Quine's challenge and Logical Pluralism
Antonio Negro

Abstract:

A number of deviant deductive systems have been proposed which differ
in some way from classical logic. An influential philosophical
interpretation of plurality in logic has been developed by Quine, who
introduced the meaning-change thesis, summarized in his "Change of
logic, change of subject".
We show that if Quine is right about the consequences of his thesis,
then the systems of classical logic can only be rejected as
unscientific or meaningless, and not refined as inadequate. We show
that there are good reasons both for and against his thesis.
We argue against Local Pluralism, on the basis that it is incompatible
with the universality and normativity of logic. We then assess Beall
and Restall’s logical pluralism, which is shown to be not sufficiently
fine-grained in that it leads to relativism in logic.
We finally introduce Dalla Pozza’s Global Pluralism, where deviant
logics are viewed as dealing with specific pragmatic meta-concepts,
which are distinct from the semantic concept of truth as captured by
classical logic, while presupposing it. We show that Dalla Pozza’s
analysis corroborates the meaning-change thesis without leading to the
monistic outcome of Quine.