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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'works' and 'Tarski on Truth and Logical Consequence'

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5 ideas

5. Theory of Logic / A. Overview of Logic / 4. Pure Logic
There is no clear boundary between the logical and the non-logical [Tarski]
     Full Idea: No objective grounds are known to me which permit us to draw a sharp boundary between the two groups of terms, the logical and the non-logical.
     From: Alfred Tarski (works [1936]), quoted by Alan Musgrave - Logicism Revisited §3
     A reaction: Musgrave is pointing out that this is bad news if you want to 'reduce' something like arithmetic to logic. 'Logic' is a vague object.
5. Theory of Logic / B. Logical Consequence / 4. Semantic Consequence |=
Logical consequence is when in any model in which the premises are true, the conclusion is true [Tarski, by Beall/Restall]
     Full Idea: Tarski's 1936 definition of logical consequence is that in any model in which the premises are true, the conclusion is true too (so that no model can make the conclusion false).
     From: report of Alfred Tarski (works [1936]) by JC Beall / G Restall - Logical Consequence 3
     A reaction: So the general idea is that a logical consequence is distinguished by being unstoppable. Sounds good. But then we have monotonic and non-monotonic logics, which (I'm guessing) embody different notions of consequence.
Logical consequence: true premises give true conclusions under all interpretations [Tarski, by Hodges,W]
     Full Idea: Tarski's definition of logical consequence (1936) is that in a fully interpreted formal language an argument is valid iff under any allowed interpretation of its nonlogical symbols, if the premises are true then so is the conclusion.
     From: report of Alfred Tarski (works [1936]) by Wilfrid Hodges - Model Theory 3
     A reaction: The idea that you can only make these claims 'under an interpretation' seems to have had a huge influence on later philosophical thinking.
5. Theory of Logic / B. Logical Consequence / 5. Modus Ponens
Modus ponens is one of five inference rules identified by the Stoics [Chrysippus, by Devlin]
     Full Idea: Modus ponens is just one of the five different inference rules identified by the Stoics.
     From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Keith Devlin - Goodbye Descartes Ch.2
     A reaction: Modus ponens strikes me as being more like a definition of implication than a 'rule'. Implication is what gets you from one truth to another. All the implications of a truth must also be true.
5. Theory of Logic / D. Assumptions for Logic / 2. Excluded Middle
Every proposition is either true or false [Chrysippus, by Cicero]
     Full Idea: We hold fast to the position, defended by Chrysippus, that every proposition is either true or false.
     From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 38
     A reaction: I am intrigued to know exactly how you defend this claim. It may depend what you mean by a proposition. A badly expressed proposition may have indeterminate truth, quite apart from the vague, the undecidable etc.