Robert Grosseteste who not only translated Aristotles scientic texts but also managed to significantly improve on the classical legacy. He conducted experiments in optics and correctly explained the rainbow as a matter of the differential refraction of light through raindrops; he then developed lenses that could bring light into a focus, thus leading in a very short time to spectacles, and eventually to telescopes. Yet Grosseteste was also still a philosopher in the Augustinian tradition, and he held that divine illumination accompanied our reasoning even in scientic matters. Thus he used the new Aristotelian material to enlarge Gods role in our intellectual affairs: God was needed in our enquiries into the natural world as much as in our logical reasoning. Grossetestes student, the philosopher, scientist, and Franciscan, Roger Bacon, built on Grossetestes achievements and went well beyond them. It is here, in the Thirteenth Century that we nd the immediate and rapid mathematisation of science, aided, no doubt, by the Augustinian notion that we nd Gods assistance when we
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endeavor to reason well.1 In both Grosseteste and Bacon we nd an enlargement, rather than a break, with the Augustinian tradition. There was no attempt in these thinkers to alter Augustinian theology to accommodate an Aristotelian metaphysics. In the work of Thomas Aquinas, however, there was such an attempt and it led to the Paris and Oxford Condemnations of 1267 and 1277. Whereas, Augustine had built his theology partially on Platonic metaphysics, Aquinas sought to do the same using Aristotelian metaphysics. His arguments for the existence of God were thus a posteriori; his epistemology was empiricist and univocal; his thought governed by the principle Nihil in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu (there is nothing that is in the mind that was not rst in the senses). Whereas Augustine divided the world into two realms, Aquinas saw it as a seamless whole, with the intellect capable of understanding all of it together with a single set of explanatory principles. Thus, of all of the gures of this period Aquinas is the one least interested in the development of deductive inference. Aquinas is more concerned with explanation in the broadest sense explaining the formation of our concepts, explaining the existence of the world, and explaining the inevitability of the Christian world-view. One should perhaps think of Aquinas as a naturalist, explaining our understanding of the world as a matter of natural faculties operating on sensory inputs. Aquinas is thus less a Scholastic and more a naturalist in the modern sensecloser in spirit to Leibniz than to Anselm. In 1277 this Aristotelianism was condemned by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris. It was seen as necessitarian, as mistaking matters that were contingent for things necessary, and thus for seeming to articially restrict Gods power to act in the world. It is difcult to know whether Aquinas was the intended if tacit object of these condemnations, and few seem to touch actual Thomistic philosophy, but that is how the matter has been read by later historians (though Frank and Wolter argue that the philosopher most affected was Henry of Ghent).2 Tempier wished to stress, against this necessitarianism, Gods absolute power, his potentia Dei absoluta: God could do anything that was not actually logically impossible. Aristotle had introduced metaphysical necessities for example a metaphysical determinism that would have left God little room to intervene in the creation once it had begun: given the initial conditions for the
1 It was Grosseteste who was responsible for the idea, not found in Aristotle, that repeatable, controlled, experiments are the way to scientic truth. It is therefore, surely, he who most deserves to be thought of as the founder of modern science. 2 See William A. Frank and Allan B. Wolter Duns Scotus, Metaphysician West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995, p. 136.
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universe, and given that these initial conditions will necessitate subsequent events, God could not prevent the subsequent events from occurring once the initial conditions had been set. This would have contradicted the Christian belief in the biblical miracles as historical events, for there God clearly had intervened. Consequently, Aristotles metaphysics had to be in error.3 The condemnations mark a turning point in Medieval thought, for in subsequent philosophers the doctrine of Gods absolute power, or to put the same point round the other way, the complete contingency of the natural world, achieves a status that it lacked before the rediscovery of Aristotle. Whereas, St Augustine had made much of Gods omniscience, using it as the basis for his own form of supralapsarian predestinationism, subsequent philosophers rested the greater weight on His omnipotence. Even philosophers who had effectively divorced their philosophy from their theology, like Buridan, emphasised the radical contingency of the natural world. In this way a central philosophical doctrine of later times became established: necessity belongs to logic but all else is contingent. (It is worth recalling the root meaning of contingent here; for whereas it now means simply non-necessary, it originally meant dependent for its existence on something else, in particular, Gods Will.) Thus the doctrine of potentia Dei absoluta came to be wielded as a large, distorting, lens: God was magnied at the same time as the world was minimised.4 We nd the beginnings of this new direction in Medieval philosophy already in Duns Scotus. Scotus held that Nothing created must, for reasons intrinsic to it, be accepted by God (Nihil creatum formaliter est a deo acceptandum) meaning that God was not obliged to save the good man because of his goodness, but could, if He chose to Will it, save the sinner. Thus even with Scotus there were the beginnings of the doctrine that would dominate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. It is an act of pure will that makes God nd certain acts good, and it is Gods choice that makes the act good, not the goodness of the act that makes God love it. Scotus believed that God could never be obligated to human beings, and in this he was simply restating an Augustinian truth; Aquinas agreed but thought that God could be obligated to himself to keep the promises that he had made, in particular to save those who love Him. It is the unravelling of this covenantal theology that the assertion of the potentia Dei absoluta brought about.
Aquinas views on causation serve to distance him from classical Aristotelianism, for he held a view that was similar to Malebranches Occasionalism. There are no necessary connections between events but God acts to make it seem as though there are. 4 For a discussion of the impact of the Condemnations on the reception of Aristotelian physics see chapter 26 of The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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But Scotus agreed with Aquinas on one substantial point: the human mind could attain to a conception of God without the aid of Divine Illumination. With Scotus the centrality of divine illumination effectively came to an end: reason and experience would have to do all of the epistemic work. Scotus is, however, like Aquinas before him, an epistemic optimist, in that he believes that reason and experience are sufcient to allow us to know all that we believe that we know. We nd these two basic doctrinesthe absolute freedom of Gods Will, and the rejection of Augustinian Illuminationismalso in Scotus great successor, William of Ockham. But Ockham is not an epistemic optimist and for him reason and experience are not sufcient to allow us to know all that we believe that we know. According to Ockham we know less than we believe we know. This great difference between Ockham and Scotus, and indeed between Scotus and most later philosophers, is a matter of their attitude to the principles of reasoning and inference: Scotus, like Aquinas, allows for nondeductive inference, whereas Ockham is a more thorough-going Deductivist. In the following section we will try to capture the underlying argumentative strategy that Ockham uses, and that became so much the foundation for later Empiricism.
6.2
O CKHAMIST E MPIRICISM
What we can surmise about Ockhams character is that he was as austere as he was intellectually fearless; inclined, as perhaps no one before him to pursue a line of argument to its inevitable, dogg d, conclusion.5 e The razor that has become associated with him is perhaps less a reection of his inferential strategies than it is an emblem of his philosophical demeanor for we do not nd the razor used explicitly over and again in his arguments, though it does seem to characterise something of the spirit of his philosophy. But this raises the question of how we should account for his philosophy. What were the principles that allowed him to obtain his conclusions, and what provided the overall shape for his philosophy? We can answer these questions by looking more closely at the principles that he inherited from the post-Condemnation empiricism of his time. Firstly, we may note that Ockham was an empiricist and he would have
Having been tried for heresy in Avignon by Pope John xxii, and excommunicated (because of his relations with Michael of Cesena), Ockham attacked the Pope as the Anti-Christ, and continued his attacks from the court of Louis IV of Bavaria. He seems never to have consciously moderated a single one of his opinions. (The charge of Pelagianism that was levelled against him, and that he denied, seems to have been a red herring: Pelagianism was always completely contrary to the tenor of Ockhams thought.)
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agreed with Aquinas that there is nothing in the mind that was not rst in the senses.6 But he also held that Gods freedom of Will was absolutethe potentia Dei absolutaand that therefore the world that we observe with our senses was thoroughly contingent: there were no obstacles to God choosing tomorrow to make the world different. This means that our inductive inferences are not guaranteed to be reliable, and also that there can be no causal necessities linking events. Nor, for that matter can objects have essential natures, in the sense of properties that an object must have. Thus, by the simple act of combining the potentia Dei absoluta with an empiricist theory of knowledge Ockham was able to provide a powerful motivation for nominalism, deductivism and a regularity theory of causation. Indeed we might see Ockham as being the rst philosopher to really see the power of the potentia Dei absoluta. Let us isolate some of these claims as principles. Principle 1 (Empiricism): There is nothing in the mind that was not rst in the senses. Principle 2 (Contingency): Everything that we observe is contingent. Principle 3 (Deductivism): Deductive inference is the only reliable, well-founded form of inference. The obvious and immediate question, here, is how do we account for necessary truths? If we were to combine Principles 1 and 2 as they stand it would seem that everything in the mind must be contingent. Ockhams solution, which also became the solution for later Empiricists, is that necessary truths are analytic, or more generally, are relations between concepts, or the mental states that realise those concepts. So roses are red is something that we come to know through the senses, but either roses are red or roses are not red is known once we know the meaning of the constituent propositions plus the meaning of the logical particles. We could say that the truthmaker for this tautology is a relation between concepts and Ockham thinks of this relation as being somehow parasitic on our knowledge of sensory propositions. Once we have the division between necessary and contingent propositions the rules of deductive inference will tell us what is able to follow from what. A necessary proposition, for example, can only logically imply another necessary proposition. Thus we can never test the truth of a necessary proposition
And therefore, just as the knowledge of sensible facts that is obtained from experience (as the Philosopher says in the rst book of the Metaphysics and in the second book of the Posterior Analytics) begins with the senses, i.e. from a sense intuition of these sensible facts, so in general the scientic knowledge of these purely intelligible facts of experience begins with an intellective intuition of these intelligible facts. See Ockham: Philosophical Writings (a selection) trans. Philotheus Boehner, o.f.m. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. 1990.) p. 24.
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by having it entail a contingent proposition and nding out whether that contingent proposition is true. An impossible proposition, on the other hand, will entail all impossible propositions, and, conversely, an impossible proposition will only be entailed by an impossible proposition. This gives us the logical basis for the method of reductio ad absurdam: if something logically implies a contradiction then it must have been a contradiction. Also, if something implies no contradiction then it cannot have been a contradiction, hence it must be possible. Ockham was thoroughly aware of all of these logical relations and used them time and again in his philosophising.7 When we consider contingencies, however, the logical relations become more complicated. It was known, and follows trivially from the above, that necessities can imply no contingencies, but that impossibilities will imply all of them. But it is the question as to what contingencies can imply that introduced the complications. It may well have been known as far back as Abelard that anything will logically imply a necessary truth, and that therefore any contingency will do so as well, but it is hard to nd there. By the time of Robert Kilwardby in the second half of the Thirteenth Century, however, it was very evidently known, for Kilwardby actually corrects Aristotle on the point. Aristotle had claimed that if AB then it is not the case that AB (using for logical implication here). Kilwardby objected that when B is a necessary truth it is logically implied by anything, and therefore by A and A.8 (Boethius had likewise held a mistaken, parallel, view about inference, namely, if AB then it is not the case that A B; the counterexample to this is that if A is a contradiction then it will imply anything, and therefore B and B.) It is implausible to suggest that Aristotle had made a straightforward mistake here, so why does he seem to espouse an invalid inference form? The answer, I suggest, was given in our last chapter: Aristotle intended to make an epistemic point about what could be known on the basis of what, and it became confused with a logical point. What he wanted to say was that if I believe B on the basis of A then I could not have come to believe B on the basis of A, a claim that is perfectly true when B is contingent. If A raises the credence of B to the point where it is believed (greater than 0.5), then A cannot also raise its credence to the point where it is believed. Indeed, if B were a necessary truth then I could not have come to believe it by believing A since I could not have raised its credence in that way. This is related to a long-standing dispute about the nature of contingencies: that contingencies only imply contingencies. It has
See chapter 1 above; also ibid, throughout. For this see Kneale, W. and M. Kneale The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 275.
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often been held that this was a common Medieval doctrinea esse ad necesse non valet consequentiabut I have been unable to nd any logician who has espoused it in anything other than an epistemic form: one can only come to believe a contingency on the basis of another contingency. The distinctive feature of the invalid form of this doctrine is that, even if it does not obviously say the same thing as the claim made by Aristotle, above, its counterexample is the same: contingencies do imply necessities (because everything does, even contradictions). An Empiricist is interested in inference because it is a tool of discovery. In the Posterior Analytics it was Aristotles avowed aim to work out the inferential character of scientic discovery. But it was easy for later philosophers to misunderstand these intentions. By the time of Albert the Great in the midThirteenth Century, however, the theory of deductive inference appears to have become settled in its modern formKilwardby, Scotus, and Ockham are able to use it freely without becoming entangled in irrelevant epistemic questions. But settling it made it clear that there was an epistemic division between necessities and contingencies: inference would only take one from necessities to other necessities, and one could never come to know a necessity by inferring it from a contingency (because it will only be that if one already knows that the necessary truth is a necessity that one will be able to know that it follows from anything). We thus have a recapturing of the Augustinian dualism between the realm of necessitythe realm of the formsand the realm of contingency only now the epistemic light shines brighter on the latter side. Sense experience gives us knowledge of some contingencies, and from there deductive inference will only allow other contingencies to be known. We might summarise this by saying that necessities are inferentially and epistemically closed and contingencies are epistemically closed. In Ockham this division leads to a devaluing of the Demonstrative sciences. For him it is the empirical world that is best known. Plato is also often thought to have held that we cannot come to know a necessary truth from a knowledge of something sensory, or contingent. But Plato thought that since we do obviously have some knowledge of necessary truths that there must be some alternative way of our coming to know them. Ockham draws the opposite conclusion. The result is that there really is no satisfactory solution to the problem of how we come to know necessary truths, and the little that Ockham does say will not do. Or so I will argue in the next section. Before going on with that, however, it is worth drawing out the parallel between Ockham and Hume in more detail, for the inferential and epistemic closure argument is taken over by Hume and used to generate many, if not all, of his interesting sceptical conclusions.
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Firstly, it is noteworthy that Hume states his empiricist principle in terms that are nearly identical to those used by Medieval philosophers. [I]t is impossible for us to think of any thing, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses.9 Hume also holds, I would maintain, a rather strong form of Deductivism. Thus his argument on induction, or our beliefs about the unobserved, can be schematised as follows. (i) Reasonings are of two kinds, either Demonstrative (from necessary premises) or Experiential (from contingent premises); (ii) Consider our belief that snow, in the future, will feel cold to the touch (S): this cannot follow from necessary premises, for then it would have to be necessary and its denial therefore impossible. But it implies no contradiction that tomorrow snow will feel hot to the touch, therefore S is not a contradiction and S is not necessary. (iii) But S cannot be implied by any experiential (sensory) premises, either, for these are all of past experiences and can entail nothing about the future, or they will involve some claim about the future (uniformity of nature) and will beg the question. Since these two kinds of reasoning are exhaustive we may conclude that our belief that snow will, in the future, feel cold to the touch is without foundationi.e. we do not come to it by reasoning.10 Hume uses inferential closure in both parts of his dilemma. Necessities only imply necessities, and contingent statements about past sensory experience will not imply anything about contingent future events. This second half is clearly a specialisation of the idea of deductive and epistemic closure. If the premises have character X but not character Y then the conclusion cannot have character Y. Thus we can see that Humes famous Is/Ought Gap argument is an instance of this same type: if the premises only contain statements of what is the case then they cannot imply anything about what ought to be the case. But the same argument dilemma reappears also in Humes attempt in the Treatise to show that we can have no knowledge of the external world: it implies no contradiction that there should be no external world, and so the claim that there is one cannot be necessary; yet experience is always experience of private inner states and these can imply nothing of their origin or of anything beyond them. So deductive closure ensures that we can know noth9 D. Hume Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals third ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 62. 10 Thus when Hume speaks of reasoning he means only deductive reasoning. Those who think Hume has shown that our beliefs concerning the future are not even probable read Hume anachronistically. They also make nonsense of Humes own solution, for when Hume speaks of custom or habit it is at least arguable that he intends to advert to a mental faculty that would subserve probabilistic inference. Thus probability theory is the normative theory while custom and habit are descriptions of the actual inferential mechanisms in the mind.
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ing of the external world. So our belief in the external world is not arrived at through reasoning. This deductive closure argument is so often used in Hume that it may be appropriate to think of it as Humes Master Argument. Indeed one might consider it to be the Master Argument for Empiricism as a whole, for even philosophers who give no argument for these views seem to rely on those that Hume has given. Yet it is clearly just a variant of Ockhams argument. But the comparison with Ockham serves to bring out just how many unwarranted assumptions there are in these later argumentsfor without the aid of Ockhams potentia Dei absoluta so much of this later Empiricism seems unmotivated. Why, for example, does Hume assumeas he clearly doesthat everything that we can observe with the senses must be contingent? This assumption is vital for Humes argument about induction as well as his subsequent, related, argument concerning necessary connections. He believes that the proposition snow feels cold to the touch is contingent, just as the relation between the mans being hit by the bus and the mans dying is not a necessary connection. But against the rst one might well insist that snow being frozen water is an essential property of it, and therefore future snow must feel cold to the touch if it is to be snow; and to the second one might just insist that the relation is a necessary connection. We may not be able to observe the necessity in the connectionwhatever that would meanbut we may still be observing a necessary connection.11 In Hume we nd Ockhamite Empiricism taken up and distilled to its essence. But where Ockham had reasons for holding the positions that he did, Hume has assumptions that seem hard to justify. In the next section I will argue that neither Ockham, nor his successors, can adequately account for the very principles of deductive inference that they need to rely on. By extension, they cannot account for mathematics as a whole either.
Hume fudges the issue about snow by saying may I not clearly and distinctly conceive that a body, falling from the clouds, and which, in all other respects, resembles snow, has yet the taste of salt or feeling of re. (op. cit. p. 35) But I may be able to conceive of this without it being true that I can conceive of snow being this way. On the issue of necessary connections Hume seems to spend a great deal of time arguing that we never observe a connection which reveals itself in the observation as a necessary connection. This, however, is asking for something which is transparently impossible. All we really need to do is to observe that there exists a relation which on non-observational grounds we have good reason to believe to be a necessary connection.
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6.3
T HE G ENERALISED E UTHYPHRO
Ockhamite Empiricism relies on inferential closure to generate the negative, sceptical, part of the position. But inference is a matter of necessary implication, of the conclusion following from the premises, and this necessary connection is difcult to account for empirically. Empiricists have always wanted to deal with this problem without also violating the basic axiom of empiricism: that there is nothing in the mind that was not rst in the senses. Traditionally, they have assumed that this necessity is to be thought of as a connection of meaning, that is, an analyticity.12 Here I wish to argue that neither this solution, nor any of its near relatives, can possibly work, since they all succumb to a generalised version of the Euthyphro argument. To begin, it is worth stating the common form of the Euthyphro. Suppose we wish to explain the origin of, say, moral goodness and it is proposed that an act is good because the gods love it. What if we then ask why the gods love it? It must either be because the act is intrinsically good, and the gods are simply recognising that fact, or it must be that it is the gods loving the act that has made it good. In other words the goodness of the act must be either prior to, or the result of, the gods favour. But if it is prior to the gods favour then the goodness has not been explained at allit simply exists antecedently. Alternatively, if it is the result of the gods favour then they might equally have chosen any act to be good: wanton slaughter might just as well have been chosen to be good. But if the decision is really completely arbitrary, as it must be on this horn of the dilemma, then we have really explained away the goodness of all acts, for we might say that nothing on this view is really good. We might obey the gods will but we would cease believing in the goodness of the acts themselves. (Effectively, this response to the second horn of the dilemma involves a denial of the intelligibility of an act being made good by a completely arbitrary choice; to see the power of this argument one must really imagine the gods pulling descriptions of act-types, or even act-tokens, out of a hat and declaring that these shall be the good ones.)13 Just as we can ask about the origin of goodness, we can ask also about the origin of necessity. Suppose we were to ask where necessity comes from and it is answered that it comes from a designation by the gods. Now this may
12 Specically the idea is that there is a collection of basic analyticities and that all logical and mathematical truths are generated from the logical closure of this set. The base analyticities are thought of as simple identities, the denial of which would be obvious contradictions. 13 Students often fail to see the power of this argument because they slide back at this point onto the other horn of the dilemma, thinking that the gods have chosen the acts that they have because they are really intrinsically lovable.
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mean either that a proposition is necessary because the gods recognise that it must be true; or it may mean that its necessity is the result of a decision by the gods that this proposition shall henceforth be necessary. But again, if it is the former then we really have no explanation for the origin of the necessity, for it is antecedent to the gods recognition. On the other hand, if the gods have simply arbitrarily designated certain propositions necessary then we may justly feel that this is really a reason to believe that no proposition is really necessary. After all, we will probably want propositions that are necessary to be necessarily necessary and on this account they will at best be contingently necessarycontingent, that is, on the arbitrary decision of the gods. But we might also wonder, as before, whether an arbitrary act of choice is able to make a proposition necessary. If there is no intrinsic feature of the proposition that would distinguish it from a contingent proposition then it is difcult to see what the gods arbitrary stipulation can add. An arbitrary choice is not what we wantwe want a discerning choice. Armed with the doctrine of the potentia Dei absoluta Ockham and the late Fourteenth Century Ockhamists had little option but to embrace the second horn of these dilemmashowever implausible they might be. If Gods power was absolute then there could be no pre-existing constraints that could stand in the way of the exercise of the Divine Will. Hence God was not forced to acknowledge and abide by a sense of goodness that had a prior and independent existence. Likewise with necessities: as the Fourteenth Century wore on there was less and less that was permitted to constrain Gods actions. This led to profound philosophical problems. If God had simply arbitrarily chosen that murder be evil and piety be good, could He not choose again, but in reverse? Could God not choose to love those who hate him and hate those who love Him? Could God not make what has happened up to now, now happen differently? Could God not make it be the case that He never had existed? The potentia Dei absoluta drove philosophers in the direction of logical paradox and religious scepticismfor how can we know what God is currently willing? We cant even say that God will keep His promises to Man, because if He is the author of what is good then there is no reason to think that He will continue to hold that promise-keeping is good. Perhaps He will choose inconstancy, even for Himself. It is little wonder that by the Fifteenth Century faith had replaced reason as the principal way of approaching God; the Reformation itself can be seen as simply part of the long tail of the Ockhamist comet. But however true this account may be for the later Ockhamists for philosophers such as Nicholas of Autrecourtit does not do justice to Ockham himself, for in Ockham we nd an equivocation on the nature of necessity. This equivocation can be seen in the following remark: In one way something is
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called necessary. . . because it can begin or cease being through no power; and thus God alone is. . . necessary. . . . In another sense, a proposition which cannot be false is called necessary. . . . And in this sense demonstration is of necessities. . . that is, of propositions which cannot be false, but always true.14 To hold that God is the author of what is necessary would undermine the belief that God is a necessary beingand this is a doctrine that Ockham did not wish to deny. But once we have God as the sole necessary being then all other beings, including those complex propositions that correspond to necessities, come from God, in one sense, and are mere truths of meaning in another. In this way Ockham can maintain that necessities are analyticities and also keep alive the possibility that God could have willed them otherwise. Yet it is obviously an unstable doctrine too; for if the necessary propositions are really such that they cannot be false, then one might wonder how God could be the only necessary being, the only being that can begin and cease through no power, since these also seem that they could not be otherwise. Ockham could never fully resolve this problem and was forced to settle on an equivocal compromise. Necessities are complex propositions that are such that, given the meanings of the terms in the propositions, cannot be false; on the other hand, considering the potentia Dei absoluta, they are the result of Gods free decision and are in that sense contingent upon His will. The necessity that is thus given with one hand is taken away by the other.15 Suppose, however, that we focus just on the proposed reduction of necessities to complex propositions. Can this give us an account of the nature and origin of necessary truth? Let us imagine someone saying that the necessity of A is to be explained by the fact that it is true in virtue of the meanings of the words in A. Then we might ask, as before, whether the meanings of the words must be as they are, that is, whether they are just reecting an antecedent necessity, or whether the meanings of the words could have been otherwise, and A be false. Thus, as in the previous Euthyphros, it is a question of whether there is any necessity prior to, or whether it is all the result of, the meanings of the terms in the proposition. If the former then we have no explanation at all as to the origin of the necessity, and if the latter then we have an explanation that would render them contingent. (On the second alternative the meanings would have to be such that they could have been otherwise because there is no antecedent necessity to constrain them.) Since neither horn of the dilemma is
In Kretzmann et al p. 513. It will not do to try to imagine it to be a contingent necessityi.e. one where we have necessarily A but not necessarily necessarily Asince it is not clear that Ockham had the concept of this. Anyway, the failure of necessarily necessarily A in sub-S4 systems is arguably not well interpreted as contingent necessity.
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satisfactory we have no solution to the problem of the origin of necessity. We might try to rectify this problem by making the basis for the proposed reduction less linguistic, more a matter of relations between propositionsin fact this would probably be closer to what Ockham had in mind. Suppose, therefore, that we try to explain the necessity of A by saying that it is the result of the arrangement of simple propositions within some complex proposition. Then, again, we might ask whether it was possible for the complex proposition to be such that it was false. If the answer is no then there must be some antecedent necessity constraining it and if yes then it is contingent. So again, we either have no explanation for the necessities or we have one that renders them contingent. In fact once the general structure of the Euthyphro becomes apparent it is clear that there can be no reductive explanation for necessity. The reductive base will either be such that it must be the way it is, or not. If the former, then there will be an antecedent necessity constraining it, and therefore no reduction; and if the latter then there will be no antecedent necessity to constrain it and it will be contingentand hence also not capable of providing a reduction. This argument will apply to Kants attempted explanation of necessity as arising from the structure of cognition, as much as to Humes connexions of meaning. If the structure of cognition is constrained so that it must be as it is then there must be an antecedent necessity, and if it is not so constrained then it will be contingent and therefore likewise incapable of explaining necessity. Given these difculties explaining necessities in general, it is little wonder that, traditionally, Empiricists have had so little to say about the surprising nature of logic and mathematics. After all, we do seem to know what our language means but we are often surprised at the logical consequences of what we believe. Also, even a cursory glance at an area of modern mathematics reveals that it requires a considerable amount of inventivenessand a corresponding inventiveness with language. Mathematics surprises us precisely because it goes so far beyond our current language use. So mathematics differs from analyticities in two important respects. In fact it is just another way of making the Euthyphros point to say that it seems implausible that something which seems so arbitrary and freely chosen (language) could give rise to something which could not be false (mathematics). Not, could not be false given the way the language currently is, but could not be false given any way that the language could be. Hence it seems to considerably outrun the meanings contained in our actual language. Bachelor means unmarried man is true and analytic: it could not be false given what the words in our language mean, but it would not (or need not) be true if the constituent words meant something else. But 5+7=12 would be true even if all the words in our language were to
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changeit is just that its truth would no longer be expressed by the sentence 5+7=12. Empiricists seem to have thought that mathematics is to steam as language is to boiling water. But it isnt: it is to heat as language is to boiling water. We can augment this Euthyphro argument with another that goes specically to the reduction of necessities to analyticities. Suppose that we imagine there to be a base set of analytic statements that is rich enough to generate (by its deductive closure) all of logic and mathematics. It turns out that the set so dened will be inconsistent.16 More specically, let be a set of sentences which i. Contains the axioms of Robinsons Arithmetic R, ii. Is closed under rst-order logical consequence, iii. Contains 2 whenever it contains , iv. Contains all instances of the (T) schema 2 . The inconsistency of this set comes as something of a shock since all four conditions look to be quite plausible. But if we follow the suggestion that we think of the 2 as marking the fact that we have deduced the claim from the base set of analyticities then we end up with an unpalatable solution to this problem: it is recommended that we drop the fourth claim that everything that is necessarily true is true. This may be plausible if the 2 is read as it is provable that but it does not seem very plausible when it is read as it is logically necessary that. This serves to mark out an important difference between logical necessity and derivability from some base set of analytic truths: the former requires all instances of the T-schema whereas the latter does not (in fact it requires something far weaker, namely all instances of 2(2)2). As Montague remarked if necessity is to be treated. . . as a predicate of sentences, as Carnap and Quine have urged, then virtually all of modal logic. . . must be sacriced.17 But in fact 2(2) 2 may be too strong if we are to read the box as it is analytic that. . . since it implies 222 and this seems
See Richard Montague Syntactical Treatments of Modality, with corollaries on reection principles and nite axiomatizability, Acta Philosophica Fennica 16, 15367, reprinted in R. Montague Formal Philosophy, ed. Richmond H. Thomason, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. 17 The contrary view has been argued by Vann McGee in Truth, Vagueness and Paradox, (Indianapolis: Hackett) 1990, ch. 2. McGee is more sympathetic to the Empiricist doctrine than I am but he demonstrates clearly what needs to be given up if we are to cling to it.
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quite wrong. If it is analytically true that bachelors are unmarried then is it really analytically true that it is analytically true that bachelors are unmarried? Surely not. But it is possible to see the argument just given is a more precise version of the Euthyphro: how can analyticities really mimic everything we want from a genuine necessity? (Montague may be wrong to think that Quine holds to this syntactical viewbut it is a view held by virtually every Empiricist from Ockham onwards, and even some prominent non-Empiricists such as Leibniz holds to it.) So the Empiricist doctrine on necessities is implausible. But it may be profitable at this point to compare our response with that of Quines. Quine also thinks that the traditional Empiricist equation between necessities and analyticities is unenlightening, but his reason for thinking so is quite different to ours. In Two Dogmas of Empiricism Quine is principally concerned, of course, with the analytic/synthetic distinction, but the connection with necessities enters in at a later stage. In fact I think Quines intentions in this essay have been largely misunderstood, so I will rst try to outline what I think his argument is. Quine believes that statements cannot be uniquely analysed into a part which is the contribution of meaning and a part which is the contribution of fact; so in particular, we cannot identify statements whose truth is entirely a matter of meaning (those that are analytic) and those whose truth is entirely a matter of fact (those that are synthetic). But he does not think that meaning is a chimera, or even that statements cannot be said to have a component which is their meaning componentrather he thinks that no statement can be uniquely factored into a meaning part and a factual part. Thus he says, We lately reected that in general the truth of statements does obviously depend both upon language and upon extralinguistic fact; and we noted that this obvious circumstance carries in its train, not logically but all too naturally, a feeling that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component.18 An analogy may help to show what Quine seems to have in mind; it comes from linear algebra. Suppose that we have a vector V in a two-dimensional vector space. Choosing a particular pair of basis vectors (we may think of them as co-ordinate vectors) will allow us to express V as the weighted sum of those basis vectors. But we can always choose another set of basis vectorsthink here of a rotation of the rst pair about zeroand in that different basis V will be expressed by a different weighted sum. In general, there are an innite number
In From a Logical Point of View 2nd revised ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980, p. 41.
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of ways to express V as a weighted sum of basis vectors, for there are an innite number of basis pairs. These different ways of factoring V into basis vectors, corresponds to Quines idea that there are many different ways of factoring a sentence into a meaning component and a factual component. These different factorings are the result of the many different ways that we can choose to revise our total science in the face of recalcitrant experience. An individual sentence can be held come what may or it may be given up lightly. It is as a part of total science that sentences may be considered to depend both upon language and experience, but it is a matter of choice how one revises them and therefore of how they may be considered to be factored. Quine believes that we may choose our revision strategy to make any sentence analytic (relative to that strategy) or synthetic. The analytic/synthetic distinction has thus been relativised to the choice of, what we might think of as, revision pathways. I will leave till the next section a comment on the plausibility of this view, but here I merely want to note that it has awkward consequences for the Empiricist theory of necessitieswhich Quine doesnt seem to wish to reject. If we take the view that necessities are to be explained as analyticities then the relativising of analyticity will mean a relativising of necessity. Quine seems ready to embrace this consequencesince he has similar worries about necessity as he has about analyticity. He says, Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle. (p. 43) It seems that Quine thinks, though he doesnt quite say, that the law of excluded middle is contingent! But it would be more accurate to say that, for Quine, the distinction between statements that are necessary and those that are contingent has been replaced by the differing degrees of epistemic entrenchment that statements may have. It is a distinction that comes in degrees and that is dependent upon ones choice of revision strategy. Yet this seems absurd and unworkable. Necessary statements have quite different logical properties to contingent statements and the division between them is as absolute as it could be. Necessities imply only necessities, whereas it is not the case that contingencies imply only contingencies. Similarly, the denial of a necessity implies anythingagain something that is not true of a contingency. No amount of talk of revisability in principle will substitute
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for necessity: the former is an epistemic concept and the latter is logical. But if the view is so implausible we may wonder why it has not been more criticised. The answer lies, I think, in the ambiguous way that Quine expresses the issue of revisability. For we may agree that we may have been wrong to believe that the law of excluded middle was a logical law. Perhaps it is false after all, and Quantum Mechanics has revealed that it is. But this is just to say that our logical and mathematical beliefs are falliblesomething that seems perfectly true. But their fallibility does not mean that when true they are not necessarily true. It just means that we may be wrong in thinking them true. I suspect that many philosophers have found Quines view unobjectionable because they have read him as simply asserting the fallibility of our logical and mathematical beliefsand because of their fallibility asserting their revisability in principle (and after all that is all that the analogy with Kepler et al. really suggests). But on a straight reading he is doing much more than that, he is effectively making them all contingent. By hanging on to the view that necessities are analyticities and relativising the latter he has effectively relativised the former as well. Indeed we might see this as just another version of the Euthyphro. After all, we are trying to explain necessities by thinking of them as analytictiesand the only difference from before is that these analyticties are relative to some revision pathway. But now, again, there is nothing to constrain our meanings and thus, again, the necessities are contingent.19 Quine himself may nd nothing wrong with this but we should be wary of following him down that path. The concept of necessity is simply too important to lose. In the next section I will take up the question of how Empiricism should be broadened to allow it to deal adequately with logical and mathematical truths.
6.4
E MPIRICISM AND M ATHEMATICS
The Empiricist traditionrunning from Ockham through to Locke, Hume and Kant, and on to Ayer and Quinethus faces a major objection. Deductive reasoning is employed as the sole inferential mechanism of the theory, the sole way of going beyond our present sense experience, and yet there is no adequate account of the concept of either necessary (logical) truth or necessary (logical) implication available from within the tenets of that theory. It would have been possible for an adventurous philosopher to solve this problem by simply eschewing inference altogether; but that would have left Empiricism in
It is a corollary of this that there can be no objective normative constraints on how we should make our revisions since that would require there to be some necessary truths that are not revisable!
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an extremely impoverished state, indeed with little more than a recommendation that we take note of our current sensory experiencepointillist fashion! Even Nicholas of Autrecourt, who perhaps comes closest here, held that the principle of non-contradiction is certain.20 It is only when we come to Quine that we have a philosopher radical enough to try to cut the Gordian Knot by declaring the notion of necessity somehow illegitimate. Thus in logic, as discussed in chapter four, Quine reconceives of logical truth and logical consequence in the Model Theoretic fashion, as initiated by Tarski. But, as we have seen, this requires a vast set-theoretic commitment, and the problem of the ontology and epistemology of necessity is simply transferred to the problem of the ontology and epistemology of these abstract mathematical objects. Thus, once again, there seems to be no way of accounting for the deductive apparatus used by an Ockhamite Empiricism in terms that are empirically acceptable. When we combine this with Quines general reduction of necessities to analyticities we have a view that is simply unworkable: what is necessary becomes relativised to a revision path, with no possible normative constraint on how we should revise, and yet we have a set-theoretic universe that somehow must be seen as independent of us, constrained by an objective set of logical truths. Quines difculties with necessary truths are exacerbated by his attempt to mix Realism with an implausible Pragmatism, but the underlying source of the problem is Empiricism itself. Despite the fact that Empiricism has traditionally relied on deductive inference and modal principles of inferential relations to generate its philosophical conclusions, there are insufcient resources within the theory to account for this deductive inference. In fact, the problem extends to mathematics in generala consequence that is still with us today and that recurs frequently in discussions of the philosophy of mathematics. How, then, should Empiricism be cast so as to deal with this problem? In this section I want to sketch an answer to this question, building on some of the conclusions of previous chapters. The starting point for most recent discussions of mathematics is Paul Benacerrafs paper Mathematical Truth, for Benacerraf put very elegantly the dilemma facing the philosophy of mathematics. That dilemma can be put as follows: we wish to give an account of mathematics so that mathematical statements are able to be true or false and yet they must also be such that they can be known to be true if they are. But providing truthmakers for mathematical claims in the form of abstract entities will make them unknowable if we insist, not unreasonably, that we have some causal connection with that which we claim to know. On the other hand, if we try to make the epistemological
20
See Kretzmann et al. p. 515, footnote 72.
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problem easier then we will inevitably fail to provide truthmakers for a large number of mathematical claims that we take to be true. So solving the problem of mathematical truth makes the problem of mathematical knowledge unsolvable, and vice versa. Twenty years ago, in 1979, Hilary Putnam declared the problem of mathematical knowledge completely intractable. Instead of describing the main trends in the philosophy of mathematics, I have decided to begin with the theme why nothing works. But I am not simply being perverse: explaining why and how it seems that nothing works, that is, why and how it is that every philosophy seems to fail when it comes to explaining the phenomenon of mathematical knowledge. . . 21 Putnams pessimism is still widely shared today, but it is a pessimism that is misplaced. Let us take the two questions in turn, rst the metaphysical, then the epistemological one. I claim that mathematics is (by-and-large) about what it seems to be about: structure. Topology is a description of the very basic neighborhood relations of points in spaces; group theory is an account of sets of elements that are able to be combined, and operated on, in particular ways; Measure Theory describes how to assign numbers to sets that have particular spatial properties; differential geometry is about the behaviour of curves on spaces; and so on. It would not be correct to say that mathematics is blind to the nature of the elements that enter into these structural relations, for in some cases the structure ows from their internal properties (for example, the successor relation on natural numbers) but it is true that, from wherever it is derived, it is the structural relations that matter. It is this that occasioned the parenthesised by-and-large above: we are interested in the objects and their structural properties, but any characteristics of the objects that transcend those structural relations are irrelevant. We may, therefore, be able to reduce some entities (natural numbers, say) to others (sets) and provided that the structural properties are captured in the process we may count it as an economy. (There are losses here, however, since we lose the progressive relation between the natural numbers and real numbers.)22
Reprinted as Philosophy of Mathematics: Why Nothing Works in Words and Life ed. James Conant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 499. 22 I expressed the view that mathematical structures are real in my paper: Zeeman-Gobel Topologies British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1986. The idea that mathematics is about structure and that such structures should be taken with full ontological seriousness has been well-defended by a number of philosophers, including, Stewart Shapiro (Foundations
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Just as mathematics is about structure it is natural to think that there will be a mathematics of mathematics that is about the structural relations arising from mathematical structures: this, on the standard interpretation, is Category Theory. It is a form of second-order mathematics, an abstraction of the basic idea behind all of mathematics that we are interested in objects and the functions dened on those objects. In a sense Category Theory is the natural mathematical development of the philosophical idea that mathematics is about structure. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that we nd the co-inventor of Category Theory espousing a strong Structuralist view of mathematics. Thus Saunders MacLane has outlined a Structuralist view in his Mathematics: Form and Function.23 But if mathematics is about structure, if structures are the truth-makers for mathematical claimsthen the next question is: what is a structure? To this I answer that a structure is a universal, property or form. Classic discussions of universals have obscured this point because they have tended to focus on very simple properties (in the Medieval case Socrates being white, or human; in the modern case, the charge on an electron, or the mass of an element) but if mathematics is about structure then those structures may be had by different objects, or collections of objects. Thus a topology may be shared by a physical space-time and by a phase space, or even a colour space. The rotations of a cube about its centre may instantiate a particular group and the same group may be the transformation group for some elementary particle. A velocity is a vector in a dynamical system but so is an acceleration, and so on. Even a set may be thought of as a very basic structurea kind of mathematical amoeba governed by a simple inside/outside condition. Here however the structure is so basic that two different collections of objects cannot form the same set, blurring the distinction between an object and a universal. Isomorphism has to do the job of equality here, since we cannot speak of equality, as we might do elsewhere of groupoids, say. However, if we wish to be careful we should
Without Foundationalism, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991)), Michael Resnick (Mathematics as a Science of Patterns: Ontology and Reference, Nous, 15, 1981), Geoffrey Hellman (Mathematics Without Numbers: Toward a Modal-Structural Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) and Jim Franklin (Mathematics, Necessity and Reality, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 67, 1989, pp. 286294.) For an excellent introduction to these issues see The Philosophy of Mathematics ed. W. D. Hart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 23 New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986. See also Categories for the Working Mathematician, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1971. The older conception of metamathematics was based on the idea that mathematics was essentially a deductive enterprise, and so metamathematics became the study of such deductive systems. Changing the characterisation of mathematics changes the emphasis in metamathematics. These different approaches should be seen as complimentary, however, and not as rivals, (even if so far there has been no real attempt to put them together).
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refrain from speaking of the sameness of mathematical structures and speak instead of their isomorphism. If mathematical entities are structures and structures are universals then our epistemological problem is reduced to the problem of our knowledge of universals. At this point we may seem to have arrived at a particularly strong form of Benecerrafs problem, for how can we claim to be acquainted with an abstract entity like a form? If to be acquainted with something is to be in causal contact with it then it may seem that we have solved the ontological problem only at the expense of making the epistemological problem completely intractable. We seem to have arrived back at Platos solution with no progress made at all. I think this is a mistake, and moreover one that arises from erroneous epistemology. Not surprisingly, I think these are related to the errors that I have been concerned to expose in this book. Thus I will argue that the epistemological problem of mathematics, and universals in general, has been brought about, or at least been exacerbated, by Ockhamite Empiricism. According to the classical doctrine on universals a universal is wholly present in each of its instantiations. Thus greenness is wholly present in each blade of grass; massiveness is wholly present in each massive object; etc. Now if the universal is wholly present wherever it is instantiated then it follows that whenever I see a blade of grass I am seeing the universal. I am not seeing some pale reection of a Form that exists in some distant Platonic realmI am seeing the Form itself, for it is nothing but the greenness of the green grass. Thus, on one way of looking at it, I am seeing an abstract object; on another way of looking at it universals are really physical. In fact the usual distinction between physical objects and abstract objects is rather poorly drawn, for a physical object in the usual sense is made up of abstract objects. But to put the point this way is to needlessly court paradoxand to create disbelief where none is needed. If a physical object is made up of abstract objects then the sensible thing to say is that they are not really abstract after all. The usual doctrine about physical objects makes little sense and rapidly leads to incoherenceeven more rapidly if there is even a modest amount of scepticism about the existence of universals. For what is the physical object without the properties, and if the properties are simply mental (or are mental constructs, in the post-Kantian argot) then what will stop the physical object from going the same way? Seen this way the classical idea of physical objects is an odd form of substance chauvinism. There is an objecta chair, saybut the shape, mass, colour, solidity, position in space and time, and the rest of its properties, are either abstract entities that exist in a Platonic realm, or have no objective existence at all. In this way nominalism becomes the short way to idealismand realism the long way.
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The straightforward thing to say is that when I see an object I see the properties of the object and these properties are universals in the sense that they can exist in more than one place at any time. Certainly nothing seems plainer than to say that the electric charge of an electron can be had by many electrons simultaneously. Likewise, nothing seems plainer than that it is these properties that enter into the physical interactions of matter. It is the mass that causes an object to fall, it is the like electric charge that causes particles to repel, and it is the colour of quarks that causes them to bind in the nucleus. At a larger scale it is the properties of an object that interact with us that allow it to be perceivable. Thus it is these abstract objects that enter into causal interactions. Indeed it is the fact that properties are multiply instantiated and are the things that enter into causal relations that gives rise to the observed regularities, or laws, of the world. In short, there is no reason not to regard these abstract objects as physical. If mathematical objects are structures, structures are universals, and universals are sometimes observable, then we now have the possibility that some mathematical objects may be observable. I maintain that some are. When I observe the rotations of a disc about a central point then I am observing a group. To take note of the inverse rotation that will restore the disc to its original position, to note that there is a zero rotation that will leave the disc unaffected, etc, this is all to observe the group structure that the disc rotations instantiate. Likewise, to observe the peeling of an orange is to observe a set of facts of differential geometry, while to observe the act of peeling itself is to observe a dynamical system, something that I also do when I watch the pendulum of a clock, a building being demolished, or a cup of tea cooling. To lay tiles on a bathroom oor is to observe the mathematical relations involved in space lling a plane. To observe the motion of the planets is to observe elliptical curves. To walk the bridges of Knigsberg is to observe a graph structure. To observe the winds on the Earth is to see certain facts about the vector tangents on a differential 2-sphere. Physical objects instantiate a great number of mathematical structures, often more than one at a time. The fact that they are observable, however, does not mean that we will immediately know what we are seeing, and we must therefore work to abstract the proper theory of the structure that we are interested in. But in this mathematical structure is no different to ordinary physical structure: one may observe the disease of cholera without one knowing exactly what it is one is observing. The mathematical structure that requires the least work is the natural numbers. As soon as there is a kind individuated into unitsapples, ships, people, or what have youthen counting is a very natural activity. And, of course, we may change the units to nd a different number in the same collection of ob-
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jects: thus a collection of twelve apples may be recounted to yield twenty-four half apples. But provided we remember that number is relative to kind there is no danger of confusion. Yet this also serves to tie the concept of number to the existence of universals, for without objective kinds there will be no objective numbering. But just as we can abstract the concept of number from collections so we can also abstract the concept of set. Once we have the concept of set then we can recover the natural numbers by counting the elements in the set, or counting the iteration of the operation of set formation on the empty set. But this is all something that requires difcult excavation: historically, the concept of number, and the related notions of measurement, so forced themselves on people that the concept of set was overlooked. This is perhaps no bad thing. Not only is the nave concept of set inconsistent, it is also much more difcult to get from the natural numbers to the real numbers from within it than it is to get there from the concept of number and length. Some mathematical structures can be directly observed and numbers are a prime case. But I repeat: to directly observe something is not to know infallibly and incorrigibly what it is that we are observing. It is theory that is the best guide to what we are seeing.24 This means that we have to abstract the relevant structure and look for ways of characterising it symbolically. Having done so, generalisations may suggest themselves and soon we have a developed and mature theory with all classicatory questions posed, if not yet answered. In this process structures may be discovered that are not realised. Thus differential topology may tell us about the existence of compact 82-manifolds despite there being no such manifolds realised in the world about us. If that should be so there is still every reason to believe that the claims made by topologists are capable of being true (or false) and thus that the structure actually exists. It is here that the idea that mathematical truths are necessarily true does some work. For the claims about 82-manifolds will be true in all possible worlds even if the manifolds themselves are realised only in some possible worlds. So the mathematicians claims are true and the mathematical structures exist in all possible worlds and yet we do not lose the distinction between our own four-dimensional manifold and the many manifolds that mathematics is able to investigate. Moreover, we are able to make sense of the way in which mathematical discovery often precedes the recognition that the discovered structure
I am certainly not claiming that our observations are theory-dependent or theory-laden, or what have you. Theory is our best guide to what we are observing but it is not capable of altering, or determining, what we see. More particularly, theory provides us with the most reliable classication of what we see and some idea of its causal/explanatory relations to other things. All too often this has been confused with a reverse determination of the perceptual experience itself.
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is actually realised in nature; for the mathematicians job is to investigate structure per se but with a structure characterised there is a greater likelihood that the physicist will recognise that structure in nature. Examples of this are legion: complex numbers and functions, Riemannian Geometry, Fibre Bundles, Morse Theory, Lebesgue integrals, and so on. It is one thing to discover some mathematical structure it is quite another to nd it useful in explaining something about the physical world. Mathematics explores the mathematical structures that exist, while mathematical physics explores the structures that are realised. Mathematical structures often have an explanatory force that can look deceptively like causal explanation. The winds on the Earth can be modelled as a vector eld; yet there is theorem that says it is impossible for there to exist a smooth vector eld on an even-dimensional sphere. Thus there must always be at least one cyclone active somewhere on the Earth.25 We may look for local causal explanations of any particular cyclone, but the existence of a cyclone is to be explained mathematically, as a fact of algebraic topology. It is not causal: if the Earth were the shape of a Torus it would not be so. Likewise, the absolute existence of handed objects is to be explained mathematically. If our space-time manifold is space orientable then there will exist no local or global motion that will turn a left-handed object into a right-handed one. Again, this is not a causal matter, and if space-time were non-space orientable it would not be so.26 A less clear-cut case is provided by the Fermi-Exclusion Principle. The particles that are known as fermions obey Fermi-Dirac statistics, in which the occupancy cells of the probability event space can be occupied by at most one particle. It is this mathematical fact that leads electrons to distribute themselves in shells around the nucleus: they could not be made to crush together for then some would enter an identical state. This exclusion is not causal in the usual sense (it is not brought about by an exchange of energy-momentum) but is rather an artifact of the probability space that is associated with particles of a particular type. In a sense, the mathematics is peculiar to a given sort of particle.27 Mathematical structures are, then, observable and capable of providing
25 The example is from Ian Stewart Concepts of Modern Mathematics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 1568. 26 This has been persuasively and tenaciously argued by Graham Nerlich in The Shape of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1972, and What Space-Time Explains. 27 Admittedly the situation is very odd: it is as though birds obeyed a different mathematics to beasts. We could have give other examples of mathematical structure giving rise to pseudocausal explanations: the Aharanov-Bohm effect, and the non-simultaneous measurability of conjugate variables in quantum mechanics, being just two. The curvature of space-time being the explanation of gravity blurs the distinction yet further.
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explanations of many facts about our world. Plato was right to believe that mathematical entities were necessary forms but wrong to believe that the structures of this world were an imperfect reection of those forms. Rather they are the things themselves. When a form is realised it is the form that we see. The world as we see it is replete with abstract entities. We do not have antennae for picking up things in Platos Heaven, those things are all about us. Mathematical structures so proliferate that we cannot help but nd the mathematics that we invent useful. Let us call the view that the things that we see about us are an imperfect reection of a perfect realm, Platos Error. It hardly needs saying that it has been an extremely inuential error. For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face runs through Augustinian thought and helped shape the Augustinian doctrine of the Fall.28 (It is little wonder that Augustine thought that with only a few modications Plato could have been made into a ChristianSt. Paul had already built Christian theology on a Platonic base.) Once Platos Error had entered the mainstream of Western thought as a cornerstone of Christology and secular metaphysics it ceased to be a rationally assessable doctrine and became a dogma. Even the discovery of the manuscripts of Aristotle, and the subsequent development of Ockhamist Empiricism, did little to dislodge it. Indeed, Ockham simply incorporated the doctrine into his philosophy. For Ockham inferential closure ensured that the realm of the necessary did not reach down to the contingent, while a knowledge of the contingent was never a ladder up to the necessary. But Ockhams philosophy would not have been what it was without its deeper central doctrinethe central doctrine as well of all subsequent Empiricismthat what we observe must be contingent. Ockhams reason for believing this stemmed from a belief in the potentia Dei absoluta but it must surely have been abetted by centuries of Augustinian Platonism, which thinks of the natural world as fallen, corrupt, and utterly dependent on the perfect realm of the Divine. What we see about us could not help but be contingent, for it was continually maintained by God, just as our knowledge of the necessary was only possible with the aid of Divine Illumination. The doctrine of the potentia Dei absoluta could be seen as a consequence of this Augustinian view. Yet the view has continued on to the present day without the aid of theological support and with no additional argument given for it. (I discount the very bad argument that lurks in Hume that we do not observe any necessity in what we seefor, as already remarked, what we observe may be necessary without our
For the story of this absorption see Book II of Jaroslav Pelikans The Origin and Growth of Christian Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press).
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being able to observe that it is necessary.) If any view deserves to be thought of as a Dogma of Empiricism it is this one. Yet it is this doctrine that has rendered mathematics inscrutable for the last seven hundred years. Those who have believed in the objective existence of mathematical entitiesphilosophers such as Kurt Godel, or mathematicians such as Paul Erdoshave had to fall back on Platonic intuition (a secular version of Augustines Divine Illumination) to explain mathematical knowledge. But it is not at all necessary to resort to such explanations. Mathematical structures are a part of our world and our knowledge of them is only a little more complex than a knowledge of the whiteness of snow. We begin with observations of the world about us and progress through abstraction and generalisation to fully developed mathematical theories. The entities and structures that the mathematician deals with are fully real and the theorems proven fully necessary. But mathematics goes beyond those mathematical structures that are actually realised to describe also those that are possible but unrealisedand its claims about such structures are perfectly objective. If our world had been a ve dimensional space-time manifold and the surface of the Earth a three dimensional surfacerather than two dimensionalthen there would not have had to have been at least one cyclone at any given moment. We can now summarise the main features of our proposals on mathematics. Firstly, mathematical truths are necessary truths. Secondly, though all mathematical entities and structures are necessary and exist in every possible world, not all structures and entities are realised in every possible world, including the actual world. Indeed which mathematical structures are realised is probably a contingent matter. Yet it is the realization of mathematical structures in our world that allows us to begin the process of doing mathematics, for it is these that are abstracted by us and then generalised to yield, say, number theory, or group theory, or geometry. I further maintain that some mathematical structures lie close enough to the surface that one may say that they are observable, and that we see the structure itself, just as when we see whiteness we see the universal of whiteness. Thus we see abstract objects. (But it is less shocking to common sense if we just realise that they are not abstract in the way that Platos Error has led us to believe.) Not only are some of these mathematical structures observable they also give rise to distinctive explanations of the facts of our worldthe existence of handedness, say, or the presence of cyclones, or our inability to cross certain bridges without doubling back. When we come to the deepest areas of physics, mathematical explanations nally become hard to differentiate from physical explanations. This account of mathematics is, I believe, true to the phenemenology of the subject (what mathematicians say it is like to do mathematics) and gives
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the best overall account of its historical development. Moreover, I see no other account that will answer Benacerrafs conundrum of how we can make sense of the ontology without making the epistemology intractable. Our account answers those questionswhile laying bare the historical mistake that gave rise to the problem.
6.5
C ONCLUSION
Despite the fact that mathematics really began in the West in the Fourteenth Century with the, so-called, Oxford Calculators of Merton Collegemen such as Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, Walter Burley and Richard Suiseth (Swineshead)Ockham himself seems not to have valued mathematics very highly. Since we know that Ockhamism was very inuential in Oxford through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries we can only wonder at the relations between these two groups. Given our argument above we would expect some of the Mertonians to have had a more Realist attitude toward Universals and that is what we nd, in Walter Burley, at least. We would expect this simply on the grounds that a realist attitude toward mathematical structures is more harmonious with a realist view of simple properties. Indeed we would expect those who were in the mathematical tradition to have been more aligned with the moderate realism of the scientists of the Thirteenth CenturyGrosseteste and Baconthan with the Conceptualist Nominalism of Ockham.29 But my argument in this chapter has been that Ockham, and the Ockhamist Empiricists of later ages, have had no adequate account of necessary truth, in general, despite their relying on it as the sole inferential engine of their philosophy. And the account that they do havethe reduction of necessary truths to analyticitiesis manifestly inadequate to the task. It is for this reason that I say that the view must be false; for if a theory is so impoverished of resources that it is not capable of being self-consistent, then it ought to be rejected. But the view has left other things inexplicable, as well. In fact, Empiricism has made it as difcult for us to understand causal necessities as it has made it for us to understand mathematics and logic. All three are rendered quite mysteriousand in their place the theory offers the inadequate substitutes of the regularity account of causation, analyticitiesor the forms of cognitionand the model-theoretic account of logical truth. When Quine insists that science requires only extensional concepts he is merely restating the
Still, Nominalism has always had an appeal for some scientists, perhaps because of its emphasis on particulars, and perhaps because it seems less obfuscatory than a full-blown Platonism.
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limitations of our inherited Empiricism as though they were an imprimatur. But Quine has never offered any reason to believe that science can be developed in a purely extensional way, and the evidence is surely overwhelming that it cannoteven provability has turned out to be a strongly modal concept. (He may have been right to believe that it would be desirable, because tidier, if it could have been recast in extensional formbut then, ought does not imply is!) Of course Quine has offered arguments to suggest that quantifying into modal contexts can lead to interpretational difculties, but that is a far cry from an argument that modal notions are, as a whole, untenable, or that science is really extensional. Modal notions have their own logic, and their own characteristic inference rules, and we could not do without them without losing much that we currently need. It is a mark of the modal that necessity does not distribute over disjunctions (it is not the case that 2(A B) 2A 2B, as well as that the negation of a necessary truth is impossible and will imply anything. Our belief that certain statements are necessary and others contingent has been one of the guiding doctrines of logic since the time of Aristotle.30 It is, I maintain, a perfectly sound doctrine. The mistake came later in the belief that the world as we observe it, the world of facts, is thoroughly contingent. This view was intended simply to guarantee Gods freedom to act in the world, but in so doing it banished causality, mathematics, and even the logic that it otherwise relied on, to obscurity and oblivion. What is surprising is that its consequences have so completely shaped modern philosophy that we still live within its limitations. It is high time, surely, that we set ourselves free from this Idol of the Tribe.
One frequently gets the impression from philosophers that modal notions arise no earlier than Leibniz and that their resurrection in C. I. Lewis is an historical anomaly. Such a view is completely misleading. In the larger historical scale it is the neglect of modal notions in the rst part of this century that is anomalous.
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THE ART OF NECESSITY:

Deductivism, Modality, and the Limiting of Reason

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Abductive Inference and Invalidity

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The Art of Necessity It is sunny in California

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A BDUCTIVE I NFERENCE AND I NVALIDITY

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52 not be an example? (3)

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The Art of Necessity