MacCollsElusivePluralism-JohnWoods.docVIP

DRAFT MacColl’s Elusive Pluralism John Woods Department of Philosophy University of British Columbia and Group on Logic and Computation King’s College London Presented to The Hugh MacColl Centenary Conference, Boulogne-sur-Mer, France October, 2009. MacColl’s Elusive Pluralism “The writer of this paper would like to contribute his humble share as a peacemaker between the two sciences, both of which he profoundly respects and admires. He would like to deprecate all idea of aggression or conquest ( Why should not logicians and mathematicians unite ( under some common appellation?” Hugh MacColl, “Symbolical reasoning I” (1880). “In Logic, there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build his own logic, i.e. his own form of language, as he wishes.” Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (1934/1937) “We are pluralists about logical consequence (. We hold that there is more than one sense in which arguments may be deductively valid, that these senses are equally good, and equally deserving of the name deductive validity.” JC Beall and Greg Restall, “Defending logical pluralism” (2001) ABSTRACT: MacColl is the recent subject of three interesting theses. One is that he is the probable originator of pluralism in logic. The other is that his pluralism expresses an underlying instrumentalism. The third is that the first two help explain his post-1909 neglect. Although there are respects in which he is both a pluralist and an instrumentalist, I will suggest that it is difficult to find in MacColl’s writings a pluralism which honours the threefold attribution of having been originated by him, having been rooted in an instrumentalism adapted to logic, and occasion of his neglect. KEY WORDS: conceptual adequacy, conditionals, conventionalism, instrumentalism, logic, material implication, mathematics, mathematical adequacy, pluralism, realism, strict implication. 1. The