Bruno Jacinto

LANCOG Universidade de Lisboa

Bridge Principles and Purely Epistemic Norms

17 January 2018, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Room Pedro Hispano

Abstract: One influential approach to inquiry on the normativity of logic consists in investigating what are the true bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence with norms for belief. Although the question of whether logic is normative is naturally understood as an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from debates over the correct epistemic norms. In this paper we present a number of consequences for the normativity of logic of the hypothesis that logic is normative in a distinctively epistemic sense, and so that the norms occurring in bridge principles are epistemic norms. We do so by first proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions and then showing some of the predictions of the model theory concerning the implication of bridge principles by distinguished purely epistemic norms. The latter are norms, such as the truth and the knowledge norms of belief, whose formulation does not involve logical notions. They are formulated solely in terms of doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions. We conclude by proposing a minimal theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions. The true bridge principles are at least those that are commitments of this minimal theory. [This is joint work with Claire Field]