Analyticity

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused to talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.

In this paper I defend the view that positing analytic, constitutive connections among concepts best explains certain semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions. Jerry Fodor and Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence offer alternative explanations according to which such intuitions can be explained without positing analyticities. I argue that these alternative explanations fail. As a partial diagnosis of their failure, I suggest that critics have failed to recognize the extent to which a psychologized notion of analyticity must depart from the traditional notion of ‘truth in virtue of meaning alone’.

Quine's 'Two Dogmas of of Empiricism' is generally seen as overturning the epistemological picture of mathematics and the sciences of Carnap. However, I wish to stress how these arguments grew out of arguments not having anything to do with large scale epistemological concerns, but as a reaction to Ruth Barcan Marcus's recent groundbreaking work on quantified modal logic. Quine had thought he could demonstrate that it was impossible to add anything like ordinary quantification to modal logic, but Barcan Marcus does exactly this. In fact, as I will argue, 'Two Dogmas. .. ' can be seen as growing out of a 1947 paper of Quine's where Barcan Marcus is the explicit target. In certain exchanges with Quine, Barcan Marcus is simply demonstrably correct on logical questions. We also see Barcan Marcus defending a consistent and interesting position on matters of ontology and the philosophy of language.

Статья состоит из трех частей. В первой части я
разбираю проблему носорога, поднятую Людвигом
Витгенштейном и Бертраном Расселом. Вторая
часть посвящена доказательству возможности
таких рассуждений, которые были представлены
в первой части. Для этого мне приходится иметь
дело с критикой Куайном различия аналитических
и синтетических суждений. В третьей части я
возвращаюсь к проблеме носорога и предлагаю ее
решение в феноменологическом ключе.


The article consists of three parts. In the first part
I consider the problem of the rhinoceros, raised
by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. The
second part is devoted to the proof of the possibility
of the arguments presented in the first part. For
this, I will come to discuss Quine’s criticism of the
analytic-synthetic distinction. In the third part I will
go back to the problem of rhinoceros and offer a
phenomenological solution to it.

How does Quine, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, fare in the first decades of the twenty-first century? It appears that new developments in metaphysics and epistemology, such as grounding/fundamentality theory and even the ongoing debate on realism in the philosophies of science and mathematics, tend to ignore his work. In contrast to this trend, I believe that Quine's rich and complex ideas have much to contribute to the current debate. Indeed, some of his ideas have a philosophical potential that has yet to be fleshed out and realized. In this paper, I will focus on a cluster of Quinean ideas that are especially fruitful in meeting some of the current challenges, both general methodological challenges and challenges concerning abstract knowledge and ontology. Exploiting the philosophical potential of Quine's ideas is, however, a bit tricky. First, there are inherent tensions both among and within Quine's ideas. Second, Quine's arguments for some of his ideas are orthogonal to their philosophical significance. To make the most of Quine's ideas we have, therefore, to take an active stance: accept some of his ideas and reject others, sort out the different versions of relevant ideas, supply new arguments, sharpen or revise some of the ideas, connect them with non-Quinean ideas, show which new theories and new solutions to problems they lead to, and so on. Clearly, this is a major project. What I will attempt to do here is more modest. I will choose a particular cluster of four Quinean ideas and specific Quinean versions of these ideas, suggest a particular construal and/or development of these ideas, and explain why they are fruitful for contemporary philosophy in general and for dealing with abstract knowledge and ontology in particular. Unavoidably, the project will, at times, pit Quine against Quine. My goal is not to reconcile Quine's ideas but to highlight the fruitfulness of some of his ideas, and this requires fleshing out in full, and magnifying, certain elements of his thought, regardless of their agreement with other elements. In a project of this kind it is important to distinguish between Quine's original ideas and my own construal, development, and use of these ideas. But this task is not straightforward. Different readers (including commentators) differ in their interpretation of Quine, and what I regard as the original version * I would like to thank two anonymous referees as well as Frederique Janssen-Lauret for very helpful comments.

In this article I first sketch what I take to be two Quinean arguments for the continuity of philosophy with science. After examining Wittgenstein’s reasons for not accepting the arguments, I conclude that they are ineffective on Wittgenstein’s assumptions. Next, I ask three related questions: (a) Where do Quine’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophical views essentially diverge? (b) Did Wittgenstein have an argument against the continuity of science with philosophy? (c) Did Wittgenstein believe until the end of his philosophical career that scientific results are philosophically irrelevant? It will be seen that all three questions are related with Wittgenstein’s distinction between conceptual and factual issues. I conclude that the opposition between Quinean philosophy and Wittgensteinian philosophy is genuine.

Merely conceptual knowledge, not based on specific sensitivity to the referential domain, is not seriously a priori. It is argued here that it is either weakly and superficially a priori, or downright a posteriori. This is done starting from the fact that many of our definitions (or concepts) are recognizably empirically established, and pointing out that recognizably empirical grounding yields superficial a priority. Further, some (first-order) concept analyzing propositions are empirically false about their referents and thus empirically refutable. Therefore, our empirical definitions (or concepts) are fallible and empirically revisable: they can turn out to be incorrect about the intended satisfiers of the concept defined, and their concept analyzing propositions to be false. Now, empirical revisability is incompatible with strong apriority (and entails at best a weak a priority or a posteriority). The result is quite shocking: analyticity does not entail a priority.

By studying the grammaticalization of Romanian auxiliaries from a diachronic Romanian and a comparative Romance perspective, this paper argues that the output of grammaticalization is a predictable pattern in a given language, i.e. a language-specific parametric choice. Specifically, in the passage from old to modern Romanian we observe that a number of emergent periphrastic structures (innovations in contrast to Latin) died out, against the well-known transition from syntheticity to analyticity in the development of the Romance languages (i.e. the profusion of auxiliary structures in this particular situation). In order to account for what appears to be a diachronic paradox, we show that, under a rich cartographic structure of the IP, Romanian auxiliaries systematically grammaticalize as exponents of the category mood; the auxiliaries of the now-defunct periphrases have a richer feature matrix (and this accounts for their demise). The MoodP is also the target of synthetic (finite) verb movement, hence Romanian is, (micro)parametrically, a mood-oriented language, a hypothesis which accounts for the particular diachrony of periphrastic constructions in this language, as well as other properties.

Among contemporary philosophers, there is widespread (but not universal) consensus that begging the question is a grave argumentative flaw. However, there is presently no satisfactory analysis of what this flaw consists of. Here, I defend a notion of question-begging in terms of analyticity. In particular, I claim that an argument begs the question just in case its conclusion is an analytic part of the conjunction of its premises.

It is commonplace in cognitive science that concepts are individuated in
terms of the roles they play in the cognitive lives of thinkers, a view that Jerry Fodor
has recently dubbed ‘Concept Pragmatism’. Quinean critics of Pragmatism
have long argued that it founders on its commitment to the analytic/synthetic distinction, since without such a distinction there is plausibly no way to distinguish
constitutive from non-constitutive roles in cognition. This paper considers Fodor’s
empirical arguments against analyticity, and in particular his arguments against
lexical decomposition and definitions, and argues that Concept Pragmatists have
two viable options with respect to them. First, Concept Pragmatists can confront
them head-on, and argue that they do not show that lexical items are semantically
primitive or that lexical concepts are internally unstructured. Second, Pragmatists
may accept that these arguments show that lexical concepts are atomic, but insist
that this need not entail that Pragmatism is false. For there is a viable version of
Concept Pragmatism that does not take lexical items to be semantically structured or
lexical concepts to be internally structured. Adopting a version of Pragmatism that
takes meaning relations to be specified by inference rules, or meaning postulates,
allows one to accept the empirical arguments in favor of Concept Atomism, while at
the same time deny that such arguments show that there are no analyticities. The
paper concludes by responding to Fodor’s recent objection that such a version of
Concept Pragmatism has unhappy consequences concerning the relation between
concept constitution and concept possession.

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused of talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.

A B S T R A C T. Whereas for many truths, truthmaker theory offers a plausible account , there are certain kinds of truths for which the theory seems less helpful: principally (though not exclusively) analytic truths. I argue that an augmentation of the usual idea of truthmakers can solve this problem. Moreover that once solved we are able to look afresh at the nature of mathematics, whether conceived as analytic or synthetic, necessary or contingent, and reduce the ontological options. I also argue that it was Quine's reformulation of analyticity, deployed in place of the correct Leibniz-Wolff-Kant account, that led to his holistic account of knowledge and pragmatist account of scientific revisability.

Wer eine philosophische Bedeutungstheorie aufstellen möchte, sollte u.a. den Begriff der Synonymie (Bedeutungsgleichheit) zu klären versuchen. Ein Hauptproblem für dies bedeutungstheoretische Projekt hängt mit dem Holismus der Quine/Duhem-These zusammen: Dieser holistischen These zufolge findet die Überprüfung unserer Behauptungen über die Welt nicht auf der Ebene des einzelnen Satzes statt, sondern auf der Ebene ganzer Theorien (Abschnitt I). Wenn wir z.B. aus Davidsons Bedeutungskonzeption Aufschlüsse über Synonymie
extrahieren wollen, dann stolpern wir über Quines Holismus. Falls
Davidsons Theorie gar nicht für Synonymie aufkommen möchte, ist diese Theorie zumindest unvollständig (Abschnitt II). Dies Verdikt trifft natürlich nur zu, wenn es überhaupt möglich ist, im Rahmen von Quines Holismus einen Begriff der Synonymie einzuführen. Dass dies möglich ist, zeige ich (gegen Quine) im Abschnitt III, indem ich verifikationalistische und falsifikationalistische Theoriestücke zu einer neuen empiristischen Bedeutungstheorie ausbaue, in deren Rahmen
sinnvoll über Synonymie gesprochen werden kann. Im Abschnitt IV wird dies positive Resultat zur Verteidigung des Begriffs des analytischen Satzes herangezogen.

Dieser Hypertext bietet die leicht überarbeitete Version eines Aufsatzes, der in den Facta Philosophica 4, Heft 2 (Oktober 2002), pp. 239-270, erschienen ist. Er unterscheidet sich nicht inhaltlich, wohl aber formal von der gedruckten Version -- und zwar nicht nur in Layout, Paginierung und Rechtschreibung, sondern auch durch eingebaute Querverbindungen zwischen Fußnotenzeichen im Haupttext und zugehörigen Anmerkungen.

Lanier Anderson has recently argued that Kant’s account of analyticity can be understood by appealing to the ontological hierarchy of things. Whilst I agree with Anderson that containment is central to Kant’s conception of analyticity, I shall argue against him that the structure of a concept can be fully grasped by the logical relations that the concept’s marks have to each other. On the view that I defend, a concept a contains another concept b if and only if a logically entails b. In the course of my paper, I will also address seeming difficulties stemming from the relation of concepts to the world, or concept identity and scientific progress.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of “containment,” a second time in terms of “identity,” a third time in terms of the explicative–ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of “cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction.” The paper asks: Which of these characterizations—or apparent characterizations—best captures Kant’s conception of analyticity in the first Critique? It suggests: “the second.” It argues, further, that Kant’s distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject–predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction’s meaning, its epistemology, and its tenability.

I discuss Charles Pigden’s paper ‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’ and ask whether theories of meaning whose primary purpose is to discredit rival philosophies as meaningless necessarily employ artificially narrow conceptions of meaningfulness.  In the course of my argument I ask whether the colloquial-rhetorical use of words like ‘nonsense’ and ‘meaningless’ has made it difficulty for philosophers to see just how novel and radical their own accusations of talking nonsense are.

Analyticity theorists, as I will call them, endorse the doctrine of analyticity in ontology: if some truth φ analytically entails the existence of certain things, then a theory that contains φ but does not claim that those things exist is no more ontologically parsimonious than a theory that also claims that they exist. Suppose, for instance, that the existence of a table in a certain location is analytically entailed by the existence and features of certain particles in that location. The doctrine implies that the table’s existence requires nothing more of the world than that those particles exist and bear the features in question. Analyticity theorists have alleged that this idea may be used to defend controversial existence claims against a battery of objections. I argue that this style of defense fails, because the doctrine faces counter-examples. An existence claim may be analytically entailed by some truth and still report a substantial further fact. These counter-examples suggest a picture according to which the theoretical utility of analyticity in the investigation of extra-linguistic reality is virtually nil.

In Boghossian's 1997 paper, 'Analyticity' he presented an account of a priori knowledge of basic logical principles as available by inference from knowledge of their role in determining the meaning of the logical constants by implicit definition together with knowledge of the meanings so-determined that we possess through our privileged access to meaning. Some commentators (e.g. BonJour (1998), Glüer (2003), Jenkins (2008)) have objected that if the thesis of implicit definition on which he relies were true, knowledge of the meaning of the constants would presuppose knowledge of the very logical principles knowledge of which the account purports to explain. A consequence would seem to be that implicit definition is incompatible with privileged access. I argue that whilst it is possible for Boghossian to defend against these objections the form of argument he proposes does exhibit a subtle form of question begging such that it exhibits a transmission of warrant-failure.

Logical form has semantic import.
Logical sentences (GG: Greeks are
Greeks) and their synonym interceptions
(GH: Greeks are Hellenes) state
the same fact but different truths with
different explanations. Terms retain
objectual reference but its role in explaining
truth is preempted by syntax
or synonymy. Church’s Test exposes
puzzles. QMi sentences (GmG:
‘Greeks’ means Greeks), and QTi
sentences (p≡it is true that p≡“p” is
true) are metalogical necessities,
true by syntax. Their interceptions
alter syntax and modality, yielding
contingent truths (GmH: ‘Greeks’
means Hellenes, HmG: ‘Hellenes’
means Greeks). Meta-logical translation
preserves syntax (GmG:
‘Greichen’ bedeutet Greichen), not
necessarily objectual reference.
Metalogical syntax secures truth by
self-referential quotational indexing
that identifies quotational referent
with an intrasentential replica.

I defend the thesis that Kantian analytic judgments are about objects (as opposed to concepts) against two challenges raised by recent scholars. First, can it accommodate cases like “A two-sided polygon is two-sided”, where no object really falls under the subject-concept as Kant sees it? Second, is it compatible with Kant’s view that analytic judgments make no claims about objects in the world and that we can know them to be true without going beyond the given concepts? I address these challenges in two steps. First, given Kant’s distinction between an object in general = x from an object of sensible intuition, I argue that analytic judgments are about objects in the former sense, no matter whether the purported objects can be given in our intuition. Second, using Kant’s method of representing certain logical relations of concepts with such figures as circles, I construct a model to show that analytic truths are truths about objects in general = x and yet can be determined solely by the intensional relation between the given concepts plus certain Kantian-logical laws. Analytic truths are thus shown as formal in the Kantian sense that they do not presuppose the purported objects as givable in our intuition. This account of the formality of analytic truths captures Kant’s diagnosis of the Leibnizian illusion that we can make material claims about the world by analytically true judgments.

I am concerned with epistemic closure—the phenomenon in which some knowledge requires other knowledge. In particular, I defend a version of the closure principle in terms of analyticity; if an agent S knows that p is true, then S knows that all analytic parts of p are true as well. After targeting the relevant notion of analyticity, I argue that this principle accommodates intuitive cases and possesses the theoretical resources to avoid the preface paradox. I close by arguing that contextualists who maintain that knowledge attributions are closed within—but not between—linguistic contexts are tacitly committed to this principle’s truth

Analytische Sätze, die kraft Definition wahr sein sollen, schaden der Naturwissenschaft oder trivialisieren ihren Fortschritt: So lautet einer der Kritikpunkte, die Quine in seinem Feldzug gegen die Unterscheidung zwischen synthetischen und analytischen Sätzen vorgebracht hat. Sie schaden, so Quine, weil sie nicht revidiert werden dürfen und damit die Wahlfreiheit beim Theorienwandel über Gebühr einschränken. (Hätte sich z.B. Einstein vom analytischen Status der newtonischen Impulsdefinition beeindrucken lassen, so hätte er die Relativitätstheorie nicht formulieren können). Oder sie trivialisieren den Fortschritt, weil sich durch Preisgabe analytischer Sätze bloß die Sprache ändert – und wie soll uns eine Änderung der Begriffe vorwärtsbringen? Um dieser Herausforderung zu begegnen, müssen wir Sprach- und Theorienwandel auseinanderdividieren. Im Falle einer wissenschaftlichen Revolution findet beides gleichzeitig statt. Trotzdem kann man die Beobachtungskonsequenzen der neuen Theorie (mithilfe des Ramsey-Satzes) mit denen der alten vergleichen; und mithilfe des Carnap-Satzes kann man den jeweiligen analytischen Anteil der beiden Theorien extrahieren. Es war Carnaps Fehler, diesen Schachzug zur Definition des Begriffs vom analytischen Satz heranzuziehen. Umgekehrt wird ein Schuh draus: Mithilfe einer holismustauglichen Definition von "analytisch" lässt sich zeigen, dass die Carnap-Sätze analytisch sind. Hier die Grundidee der fraglichen Definition: Ein Satz ist analytisch, wenn sich der empirische Gehalt keiner Gesamttheorie dadurch ändert, dass man ihr den Satz einpflanzt.

The goal of this paper is to consider how the notion of analyticity can be dealt with in model-theoretical terms. The standard approach to possible-world semantics allows us to define logical truth and necessity, but analyticity is considerably more difficult to account for. To explain this difficulty, we will first give a simplified sketch of possible-world semantics.1 After defining necessity and logical truth, we will describe how a two-dimensional variant of that approach has been used to define the notion of a priori. The subsequent section is focused on analyticity. As will be suggested, the source of the difficulty in defining that notion lies in the received model-theoretical conception of a language interpretation. Intuitively, analyticity amounts to truth in virtue of meaning alone, i.e. truth solely in virtue of the interpretation of linguistic expressions. However, the received conception of a linguistic interpretation as a mapping from language to a model frame makes it...

The analytic/synthetic distinction can be conceived from two points of view: from within or from without; from the perspective of one's own language or from the perspective of the language of others. From without, the central question is which sentences of a foreign language are to be classified as analytic. From within, by contrast, the question concerning the synthetic and the analytic acquires a normative dimension: which sentences am I not permitted to reject—if I want to avoid talking nonsense? Both perspectives on analytic sentences do not mutually exclude but supplement and illuminate each other. In "Two Dogmas", Quine's criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction comes from within, whereas in Word and Object, Quine repeats his earlier criticism from without. His criticism is directed against Carnap's views on our understanding of theoretical terms. I challenge Quine's criticism in both of its versions and provide two definitions for analyticity that are immune to Quine's arguments. Using the first of these definitions (the one from without) I try to show how it is possible to distinguish (genuine) belief revision from linguistic change—even in case of a scientific revolution.

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is freely available in Inquiry, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1787222.

‘Open texture’ is the property of concepts or terms that they are not fully defined with regard to unexpected questions. Even though it is a ubiquitous phenomenon, there is no consensus on which concepts are subject to open texture. I present three equivalent definitions of open texture, connecting the concept to the notions of analyticity and algebraicity. I show that the claim that a concept is open-textured is equivalent to the claim that the class of analytic sentences using it can be changed, which in turn is equivalent to the claim that its definition is not algebraic. While this equivalence is interesting on its own, with it I can show the extent of open texture: all concepts that are not algebraically defined mathematical concepts are open textured. Finally, I show that this has unfortunate consequences for attempts to provide a foundation of mathematics.

I discuss Charles Pigden’s paper ‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’ and ask whether theories of meaning whose primary purpose is to discredit rival philosophies as meaningless necessarily employ artificially narrow conceptions of meaningfulness.  In the course of my argument I ask whether the colloquial-rhetorical use of words like ‘nonsense’ and ‘meaningless’ has made it difficulty for philosophers to see just how novel and radical their own accusations of talking nonsense are.

According to the so-called metaphysical conception of analyticity, analytic truths are true in virtue of meaning (or content) alone and independently of (extralinguistic) facts. Quine and Boghossian have tried to present a conclusive argument against the metaphysical conception of analyticity. In effect, they tried to show that the metaphysical conception inevitably leads into a highly implausible view about the truthmakers of analytic truths. We would like to show that their argument fails, since it relies on an ambiguity of the notion of ‘independence of (extralinguistic) facts’. If one distinguishes between variation independence and existence independence, the unwelcome view about the truthmakers of analytic truths no longer follows. Thus, there is at best a challenge, but no conclusive argument. The door to the metaphysical conception of analyticity is still open.1

Analyticity is a bogus explanatory concept, and is so even granting genuine synonomy. Definitions can't explain the truth of a statement, let alone its necessity and/or our a priori knowledge of it. The illusion of an explanation is revealed by exposing diverse confusions: e.g., between nominal, conceptual and real definitions, and correspondingly between notational, conceptual, and objectual readings of alleged analytic truths, and between speaking a language and operating a calculus. The putative explananda of analyticity are (alleged) truths about essential properties. Real definitions (a la Socrates) are the (alleged) explananda, not the explanans of analyticity. Their truth can be explained neither by conceptual definitions (a la Kant), nor by nominal definitions (a la Frege). The Quinean assault on synonomy is unsuccessful and in any case misplaced, because analyticity turns on the explanatory import of synonomy, not its existence. Synonym substitution in a logical truth cannot yield a necessary truth for it doesn't preserve logical form. Self-identity statements (for properties and/or individuals) differ in logical form from alter-identity statements.

In his paper ‘Analyticity’, Boghossian defends the notion of analyticity against Quine's forceful criticism. Boghossian's main contention is that non-factualism about analyticity of the kind advocated by Quine entails scepticism about meaning – and this shows that Quine's argument can’t be right. In other words, Boghossian presents us with a reductio of Quine's thesis. In this paper, I present an argument to the effect that Boghossian's attempted reductio fails. In the course of making this case, I will suggest that Quine's argument, properly interpreted, has a more limited scope than is generally believed and that it leaves the door open to non-Platonistic accounts of meaning.

Η θεωρία της συνέπειας είναι ένας κλάδος της λογικής που μελετά ως ξεχωριστό θέμα τις σχέσεις εξάρτησης μεταξύ προτάσεων. Έτσι, κατά κάποιον τρόπο, η θεωρία της συνέπειας είναι γενικότερη από τη συλλογιστική. Στηρίζεται σε παλιά θεμέλια, αλλά ως ξεχωριστό λογικό πεδίο γεννήθηκε γύρω στο 1300. Η πιο δημιουργική φάση της ήταν το 1320–1340 (Burley, Ockham, Buridan). Μετέπειτα λογικοί την επεξεργάστηκαν και διατηρούσε μια καθιερωμένη θέση στα λογικά βιβλία. Η συνέπεια (στη λατινική γλώσσα consequentia, «επακόλουθο», «αποτέλεσμα») είναι ένα – συχνά υποχρεωτικό, αλλά τουλάχιστον δυνατό – συμπέρασμα. Ανάλογα με το περιβάλλον, είναι πιο συχνές πιο συγκεκριμένες εκφράσεις. “Συνέπεια” σημαίνει επίσης τη αποτελεσματική ορθότητα των ενεργειών ενός ατόμου. Η αντίθετη συμπεριφορά αναφέρεται επομένως ως “ασυνεπής”, για παράδειγμα, εάν παραλειφθεί μια ανακοινωμένη ενέργεια. Μια «συνέπεια» από το προκείμενο (ή τα προκείμενα) σε ένα επακόλουθο μπορεί να θεωρηθεί καλύτερα ως ένα έγκυρο συμπέρασμα. Σύμφωνα με τον τυπικό ορισμό της θεωρίας, μια συνέπεια ισχύει όταν το προκείμενο δεν είναι συμβατό με το αντίθετο του επακόλουθου. Οι λογικοί αναζήτησαν γενικούς κανόνες για τέτοιες σχέσεις. Μερικοί κανόνες ήταν «αποδεικτικοί-θεωρητικοί», δηλαδή, μια συνέπεια ακολουθείται από άλλες συνέπειες. Ορισμένοι κανόνες αφορούσαν την εγκυρότητα ενός τύπου συμπεράσματος. Πολλά από τα θεωρήματα της προτασιακής λογικής αποδείχτηκαν σε αυτό το πλαίσιο και σύντομα προστέθηκαν τροπικές εμπεριστατώσεις.