Logic and How It Gets That Way

In this challenging and provocative analysis, Dale Jacquette argues that contemporary philosophy labours under a number of historically inherited delusions about the nature of logic and the philosophical significance of certain formal properties of specific types of logical constructions. Exposing some of the key misconceptions about formal symbolic logic and its relation to thought, language, and the world, Jacquette analyzes well-entrenched philosophical doctrines about the nature of logic, including some of the most fundamental but seldom-questioned aspects of elementary propositional and predicate-quantificational logic. He questions conventional ways of thinking about truth functionality, the metaphysics of reference and predication, and the role of a concept of truth in a theory of meaning, among others, and reshapes ideas about traditional logic. In so doing Jacquette is able to offer a new perspective on a number of existing problems in logic and philosophy of logic.