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In the conference “Las lógicas y las cosas “ (2014), Alberto Moretti argues that approaches that focus on the phenomenon of interpretation to account for the problem of meaning have a problem, namely, they do not support the transcendental conditions that make significance possible. Thus, in the context of interpretation, distinguishing others as speakers involves the possibility of distinguishing others as related objects in the (non-linguistic) world. Not only is this distinction possible because specific logical principles expose the basic structure for discourse and thought but they also expose the elementary structure of the world or reality (Moretti, 2016, p.1). In other words, the logical forms or the logical principles that structure our language are also principles of things (cf. Moretti: 1:23:14). This argument can be considered a transcendental argument as it establishes, through pointing out certain necessary conditions, the intimate world-language connection that accounts for significance, and as it insinuates itself as a response to the problem of the external world (cf. Moretti, 2014: 1:39:13).I propose discussing the scope of this argument from the idea of language autonomy that Wittgenstein develops in On Certainty, which entails an alternative dissolutional strategy against the skeptical challenge. To account for this strategy, I will focus on the distinction between logical and empirical propositions. I will also analyze the distinction show-say that, in its relation with the notion of “forms of life”, allows for illuminating aspects of its praxiological focus on language. Thus, I will defend an approach that does not omit but rejects the possibility of an external (transcendental) point of view both to account for language and to respond to the skeptic.

In this paper I argue that the notion of interpretation presented by Alberto Moretti in “La unidad proposicional” (and other texts) poses some philosophical and metaphilosophical problems. After presenting the key ideas that characterize the interpretative practice as Moretti describes it, I criticize its incompatibility with naturalism —one that understands interpretational practices in terms of natural capacities with phylogenetic and ontogenetic histories— and Moretti’s commitment to ineffabilism regarding the foundations of interpretative practices. I argue that if we abandon the idea that intentional capacities always involve conceptual content, a central commitment of Moretti’s interpretationist strategy, we can make room for a soft naturalistic understanding of interpretational capacities that is also pluralistic about the conditions for a practice to be linguistic and non-ineffabilist about its origins.

En este trabajo analizo la propuesta de Moretti (2016) según la cual las verdades lógicas tienen dos aspectos. Por un lado, las verdades lógicas son constitutivas del vínculo entre lenguaje y mundo, por ende, siempre es necesario algún sistema lógico. Por otro lado, las verdades de una teoría lógica específica son tan revisables como las verdades de cualquier otra teoría científica, sea formal o empírica. Propongo que dicha propuesta está relacionada inevitablemente con dos cuestiones cuyas posibles respuestas ponen en duda la posibilidad de revisar o cambiar una lógica. La primera cuestión es acerca del rasgo que distintas nociones de consecuencia comparten, el cual les permitiría desempeñar un rol constitutivo en la relación lenguaje-mundo. La segunda cuestión apunta a la necesidad de precisar los criterios que conducen a la sustitución de una lógica.

I propose that Quine’s Carrollian argument in “Truth by Convention” does not refute an especially genuine variety of conventionalism about logic. I also argue that the basic Carrollian lesson about conventionalism is that the introduction of accepted conventions or theses about what is logically correct cannot by itself create the corresponding inferential dispositions. Based on my discussion of the Carrollian regress, I finally indicate that there are at least certain Carrollian limits to the way in which the “logical laws” could be “replaced” and, contrary to some of Alberto Moretti’s considerations, that there are also other not strictly Carrollian limits to the replaceability of logical laws.

Se exponen algunas de las reflexiones de Alberto Moretti acerca del carácter trascendental de la lógica, poniendo especial atención en cierta evolución que parece haber en sus ideas sobre este asunto entre la publicación en el año 2006 de “Lógica y semántica” y “la Lógica y la trama de las cosas”, del año 2016. Se presentan los rasgos más generales de una versión del naturalismo lógico que podría sobrevivir a los cuestionamientos trascendentalistas de Moretti.

In this paper I review various conceptions of logic. I study the scope and the limitations of the dominant conception in at least the first half of the XXth. century. I try to show the limitations of the notion associated with the concept of consequence captured by classical logical formalism, which is related to the program of the foundation of mathematics. Those limitations are pointed out not only with respect to the intuitive notions of logic but also with respect to the different associated disciplines (in particular computer sciences, psychology, cognitive sciences and the theory of argumentation). I argue that the characterization of logic offered by A. Moretti offers a broader and overcoming view of logic.

Alberto Moretti “La lógica y la trama de las cosas” presents and defends a conception of logic according to which there are logical principles that structure language and, consequently, the world. This way of understanding logic offers an answer to the problem of its normativity, at the same time that it dissolves the problem of its justification. In this work, I critically analyze this view of logic and propose an alternative conception that vindicates the legitimacy of both problems and gives them a satisfactory solution.