Sulla questione della logica

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the question of the nature and method of logic. The debate between logical exceptionalists and logical anti-exceptionalists was revived by Hjortland (2017). Then, there has been the long-awaited publication of a text by Kripke (2024) that takes up theses he expounded in some seminars he held in 1974, but of which only partial transcriptions were available (Kripke ms. 1; ms. 2). These Kripkean theses on the nature of logic constitute the main object of Padró’s doctoral dissertation (2015), which has greatly contributed to bringing them back into the limelight. Kripke’s (2024) main target is the idea, defended by Putnam (1969), that logical principles can be revised on empirical grounds and that different logics can be adopted in the same way in which scientific theories can be adopted, an idea that can be traced back to Quine (1951). To counter this empiricist perspective on logic, Kripke elaborates an argument aimed at showing the implausibility of the idea that a logical principle can be adopted if one is not already able to infer according to it. Kripke’s argument is analogous to the argument with which Quine himself (1936) attacked the variant of logical conventionalism defended by Carnap (1934). Quine’s argument, in its turn, was analogous to the argument formulated by Carroll (1895) to cast doubt on the possibility of justifying rules of inference. This paper intends to illustrate and discuss some aspects of the debate on the nature of logic and Kripke’s position.