Synthese

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02510-4

Requiem for logical nihilism, or: Logical nihilism annihilated

Bogdan Dicher1

Received: 3 June 2019 / Accepted: 7 December 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract
Logical nihilism is the view that the relation of logical consequence is empty: there
are counterexamples to any putative logical law. In this paper, I argue that the nihilist
threat is illusory. The nihilistic arguments do not work. Moreover, the entire project
is based on a misguided interpretation of the generality of logic.

Keywords Logical nihilism · Logical consequence · Generality

A spectre is haunting the philosophy of logic: the spectre of logical nihilism, being
the thesis that the logical consequence relation is empty. At first glance, this doctrine
is both striking and plausible; on closer examination, it turns out to be neither. It is,
therefore, truly a spectre that is haunting us: an insubstantial creature that poses little
threat. My aim in this paper is to report on the reasons why logical nihilism gave up
… the spectre.

1 Preliminaries

In the past decade or so, several views have been gathered under the label ‘logi-
cal nihilism’—see Estrada-González (2012), Franks (2016), Cotnoir (2019), Zardini
(2019) for various articulations of nihilistic ideas. This paper is concerned with a ver-
sion of nihilism according to which the logical consequence relation is empty (Russell
2017, 2018).
This kind of nihilist takes to heart two observations. The first is that natural language
has enough resources to provide counterexamples to the simplest putatively logically
valid inference. The second is that the means by which these possible counterexamples
are usually managed—amounting by and large to constraining the space of adequate
logical interpretations—is misguided, being tantamount to ‘monster barring’, to use
Lakatos’s apt phrase (Lakatos 1976).

B Bogdan Dicher
bdicher@me.com

1 LanCog Group, Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

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Needless to say, there being (putative) counterexamples to logically valid infer-

ences does not mean that there are no cases in which these inferences hold. It just
means that they do not hold in every case and so do not hold logically. Ultimately
logic gets into trouble because it is (usually taken to be) general: there are no excep-
tions to its laws, which apply across every domain of inquiry, irrespective of the
particular features of that domain. However, this kind of generality is fragile. If
there are no legitimate constraints that could be imposed to safeguard it, it is unten-
able.
Thus, in the final analysis the problem of logical nihilism is the problem of
the generality of logic. Any attempt to dispel the nihilistic threat must provide an
account of how the generality of logic can be reconciled with the richness of the
(material) inferential phenomena that can affect logic and logicality. I will eventu-
ally sketch such an account. However, the path to this is somewhat arduous and it
involves spending some time analysing in detail the merits of the nihilistic argu-
ments.
The plan of the paper is as follows: In Sect. 2 I present the main nihilistic
tenets and re-construct the nihilist’s general argumentative strategy. In Sect. 3 I
argue that the technical machinery that drives nihilism forward does not, in fact,
yield the desired outcome: an empty consequence relation. What it does deliver is
an impoverished relative—minimalism—which is best understood as a qualitative
scarcity of valid arguments. In Sect. 4 I argue that minimalism is a poor substi-
tute for nihilism. Despite this, I allow that there are phenomena that threaten some
conceptions of logicality. I defuse these threats in Sect. 5, where I discuss an alter-
native account of ‘logical laws’ qua inhabitants of the consequence relation, contest
Russell having excluded them from the range of plausible candidates, and explore
what this means for nihilism. Thus, I will argue that logics are best identified with
metainferential consequence relations. On this conception, it is possible to asso-
ciate Tarskian, i.e., reflexive, monotonic, and transitive consequence relations even
to substructural logics. Building on (all) this, in Sect. 6 I tackle what I believe to
be the real source of the pull of the nihilistic position: a certain misguided under-
standing of the generality of logic. Having exposed the underlying error, I sketch
an account of the generality of logic that avoids it. I conclude in the final sec-
tion.

2 Logical nihilism in a nutshell

The central nihilistic claim, that the consequence relation is empty, could be restated
as the claim that ‘there is no pairing of premises and conclusion such that the second is
a logical consequence of the first’ (Russell 2018, p. 311).1 Roughly, a sentence A is a
logical consequence of a set of sentences X , symbolically X  A, if and only if there

1 See also Russell (2017). Russell is not the first proponent of this form of nihilism, which is at least an
implicit consequence of Mortensen’s possibilism (Mortensen 1989); cf. Estrada-González (2012). However,
for specificity’s sake, I will focus on Russell’s arguments.

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is no way of falsifying A while verifying all the sentences in the set X .2 This could be
equivalently expressed by saying that there are no logically valid inferences. That is,
for every inference from X to A, symbolically X : A, there is a counterexample to it.
Derivatively, the nihilist doctrine could be paraphrased as the claim that there are no
‘laws of logic’, where these are understood as statements asserting the logical validity
of entities such as modus ponens, disjunctive syllogism, etc. rendered schematically.
(Often, I shall use this locution in a broader sense, covering both claims of consequence
and inferences proper. The context will clarify which I have in mind.)
This is so because according to the nihilist:
Premiss 1: Logic is completely general, applicable across the entire range of
domains of inquiry.
Generality is often taken as a mark of logicality (cf. infra, Sect. 6); the view, however,
is not uncontroversial. Philosophers have at least considered the alternative hypothesis.
To give but two examples, Haack (1978, p. 223) identifies a kind of logical pluralist
that allows that different logics may hold for different ‘areas of discourse’. More
recently, Shapiro (2014, p. 63) explicitly defends the more radical thesis that ‘logical
consequence is relative to structure’. (See also Wyatt and Payette (2019).) Despite
this, generality is widely uphold as a property of logical consequence. That much
is enough to endow Premiss 1 with a high degree of prima facie plausibility. I will
return to it in Sect. 6. Right now, it is more significant to observe that this tenet is
apt to receive a precise technical formulation. Ceteris paribus, it amounts to requiring
logical consequence relations to be closed under substitution (see infra, Sect. 3).
The nihilist also claims that natural language presents us with an embarrassment
of riches: drawing on its resources, it is possible to build counterexamples to every
putative logical law. So the second nihilistic premiss is:
Premiss 2: There are sufficient logically pertinent linguistic-cum-ratiocinative phe-
nomena to provide counterexamples to every putatively logically valid
inference.
In Russell’s words:
for every principle of the form [X  A] there is an interpretation of the non-
logical expressions in [X ] and [A] such that every member of [X ] comes out
true but [ A] does not. (Russell 2018, p. 313, with notational changes).
Russell works with an interpretational semantics in which the models for one’s logic
represent different meanings being assigned to the non-logical vocabulary. Although
it may make a difference in a more general setting (see Russell (2019) and also
Etchemendy (1999), Etchemendy (2008)), the choice of semantics will not play much
of a role subsequently. For the most part, I shall confine my remarks to propositional
logics, and to re-interpret a sentence is simply to assign it a different truth value.

2 I use the turnstile, ‘’, to denote consequence. Later, I shall use the colon, ‘:’, to denote inferences and
rules of inference. The Roman capitals are all metavariables, standing for (formulae expressing) sentences
or for collections of (formulae expressing) sentences of a (formal) language. They are used to express
schematic consequence claims as well as inference rules. I write specific (in a sense to be clarified later)
consequence claims and inferences using sentential variables, p, q, r , etc.

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The second premiss is easy to substantiate by deploying a mechanism familiar from

the literature defending subclassical logics (cf. Beall 2017a, 2018):
If, say, truth and falsity are not exhaustive (= the value n below belongs to the space
of logical interpretations), a sentence could be neither and this would invalidate the
law of the excluded middle,  A ∨ ¬A. If they are not exclusive (= the value b below
belongs to the space of logical interpretations), then some sentences may be both,
leading to failures of the principle of explosion, A, ¬A  B.
Together, these two extensions of the space of possible interpretations result in the
logic F D E, i.e., the four-valued logic induced by the matrixes

∧ 1 b n 0 ∨ 1 b n 0 ¬
1 1 b n 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0
b b b 0 0 b 1 b 1 b b b
n n 0 n 0 n 1 1 n n n n
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 b n 0 0 1

where 1 (‘true’) and b (‘both true and false’) are designated, while 0 (‘false’) and n
(‘neither true nor false’) are undesignated and consequence is defined in the usual way,
as preservation of designated value.3
Although a weak logic, F D E is hardly empty. Yet, drawing on the resources of
natural languages, the nihilist has access to even more ‘interpretations’, resulting
in even fewer validities. Natural language abounds in context sensitive expressions
like the indexicals ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘tomorrow’, etc. or demonstratives such as ‘this’,
‘that’, etc. While traditional approaches to modelling reasoning with context-sensitive
expressions (Kaplan 1979, 1989) ban intra-argument context shifts, there are, the
nihilist suggests, no good reasons for this prohibition. If the space of logical possibili-
ties is tailored to model their behaviour in the absence of restrictions on context-shifts,
then the simplest logical law can fail. It is worthwhile highlighting this supplementary
nihilistic premiss:
Supplementary premiss: Intra-argument context shifts are permissible.
Although less general than the previous two, the Supplementary Premiss is central to
the entire (technical) argument. However, it receives little direct support from Rus-
sell, who merely stresses the conceivability of a ‘special kind of context-sensitive
expression[s] whose interpretation[s] [are] sensitive to linguisitic [sic] context’. These
special expressions are the daggers of Sect. 3. That said, positive arguments in favour
of allowing context-shifts for demonstratives and indexicals are canvassed in, e.g.,
Georgi (2015), Zardini (2014). There are even arguments for allowing intra-argument
variations of the domain of the quantifiers (Yagisawa 1993). While these are deserving
of attention on their own and, it seems to me, are not at all faultless, I cannot get into
this matter here. So I shall grant them for the sake of the argument.
(Before going any further, observe, as an aside, that if context-shifts of this last-
mentioned sort are allowed to inform the space of interpretations, then the push to
3 Both the nomenclature and the characterisation of F D E are borrowed from Russell (2018) for the sake
of ‘interoperability’. This is not the only way of characterising it semantically—see, for a brief overview
of the options, Omori and Wansing (2017).

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F D E is technically redundant. Nor, strictly speaking, is there any need to resort to

demonstratives and the like. Regular predicates and quantifiers could do the job. I shall,
nonetheless, assume that we are working in the F D E space and that context-sensitivity
comes on top of that.4 )
From these premisses the nihilistic conclusion follows:
Conclusion: There are counterexamples to every putatively valid logical inference
and hence the logical consequence relation is empty.
This then is the nihilistic picture—in broad strokes. In the next two sections, we will
see that its details do not quite add up. First, I will argue that an empty consequence
relation is not as easy to get as it may first appear. This will also show that the move
to back the Supplementary Premiss via ‘special’ expressions is both ill-implemented
and, generally, suboptimal. Second, I will argue that the surrogate view engendered
by the failure to achieve full emptiness is rather unappealing.

3 How full an emptiness?

Russell pushes forward the nihilist agenda by way of two extreme cases of context-
sensitivity. The first is a sentence † (dagger, called ‘SOLO’ by Russell) such that:
(1) any valuation assigns it the value 1 if it appears as a standalone sentence, i.e., not
embedded into another sentence (or any other type of context); while
(2) any valuation assigns † the value 0 whenever it occurs embedded into another
sentence.
The second is a sentence ‡ (double-dagger; Russell calls it ‘PREM’) such that:
(1) any valuation assigns ‡ the value 1 if it appears as a premiss;
(2) any valuation assigns it the value 0 whenever it ‘features in’ the conclusion of an
argument.5
It is useful to have a rudimentary technical apparatus for representing this kind of
behaviour, without going into the gory details of modelling context-sensitive expres-
sions like demonstratives; on that see Georgi (2015). For our purposes, it suffices to
tweak the definition of valuation.
Valuations are functions that interpret—i.e., assign truth values to—the sentences
of a formal (propositional) language. Or, to put it more formally, if At(L) is the set of
atoms of some propositional language L and  is the set of truth-values modelling the
space of logical possibilities, then a valuation is a function v : At(L) → , which is
suitably extended to all L-formulae via the truth conditions for the logical operators.
But on the present model, sentences are given alongside a context of valuation or
v-context. So we let the definition of a valuation consider each formula of L in a
4 I shall also assume that the logical vocabulary undergoes no changes of meaning as the space of inter-
pretations is enlarged. This is a substantive assumption, particularly in a model-theoretic framework. See
also infra, p. 5. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.)
5 What ‘features in’ means is open to speculation. In the simplest case, which is enough for my purposes,
it simply means ‘is’.

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v-context. Valuations thus are functions v : At(L) × K → , where L and  are as

above, and K represents the set of all v-contexts.
For most sentences, most v-contexts are inert: they do not affect the sentences’
truth values. Thus there is no point in representing them. Not so for the daggers. For
instance, the behaviour of ‡ requires that we recognise:
• a v-context(-type) ‘conclusion’ or ‘right-hand side of  (:)’ and
• a v-context(-type) ‘premiss’ or ‘left-hand side of  (:)’.
We will symbolise these with R and L respectively. Mutatis mutandis, we would
need contexts S (non-embedded) and E (embedded) for †. It is easy to see that the
dagger invalidates conjunction introduction, i.e., the inference schema captured by the
schematic claim of consequence A, B  A ∧ B. Whenever one of A, B is †, and the
other premiss is designated, the premisses hold while the conclusion does not. The
double-dagger spells the end of the identity inference, which, rendered schematically
is A : A. This fails if A is ‡.
So what is left of logic if even these, the simplest of inferences, can fail? The answer
would seem to be nothing and so nihilism prevails. But this is too fast! The daggers
make it look as though invalidating every logical law is an easy task. However, things
are less straightforward.
To start with, as Russell is well aware, even her daggers may not be enough to
empty the logical consequence relation:
if you have  as a 0-place truth-functor that is always interpreted as true, then you
will have some arguments with  and things like  ∨  as a conclusion. These
will be valid regardless of the interpretation, so with these logical constants you
won’t get all the way to nihilism. (2018, p. 322, n. 15)
Yet, Russell claims, this is just as bad as nihilism. In her view, ‘logical minimalism’, by
which she means that there is only a small number of otherwise uninteresting logically
valid arguments, is as bad as nihilism. Either way, logic would be useless, e.g., for
doing metatheory or analysing arithmetical proofs. I will put forward my not at all
favourable assessment of this contention in the next section.
For the moment, I wish to argue that even the daggers belie the nihilistic desider-
atum and the logic F D E ∪ {†, ‡} has a great deal many logical validities, aside from
those generated by . This apparently pedantic exercise will provide us with some
useful insight into the technical matters pertinent for nihilism. It will also help us
see how nihilism surreptitiously changes its nature. Furthermore, it ties in with Rus-
sell’s attempt to resist to the strategy of salvaging logicality by treating the recalcitrant
phenomena (the indexicals, demonstrative, etc.) as logical constants.
In passing, let me note that this resistance is hardly motivated, being backed merely
by the observation that, given the great number of context-sensitive expressions, it
would be impractical (Russell 2018, p. 315). While that may be so, it is also beside the
point. Practicality ought not to be a parameter in assessing the extension of the logical
consequence relation. Apart from this, it seems natural to suppose that a qualitative
diversification of the space of logical possibilities leads to a corresponding increase,
diversification, and refinement of the categories of our logical vocabulary. If, e.g.,
relevant logics (q.v. Anderson and Belnap 1975) can be made to fit into the model of

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expanding the space of logical possibilities, then they provide us with a ready made
example of how this may come about. In relevant logic, one distinguishes different
modes of premiss combination—extensional and intensional—and, corresponding to
these, extensional and intensional versions of the logical connectives (for details, see
Paoli 2001). All in all, the hypothesis cannot be neglected without thereby unduly
propping up the nihilist argument.
Returning now to the daggers, the reader can easily check that the following argu-
ments are valid in F D E ∪ {†, ‡}: ∅  ¬‡; ∅  ¬‡ ∨ ‡; ‡  ¬‡; p  ¬‡; q  ¬‡;
p ∨ ¬q  ¬‡; ∅  †; ∅  ¬†; p  ¬† ∨ q, etc. Indeed, any of the countably many
formulae of this logic entails ¬‡ or †. But does this disprove, independently of ,
the claim that ‘the extension of the relation of logical consequence is empty’? This is
somewhat controversial, but I would argue that it does.
The validities above are not logical laws in Russell’s sense. Rather, they are instances
of such laws. This is as it should be because, pace Russell, a (logical) consequence
relation is not populated by schemata, but by their instances. While in the case of pure
logic the distinction is somewhat obscure, it is still relatively easy to grasp if one thinks
of a logic as its own theory, i.e., as a theory about the formulae of that logic’s language.
The bone of contention is whether one can abstract from these particular validities to
‘general principles’—schematically expressed laws of consequence. Or, to put it less
mysteriously, the bone of contention is to determine the admissible substitutions for
the daggers.
Let me explain this, with reference to propositional languages. Logical consequence
relations are substitution-invariant. A substitution for a propositional language L is
a map from the set of L-atoms to the set of L-formulae. A consequence relation is
substitution-invariant iff, for every collection X of premisses and every conclusion A,
as well as for every substitution σ , if X  A, then σ (X )  σ (A) (Dunn and Hardgree
2001). The atomic formula  generates validities because it is a logical constant, not
a sentential variable; thus it is excepted from the domain of the substitutions. (Had
we let substitutions range over the constants of L as well, they would have had to be
identities mapping each constant to itself; cf. Jansana (2016).)
The question is whether the daggers are more like , i.e., irreplaceable by run-
of-the-mill sentences, or more like p, q, etc. and so freely replaceable by arbitrary
formulae of our logic. If the latter were the case, then, since we are working in the
F D E space of valuations, the daggers could be expected to take any of the four values
of this logic. But they very conspicuously do not. This might just mean that they are
supposed to represent English sentences that are never gluts or gaps—as many English
sentences are. Yet their exceptional behaviour is obtained by stipulations and, indeed,
by stipulations that go against the standard behaviour expected of, say, sentences
containing demonstratives.
This last point has to do with the use of the universal quantifiers in stating the truth
conditions for the daggers—which, to be sure, is superfluous: for the nihilist’s nefarious
purposes the obtaining of that destructive behaviour on but one valuation suffices. The
sentence ‘This is a premiss-occurrence of ‡’ may be taken as an (approximate) English
counterpart of ‡. It does not entail itself, except in the case in which the conclusion-
occurrence of ‘this’ picks out the premiss-occurrence of the sentence (and so does its
premiss-occurrence). So not every valuation makes it behave like ‡. It seems safe to

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extrapolate from this case to context-sensitive expressions in general and conclude

that no context-sensitive expression can feature the sort of contextual-stability of the
daggers. This blocks the reasonable objection that the clauses introducing the daggers
are not stipulations, but rather descriptions of English sentences that just happen to
behave in the required way.
The more general upshot is that nihilists are ill-served by ‘formal’ sentences or, as
Russell puts it, ‘special expressions’. Their daggers are quite blunt. What they need
are actual English sentences having deleterious effects on logical consequence. This is
not ‘monster-barring’, it is ‘imaginary monster-barring’. Just like a non-necessitarian
like Mortensen (1989) can complain that necessary truth preservation on models need
not be enough to warrant real truth preservation, so too an opponent of nihilism may
complain that formal sentences are not enough to drive the nihilist point. Such sen-
tences usually serve some theoretical purpose—cf., e.g., the discussion of the ‘formal’
Liar-sentence λ in Dicher and Paoli (2020). Within the nihilist argument, the only pur-
pose that the daggers can serve is to empty the consequence relation. Obviously, this
renders their use circular.
One may feel that the similarity between  and the daggers is not enough to
warrant the declaration that the latter are logical constants. After all, it seems natural
to think that an atomary sentential formula is a logical constant only if it takes the
same truth value on every valuation. I beg to differ on this point. That is one sense
of logical constanthood; it is, however, not the one pertinent here. What matters here
is the extent to which the sentences suspected of being logical constants have their
behaviour determined (i) by stipulations that (ii) place them outside the full potential
of the logical space.
I submit, therefore, that the daggers are logical constants. Thus the validities pre-
sented above are indeed logical and they persist under substitutions. This may appear
to be just an exercise in logical pedantry, but it does go to show that emptying the
consequence relation is slightly trickier than it seems at first blush. Even the daggers
generate a logic that is as full as logics can be, albeit all of whose logical validities
are generated by logical constants. (For a rather different defence of the claim that the
daggers to not yield an empty consequence relation see Fjellstad (2019).)
There are two ways for the nihilist to fix this: enhance the daggers or claim that
what we get is good (that is, bad) enough. Let us start with the second strategy since
it is the one Russell pursues.

4 Empty, almost empty, useless: a not so complicated trio

Although the consequence relation of F D E ∪ {†, ‡} is quite full, it is also useless.

There would be little solace in its cornucopia of logical validities if logical minimalism
were indeed as bad as nihilism. But this is not true. Or rather claiming that it is mixes
two problems that ought to be kept distinct.
Russell exemplifies the badness at issue with uselessness for representing arithmetic
or metalogical reasoning. Therefore, I will work my way from these examples to the
claim that there can be no privileged position from which to assess the usefulness of
logic. This undercuts the equation of nihilism with minimalism.

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Take the ability to regiment arithmetical reasoning. From the outset, one should
notice that this may be thought to be an implausibly high standard for assessing the
usefulness of logic. Most working mathematicians would claim that nothing short of
first-order classical logic is suitable for that task. Even classical propositional logic
would be useless: it can’t even represent the axioms of Peano arithmetic—no proposi-
tional logic can do this. Presumably, if it were the case that all the arguments validated
by classical propositional logic are valid, while no first-order argument is, one would
not claim that logic is empty, despite its mathematical uselessness.
That aside, it would be exceedingly surprising if a logic that fits Russell’s speci-
fication would be useful ‘for doing metatheory [o]r assessing proofs in arithmetic’.
Logic’s usefulness for mathematics is very much tied to it disregarding mathemat-
ically irrelevant phenomena such as context-sensitivity, which is hardly a pervasive
feature of mathematical reasoning. The move to enrich the space of ‘interpretations’
springs precisely from the desire to do justice to the variegated features that may affect
consequence in language as a whole, not merely in the language of mathematics. One
may deplore the fact that this has negative effects relative to mathematics, but one
cannot take it as a flaw in itself. So the equation of nihilism with minimalism is a non
sequitur.
Besides, one may wonder what reasons, apart from tradition, does one have for being
particularly concerned with arithmetic. F D E, for instance, is rather bad at describing
actual mathematical proofs, whose underlying logic is, in most cases, classical.6 But
it appears to be eminently suitable for reasoning about Christ which, being both mortal
and immortal, both human and divine, etc., is an inconsistent object. If logic is to guide
us in attaining knowledge of him, it cannot be explosive; contradictions must not entail
everything. F D E is a non-explosive logic and, dixit Beall (2017b), the best logic for
Christology. (For non-theological reasons to prefer F D E, see Beall (2017a, 2018).)
So why should mathematics provide the benchmark for assessing the usefulness of
logic? Surely logical theory does not discriminate between mathematics and theology.
It is not unthinkable that one adopting Beall’s theological perspective may criticise
classical logic (better: the logic of the actual mathematical practice) on the grounds
that it is too strong.
Now, this does not show that the daggers do not render logic useless for many of
their more or less usual applications. But the point I am making is that what is good
for the goose is good for the gander. There can be no privileged domain-specific stand-
point from which to assess the usefulness of logic. More to the point, there can be no
privileged domain-specific standpoint from which one is justified to complain that not

6 An anonymous referee takes exception to this claim, pointing out that (first-order) F D E can represent
actual mathematical proofs, as these are carried on in, as it were, F D E plus the (para-logical) assumptions
of consistency (no gluts) and completeness (no gaps) of the respective domain. This I happily grant. A better
way of expressing my claim would be to say that the strictly logical resources of F D E are insufficient
for a full codification of actual mathematical proofs; for that to be possible, extraneous assumptions must
be in place. This is an important nuance. If a logic is not strong enough to provide sufficient resources
for reasoning about a certain domain, then one can find solutions for this—in the present context, Beall’s
shrieking and shrugging are the obvious examples (Beall 2018). Nevertheless, this does not reflect back
(positively) on the expressive resources of the logic itself. (Although I shall not get into this here, the issue of
combining mathematics with subclassical and in particular relevant logics is more subtle than the discussion
above may lead one to believe—see, for discussion, Mares (2012).)

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enough logical laws survive the weakening of logic so as to account for the myriad
aspects of our ratiocinative practice. This is so especially in the case in which said
phenomena are scarce within that domain. Quite simply, the latter requirement goes
against the former. So an almost empty consequence relation ought to be sharply dis-
tinguished from an empty consequence relation. The last would give logical nihilism.
The second engenders merely an annoying paucity of validities. Besides, as we have
seen, the nihilist can deliver the advertised paucity only in a qualitative sense.7
So much then about the first strategy of coping with abundance when one paid for
scarcity. What about the second strategy, of enhancing the daggers?
There are, as far as I can tell, two ways of doing this. The first, already suggested
in Sect. 3, is to drop the universal quantifiers from the characterisation of the daggers.
Their disruptive effects can be achieved even if there is but one valuation on which
they misbehave. This also mitigates the worry that the daggers are logical constants.
The other option is to better exploit the resources of F D E and have the daggers take
the F D E-undesignated value n in, respectively, conclusion- and embedded-position.
(A more general way of achieving this would be to characterise the daggers in terms
of designatedness and non-designatedness, rather than, as in Sect. 2, in terms of the
truth-values 1 and 0.) Either way, we would invalidate each validity listed in Sect. 3.

5 What gives the law?

My proposal for dealing with this route is also pertinent for a different, more modest
version of nihilism, which, to my knowledge, has not been advertised as such in
the literature and which we may call consequence-nihilism. Therefore, I will adapt
my presentation to cover this as well. The cost is minimal as in the present setup,
Russell’s nihilism is entailed by consequence-nihilism. Moreover, addressing this form
of nihilism will also provide us with an opportunity to revisit and (in a sense) reject
Russell’s characterisation of ‘logical laws’ upon which Premiss 2 relies.
Consequence-nihilism is the doctrine that no consequence relation can have all
the structural features characteristic of a logical consequence relation. This is, in
principle, compatible with, e.g., conjunction introduction being valid, but not with,
e.g., the validity of the identity inference A : A, because, on the standard view, this
accounts for the reflexivity of the consequence relation (cf. French 2016). Nor would
it be compatible with the validity of the rule Cut (infra, p. 10), which, on the standard
view, codifies inside the calculus the transitivity of the consequence relation (though
see Ripley 2015).

7 Russell seems to be in good company when she sees paucity as (almost) as bad as absolute lack. For
instance, Estrada-González (2011, p. 117), ostensibly engaging in an exegesis of the anti-non-necessitarian
argument in Priest (2006), states the Priestian thesis that ‘a [general, domain independent] logic exists’
as follows: ‘There is at least one collection of inferences holding in all situations and this collection is
large enough’. And later on p. 118: ‘even though if the collection of valid inferences were not empty, if it
consisted of, say, only one or just [a] few inferences, it would be vacuous in practice to call “logic” such a
small number of valid inferences’. While I cannot find any textual evidence that Priest is actually concerned
with the size of the set of valid inferences, it does seem that Estrada-Gonzales himself is sympathetic to the
view.

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Despite scepticism about the ‘immutability’ of the properties of logical consequence

(Estrada-González 2015), the properties traditionally attributed to it are settled enough.
In the vein of Tarski (1956), a logical consequence relation is required to be a reflexive,
monotonic, and transitive relation between sets of sentences and a sentence (see,
for discussion, Mares and Paoli 2014; Dicher and Paoli 2018; Dicher 2018). More
precisely:
Definition 1 (Tarskian consequence) Let L be a (propositional) language, For m(L)
the set of its formulae, and P(For m(L)) its powerset. A logical consequence relation
over L is a substitution-invariant relation ⊆ P(For m(L)) × For m(L) satisfying,
for all X , Y ⊆ For m(L) and all A, B ∈ For m(L):
(1) if A ∈ X , then X  A (Reflexivity);
(2) if X  A and X ⊆ Y , then Y  A (Monotonicity); and
(3) if X  A and, for every B ∈ X , Y  B, then Y  A (Transitivity).
So let us take this as the benchmark for assessing the logicality of a consequence
relation and let us focus on reflexivity as, arguably, without it, there is no way of starting
arguments. Notice that the hypothesis here entertained is, in effect, that substructural
consequence relations (Paoli 2001; Restall 2000), i.e., relations that do not exhibit all
the features specified in Definition 1, are not logical consequence relations at all.8
To make the problem more vivid, I shall frame it relative to sequent calculi (Gentzen
1935; Bimbó 2015). A sequent is an ordered pair of finite sets of formulae, written
X : Y . The notation evokes a connection between sequents and inferences (and,
consequently, claims of consequence). Indeed, it is customary to interpret a sequent
X : A as a claim that A follows from the formulae in X . One may also call them
‘inferences’. (At least from a technical standpoint, this generalises straightforwardly
to the case where the righthand side of a sequent is occupied by a plurality of formulae.
Thus sequents of the form X : Y can be seen as multiple-conclusion entailments (rules
of entailment), in which X entails at least one of the formulae in Y (Scott 1971).)
Sequent derivations are trees labelled with sequents, their root being the conclusion
of the derivation and their leaves instances of Reflexivity, i.e., sequents of the form
A : A, called axioms. (Henceforth, I will use axiom, reflexivity (instance), and identity
(rule) as synonyms.) If reflexivity fails, there are no axioms and, therefore, no way to
start derivations (cf. French 2016). Consequently, the consequence relation is empty.
This is exactly what happens in the enhanced dagger logic—there are no potential
initial sequents. So, at least for sequent calculus fundamentalists, we get Russell-style
logical nihilism by way of consequence-nihilism.
Since sequent calculi derivations produce sequents out of sequents (or inferences
out of inferences) they cannot be built by inferential moves. Instead, their ‘engine’
is metainferential, where a metainference is simply a sequent-to-sequent passage in a
sequent calculus.
Rather than define the concept, I shall illustrate it. For instance,
p:p q:q : p⊃q
(1) (2)
p, p ⊃ q : q p:q
8 This is controversial but see Dicher and Paoli (2018) for arguments in favour of the claim. I shall have
more to say about this once I have sketched more details of the picture—see footnote 12.

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are both metainferences. (1) is easily recognisable as an instance of the sequent calculus
rule for introducing ⊃ in the antecedent; (2) as well instantiates a rule, although not a
primitive introduction in the antecedent or the succedent. The instantiated rule is the
inverse of the standard rule for introducing the conditional on the right, which allows
the transition from X , A : B to X : A ⊃ B. This is an admissible rule in many logics.9
However, as (2) above illustrates, there is no reason for metainferences in general
to proceed from axioms. Nor, indeed, must they involve logical constants. Thus,
p:q q :r
(3) p:r

is a perfectly well-formed metainference, being an instance of the rule of (multiplica-

tive) Cut:

X : Y, A A, Z : W
X, Z : Y , W

So one could start derivations with sequents that, although not expressing logical
validities, nevertheless hold for the sentences they consist of and derive other sequents
from them. Then, a logic would first and foremost account for metainferential, not for
inferential, relations.10
Before getting into the details of this, it is important to notice the following: This
suggests the possibility of rethinking our account of the ‘laws of logic’. Let us see
why and to what effect.
Russell reaches the characterisation of ‘logical laws’ in terms of (schematic) conse-
quence claims (supra, Sect. 2) after discarding two alternative candidates: (schematic)
theorems and (schematic) metainferences. (She calls the first ‘logical truths’. I prefer
a more syntactical terminology so I will call them theorems.) Theorems are disqual-
ified because they underdetermine logics: for instance, classical logic and the logic
of paradox, L P (Priest 1979) have the same theorems but differ with respect to their
consequence relation. The second class of candidates comprises ‘complex principles
which state connections between different claims of logical consequence’ (Russell
2018, p. 310); in other words, (schematic) metainferences.
So why is it alleged that metainferences are ill-suited to be the ‘laws of logic’? Since
nihilism states that ‘there is no pairing of premises and conclusion such that the second
is a logical consequence of the first’, it follows that ‘any claim of the form [X  A] [is]
false’. (Recall that these schematic claims are to be construed as universally quantified.
So their falsity amounts to there being one case for which they do not hold.) But such
claims, or rather the inferences to which they correspond, X : A, are precisely the
premisses of each and every metainference. Since no metainferential premiss is valid,
no interpretation provides a counterexample to any given metainference. (The notion

9 A rule is admissible in a sequent calculus iff its addition to the calculus does not increase the stock of
provable sequents. The rule instantiated by (2) is, in fact, derivable (given the premiss, there is a derivation
of the conclusion) in many logics, as long as Cut it present.
10 French (2016) proposes such a view while exploring the possibility of solving the paradoxes by dropping
structural reflexivity. The discussion to follow is based on the more general framework developed in Dicher
and Paoli (2018).

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of counterexample is exactly as expected: an interpretation that verifies the premisses

but falsifies the conclusion.) Every metainference is vacuously valid.
Unpacked, the conception of metainferential validity powering the argument above
is as follows:
Definition 2 (Global metainferential validity) Let S1 , . . . , Sm , Sn be inferences
(sequents). A metainference with premisses S1 , . . . , Sm and conclusion Sn is globally
valid iff, either there is a valuation v that does not satisfy Si , for some i ∈ {1, . . . , m},
or every valuation v satisfies Sn .
Global metainferential validity is specifically designed to deal with metainference
rules, which are best characterised as a principle ‘under which a consequence relation
might (or might not) be closed’ (Cobreros et al. 2013). It comes as no surprise that
it cannot serve as the bedrock of a non-vacuous explanation of the notion of ‘logical
law’ when, purportedly, there are no valid inferences in a logic.
However, even if a calculus has no valid inference rules, it may still have many
valid inferences—inferences such that, for any valuation v, if v satisfies the premisses,
then v satisfies the conclusion. Thus in F D E ∪ {‡} for instance, both p : p ∨ ‡ and
p : p ∨ q are valid inferences, for in both cases every valuation that satisfies the
premiss, satisfies the conclusion. Yet neither will instantiate a valid inference rule
and the corresponding claim of logical consequence won’t be true because there are
substitutions that invalidate them. In the first example, substitute ‡ (or †) for p; in
the second substitute ‡ (or †) for both p and q. Likewise, while the inference rule
A, B : A∧ B may fail because with ‡ we would get a counterexample to it, its instances
that do not feature the double-dagger, such as p, q : p ∧ q, hold. (Naturally, this
assumes that the daggers are the only troublemakers at hand. However, this assumption
does not affect the generality of the argument.)
This suggests, quite independently of the daggers, an alternative conception of
metainferential validity that need not be trivial in situations such as that described
above (Humberstone 1996; Dicher and Paoli 2020):
Definition 3 (Local metainferential validity) Let S1 , . . . , Sm , Sn be inferences
(sequents). A metainference with premisses S1 , . . . , Sm and conclusion Sn is locally
valid iff, for every valuation v, either v does not satisfy Si , for some i ∈ {1, . . . , m},
or v satisfies Sn .
The local conception of metainferential validity lines up nicely with the usual under-
standing of inferential (or zero-level metainferential) validity. Inferential validity is
normally defined locally, so that it expresses a truth-preservation property—as opposed
to a validity-preservation one. As pointed out in Barrio et al. (2019b), this gives us
further reasons to embrace local metainferential validity: it commits us to the same
standard of validity for metainferences as was already used for inferences. (‘Unifying’
in the opposite direction would overgenerate: any inference with an invalid premiss
would count as valid.)
Why does this help? The first point is that even if reflexivity fails for formulae, it still
holds for sequents. In general, the sequent-to-sequent derivability relation has every
property customarily attributed to a logical consequence relation, except for relating
formulae. In fact, it is a Blok-Jónsson consequence relation, i.e., a relation that has

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the standard Tarskian features, except that it is defined over arbitrary sets, not only
over sets of formulae (Blok and Jónsson 2006). I shall not argue in detail in favour
of adopting this notion of consequence; on that, see Dicher and Paoli (2018). In the
present context, it suffices that it allows us to flesh out the intuition that consequence
may be, so to speak, a higher-order matter.
The second is that local validity is not impotent qua standard of logicality. Global
validity is entailed by local validity; the converse, however, does not hold. For instance,
the metainference
p∧‡:q
p :q ∧‡

is globally valid because the premiss inference is invalid—a v such that v( p) = 1 and
v(q) = 0 provides a counterexample. It is, nonetheless locally invalid. A valuation v
such that v( p) = v(q) = 1 satisfies the premiss, but does not satisfy the conclusion,
since for every v, v(‡, R) = n. It may look as though this plays right into the nihilist’s
hand since a tighter validity standard translates into a smaller collection of validities.
But I have already argued that almost empty does not equal empty. The stake here is
not bloating the consequence relation, but rather recovering a sense of its usefulness
and conceptual coherence.
Thus the upshot is that local metainferential validity does not trivialise the interpre-
tation of ‘logical laws’ as metainferences. Moreover, it does this in a framework that
already delivers the central formal properties of the logical consequence relation—
reflexivity, monotonicity and transitivity. Despite the nihilistic onslaught, this makes
room for not just any kind of conception of logicality, but for one that is as strong and
standard as possible. (For general discussion of metainferences and metainferential
validity, see Barrio et al. (2015, 2019a, b), Dicher and Paoli (2018, 2020).)
One may object that this rehabilitation of sequent-to-sequent ‘logical laws’ mistreats
the ontology of consequence relations. However, that is not so. Each Blok-Jónsson
relation determines an equivalence class of consequence relations which, though they
may be over different objects, retain the fulcral properties of logical consequence. The
conditions for this equivalence are presented in the definition below:
Definition 4 (Equivalence of consequence relations) Let 1 , 2 be Blok-Jónsson
consequence relations over the sets U1 , U2 , respectively. We say that 1 and 2 are
equivalent 11 iff there exist mappings

τ : U1 → P (U2 )

and

ρ : U2 → P (U1 )

such that the following conditions hold for every X ∪ {a} ⊆ U1 and for every b ∈ U2 :
11 Blok and Jónsson call this relation similarity. Their notion of equivalence is more complex, being
designed to deal with substitution invariance in the very abstract way required by the arbitrariness of carrier
sets of 1 and 2 . For my present purposes, this simplified definition suffices.

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S1: X 1 a iff {τ (c) | c ∈ X } 2 d, for every d ∈ τ (a);
 
S2: {τ (c) | c ∈ ρ (b)} 2 b, and b 2 d, for every d ∈ {τ (c) | c ∈ ρ (b)}.
In the particular case in which we are dealing with relations over sequents and, respec-
tively, over formulae, the transformers τ and ρ are simple formula-to-sequent and back
translators of the kind first mentioned by Gentzen (1935). Thus, the sequent sign is
rendered as a conditional, the commas to its left as conjunctions and those to its right
as disjunctions (and conversely). This means that we can always find our way back to
a Tarskian relation over formulae from a Blok-Jónsson relation over sequents.12

6 The generality of logic

The upshot of the previous discussion is that nihilism barks but does not bite. From an
ontological thesis about the extension of the consequence relation, it surreptitiously
devolves into minimalism, the epistemological doctrine that logic is useless for its
standard applications. Not only is this view nowhere near as strong as nihilism, but
it is also a radical change of topic: The existence of privileged applications of logi-
cal theories is irrelevant for determining the scope of logicality. Furthermore, neither
nihilism nor minimalism can compromise a familiar standard of logical consequence,
as witnessed by it being possible to associate reflexive, monotonic and transitive con-
sequence relations even to ‘nihilistic logics’.
Now I wish to look at the matter from a different perspective. As advertised supra,
Sect. 1, I take the problem of nihilism to be, in the final analysis, the problem of the
generality of logic. So this different perspective is circumscribed by the generality of
logic, the richness of natural language, and the relation between them. This is a delicate
combination but I shall argue that, properly understood, it engenders no worries of the
nihilistic kind.13
Nihilism is predicated on the premiss that there is a tension between the generality
of logic and the myriad features of natural language that could be pertinent to (logical)
inference. Russell, depicting the genesis of nihilism as the purportedly abortive non-
12 Now I can add more details to this picture, as promised in footnote 8. (In this footnote I use ‘consequence
relation’ as shorthand for ‘logical consequence relation’.) On the metainferential account of logic inspired
by the Blok-Jónsson generalisation of Tarski’s definition of consequence, all metainferential consequence
relations are Tarskian. Moreover, the aforementioned recovery of consequence on formulae yields Tarskian
consequence relations even for substructural logics. So every logic, qua consequence relation, is structural
and, contra the received view, the failure of these rules does not amount to the failure of the homonymous
properties. Substructural logics are still logics, but they are not substructural consequence relations. For
some this may be too steep a price to pay, cf. Barrio et al. (2019a, b). The same authors put forward a
different, if equally metainferential, conception of logic, on which a logic is identified as the transfinite
union of all its (meta)inferential levels. However, this is a quarrel between metainferentialists and it is of
little help to the (Russellian) nihilist. Either metainferentialist position makes room for true logicality, albeit
differently. (My thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify these issues.)
13 Russell sketches a Lakatosian way of resisting the nihilist threat by way of lemma incorporation, i.e.,
tweaking the statement of our logical (meta)theorems to rule out potential counterexamples from their range.
Ultimately, however, this gives up on the generality of logic. So it either isn’t a remedy or, if it is, then
it undercuts the problem. I do not object to the procedure: a cursory survey of elementary textbooks will
show that logicians have been Lakatosians all the time. I do, however, object to embracing Lakatosianism
because of nihilism. To do that is to blow in the yoghurt before getting burned by hot soup.

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pluralist option generated by the monist insistence on generality, makes this eloquently
clear:
Some pluralists have claimed that different logics are correct for different kinds
of cases, e.g. classical logic for consistent cases and paraconsistent logics for
dialethic ones. Monists have responded by appealing to a principle of generality
for logic: a law of logic must hold for absolutely all cases so that it is only those
principles that feature in all of the pluralist’s systems that count as genuine laws
of logic. The pluralist replies that the monist’s insistence on generality collapses
monism into nihilism, because, they maintain, every logical law fails in some
cases. (2018, p. 308)
But there is a plain and essential difference between ‘absolutely all cases’ and allowing
that ‘everything is a case’. This distinction is clearly drawn by some pluralists:
[O]ne might be extremely liberal with respect to cases, and hold that for every
class of claims there is a case in which those and only those claims are true. We
are not fully liberal in that sense. Our moderate liberalism allows for a lot, but
it need not be committed to all manner of “cases” for arbitrary gerrymandered
sets of sentences. (Beall and Restall 2006, p. 89)
The difference is even more dramatic when ‘everything is a case’ is taken to mean
something along the lines of ‘every inference-pertinent aspect of language must be
accounted for when doing logic’. Much of the purchase of nihilism rests on this
misguided identification.
Let me get one objection out of the way without delay. One may worry that this is not
a fair reading of the nihilist’s arguments. Perhaps that is true—Russell, for instance,
gives very little indications as to how to understand generality, identify cases, etc.
By the same token, she does not provide any bounds on generality. Nor does she
indicate that she is contemplating such bounds. That suffices to license at least the
worry that nihilism draws support from the incriminated identification. Besides, the
suggested view would not be an implausible development of the nihilist position.
Pushed hard enough, nihilists could claim that cases are generated by every aspect of
natural language that can affect the inferential relations between sentences.
Be that as it may, a particular feature of the nihilist setup stands out rather con-
spicuously. The nihilist aims at generality from within language. On the face of it,
their programme is driven by concerns about language and its unruly expressions such
as demonstratives, etc., rather than concerns about the metaphysics of some domain,
as was the case with some defenders of quantum logic as a wholesale logic (Putnam
1968) or with the historical intuitionists (Brouwer 1981).
That brings about further questions about the relation between logic and natural
language. Paramount amongst these is whether natural language can support logical-
ity, one of whose marks is generality, without any preliminary tidying up. At least
historically, the answer tended to be negative. An exhaustive historical analysis is
impossible here, so I confine myself to provide evidence for this last claim in the form
of two vignettes, picked from different historical stages of the development of logic.
First, there is Frege—undoubtedly a valiant defender of the generality of logic
(see MacFarlane 2000; Macbeth 2005). Notoriously, Frege believed that natural lan-

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guage, ridden by ‘imperfections’ of all kinds, is a suboptimal medium for the business
of logic—tracking the laws that govern truth, to the extent that they are the norma-
tive principles that enable thought in general. For that, one needs a Begriffschrift: a
pure language apt to represent thought. He likens natural language to the eye and his
Begriffschrift to the microscope adding that:
Because of the range of its possible uses and the versatility with which it can
adapt to the most diverse circumstances, the eye is far superior to the microscope.
[…] But, as soon as scientific goals demand great sharpness of resolution, the
eye proves to be insufficient. The microscope, on the other hand, is perfectly
suited to precisely such goals, but that is just why it is useless for all others.
(Frege 1879, p. 6)
Details aside, the overarching idea is precisely that of containing the multitude of
phenomena that occur in natural language to a sufficient degree to make possible the
study of the general laws of thought. It is relative to this purged medium that the
generality of logic is predicated.
More recently, and less radically, Beall and Restall take the bearers of consequence
to be regimented sentences, that is, sentences to which one adds
whatever is needed to draw all of the distinctions we need. This may be achieved
by taking logic to analyse arguments involving sentences in an appropriately
regimented language. This regimentation might merely distinguish ambiguous
expressions, or it might do more theoretical work by exposing a particular form
or structure of the sentences being analysed. (Beall and Restall 2006, p. 9)
There is no reason to believe that the two examples of ‘regimentation’ in the quoted
passage are meant to be exhaustive. So we could add to the list more or less freely.
Presumably, the reverse direction too would be acceptable and regimenting sentences
could happen by way of disregarding distinction we do not need.
These are but two—distant in time and intent—examples that drive home the point
that ‘interventions’ on the side of language have not been ruled out by logicians. On the
contrary, historically, the generality of logic has always been defended in a qualified
sense, inside a previously determined space of acceptable parameters.
I do not wish to suggest that the nihilist pushes for dropping altogether the idea of a
sanitisation of the medium of our ratiocinative practice. It is nonetheless fair to say that
the nihilist wishes to push the place where the line between phenomena that are relevant
for logical inference and those that are not is drawn quite deep inside language. This
much is visible in their strategy. There is nothing illegitimate about this—although
their failure to even contemplate a ‘regimented’ sense of generality leaves them badly
exposed to criticism. However, this is, both in general and in relation to particular
cases, a matter of argument. Pari passu, resisting this tendency is not necessarily
dogmatic. One may even argue that it is best to draw that line precisely where things
start to break down and vindicate those of various nihilistic persuasions. This proposal
appears to be question-begging. But is it?
It would be if the parameters within which the attainment of generality is to be
judged would be pre-determined or determined by extra-logical factors. But I very
much doubt that this is the case. Generality is not independent of some ‘regimentation’

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which is inherent to the business of doing logic. Likewise, the space within which one
assesses the generality of logic is not pre-determined by natural language. There is no
‘natural’ content to the generality of logic. Or so I shall argue.
Resistance to the thesis enunciated above seems to stem from a certain view about
the relation between natural language and logic, which I shall call the contiguity thesis.
According to it language and logic are contiguous and there is no ‘qualitative leap’ in
moving from the first to the second. Logic—our theory of what follows from what—
would be somehow read from natural language by churning from the class of valid
arguments those that are logically valid (cf. Peregrin and Svoboda 2017). Provided
that we get this exercise right, we would end up with the correct logic(s), including
the correct formal properties of a consequence relation, if any. (The view seems to
be in the background of Russell’s concern with context-shifts; see Russell (2018),
p. 315. Of course, the nihilist ends up performing a reductio on it.) But there are
countless problems with this doctrine and plenty of evidence that natural language
underdetermines logicality thus understood.14 Let me give just one example.
As is well known, Fregean logic had a rather broader scope than mainstream mod-
ern logic. In particular, logic was not just first-order. Second-order logic counted as
logic by default, without need for special argument. That slowly changed (Eklund
1996) and finally, not in small part because of Quine’s influence (1986), second-order
logic became philosophically dubious.15 It is plain that (acting on) doubts about the
logicality of second-order logic leads to a certain shrinking of the expressive power
of our logical systems—and in practice generates pressure to make-up for the lost.
This immediately reflects in the amount of generality that one’s logic will suffer, since
natural languages undoubtedly present instances of quantification over predicates, as,
e.g., in the English formulation of the axiom of induction: ‘for every property …(and)
for every natural number …’.
Now, one of the complaints often brought against second-order logic is that it is
inherently incomplete with respect to its standard semantics: no formal system has the
resources to prove every second-order validity.16 This is a serious technical flaw, at least
for those that appreciate the importance of a logic being endowed with a well-behaved
proof theory. But it may be more than that. One can see it as a failure of formality
of second-order languages, where ‘formal’ is understood to mean ‘computable’—
recte: recursively axiomatizable (Dutilh Novaes 2011). Needless to say, formality is

14 Could it be that this is all that the nihilist is claiming? I believe that this is not so. But if it is, then we
would benefit more by analysing nihilism from the perspective of modern marketing, rather than that of the
philosophy of logic.
15 As Quine’s influence waned, second-order logic (re)gained more and more friends (see, e.g. Shapiro
1991).
16 I assume that natural language instances of quantification over ‘properties’ are best explained via the
standard semantics of second-order logic. This is contentious because the grammar of natural language
quantification over properties is obscure. When one says, e.g., ‘for every property’ it looks as though a
certain reification of the ‘property’ happens, which suggests that the quantifier is still first-order. That may
support Henkin semantics rather than to the standard one. Be that as it may, in this context the matter is
‘academic’. It is plain that the quandary described in this footnote supports my main claim just as much as
the scenario in the main text. (I am indebted to Bruno Jacinto for raising this issue.)

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as important a feature of logic as generality. In fact, some senses of formality overlap

with generality—cf. MacFarlane (2000).17
Anyone seeking logicality in natural language stumbles into a real conundrum
here. Agreed upon (if only for the sake of the argument) features of logicality, i.e.,
generality and formality qua recursive axiomatizability, clash in the very medium of
logic. If there is compelling evidence that central features of logicality are clashing in
natural language, what hopes are there for logic?
This is an apocalyptic scenario only if one believes that logicality is somehow
inherent to natural language and in no way a matter open to theoretical negotiations.
The case of second-order logic is one reason to reject the contiguity thesis—even
if stressing it would illustrate, a little too close to home, the point of the dictum
that ‘one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens’. There is no shortage of
less studious evidence pointing in the same direction. The two examples discussed
above—Frege’s repudiation of natural language and Beall and Restall’s embracing
of ‘regimentation’—too tell a different story: that logicality is to be understood in
a theoretically constrained way. Faithfulness to this ‘codiciled’ take on generality
is by no means necessary. Nevertheless, abandoning it in favour of ‘unconstrained’
generality is a good reason not to be surprised by failures of generality. Such failures
are easily diagnosed as banal cases of too much of a good thing. All in all, there
are plenty of reasons to reject the contiguity thesis. Natural language does not carry
logicality on its face.
The somewhat obscure choice of words when characterising the relation between
natural language and logic is deliberate. Scepticism about the logicality of natural
language is not new, but it comes in forms that are perhaps best kept apart. So, for
instance, I do not wish to make the same point as Strawson (1950, p. 350)—‘ordinary
language has no exact logic’ (my emphasis), for it may well have one or more, if
we could build it/them (see also Strawson 1952). Nor do I subscribe to the view,
transparent in, e.g., Partee (2013), that the logicality of natural language is all about
expressive power and adequate formalisation. Logic is about much more than that.
Rather, I take it that there is a kind of qualitative leap between natural language and
logic. At the very least, the latter is subject to theoretical constraints that are quite
foreign to the former. (For more on this see Dicher (2019).)
As far as I can tell, Glanzberg (2015) comes fairly close to articulating a similar
view. Thus, for instance, he argues against the contiguity thesis by pointing out that
the semantical analysis of natural language is of a different kind than that presupposed
by logics. The first is concerned with explaining actual meanings. The second is
concerned with assessing inferential connections irrespective of actual meanings—
except, of course, those of the logical vocabulary. So a formalised theory of natural
language meaning cannot in itself exhibit logical relations among natural language
sentences.

17 A caveat: this is not a change of topic, although prima facie, when one complains of infringements to
the generality of logic one does not complain about what’s left out by a given logical theory. Instead, one
complains about how that theory deals with phenomena it can accommodate. However, for the sake of the
argument, here we join the nihilist and take an intra-linguistic and rather exhaustive view of generality,
whereby its content is determined by natural language.

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An added complication here follows from the difficulty of coming up with clear
criteria for telling apart logical and non-logical vocabulary (see Glanzberg 2015, p.
97sq.). While proposals for such criteria have been made and are well known (see, for
discussion, MacFarlane 2017), it is far from clear that they are universally acceptable.
Assuming that the doubts that prevent the formation of such a consensus are not
misguided, it is difficult to see how the nihilist could resist the obliteration of this
distinction. Ultimately, this would ensue in classifying as logical every inferential
move sanctioned by the meaning of natural language terms. Such a nihilist would
become an anarchist—a position that strikes me as a lot more sensible than nihilism.
If language is the ‘natural’ environment of our ratiocinative practice, then logic’s
non-contiguity with language is tantamount to logic not being a ‘natural’ phenomenon.
In other words, logic is, in a qualified sense, an artefact (Allo 2017; Cook 2010;
Shapiro 2014).) Man-made logical consequence relations are superimposed on natural
language. One or several kinds of relations are identified as logical and (natural)
language is made to carry them.
We can see this partly as a modelling relation: logic provides a model of the pre-
formal ratiocinative practice (cf. Cook 2010; Shapiro 2014; Glanzberg 2015). This
is a way of preserving some connection between logical consequence relations and
natural language-sanctioned inferences. The latter are the suggestive basis upon which
the former are built. As any modelling process, it presupposes at least smoothing out
asperities—lest one winds up an anarchist of the kind described above—by way of
‘idealisations’ and ‘abstractions’. It matters little what are the actual ‘idealisations’
and ‘abstractions’ required for there to be a logic, just as it matters little if there is one
way of idealising and abstracting or if there are several such ways.18
I have no essential objection to this picture. Logic having a certain ‘modelling’
dimension strikes me as obvious. Nonetheless, I favour a view on which logic is a
cognitive tool (Allo 2017; Dutilh Novaes 2012). That is to say: logic not only models
(aspects of) the pre-existing practice, but it also fashions extensions, improvements,
etc. of it. Standards of deductive validity, for instance, are not given alongside natural
language. They are developed by logicians and used, among other things, to extend
the scope, precision, reliability of our deductions.
Something along the same lines can be said about generality. The kind of generality
demanded of logic is not present in language. Yet it may well feature as an important
desideratum in logic, for it has a clear instrumental value: a ‘general’ logic can be an
effective tool in every domain of inquiry. But the kind of generality that can deliver
this need not necessarily be conjoint with the kind of expressive comprehensiveness
that the nihilist appears to treasure. Subject to appropriate argument, limitations on
the latter ought not to be beyond the pale as far as logic is concerned.
Let me wrap up with two related concessive remarks. The first is this: There may
well be barriers to how much generality can be achieved. A ‘pure’ (in Yagisawa’s
(1993) sense) treatment of demonstratives and indexicals may radically limit it. But
here we need to ask ourselves: Is generality still a virtue when purity is desired? And
18 A bit of care is required here. As an anonymous referee points out, neither idealisation nor abstraction
lead to generality. However, I am not invoking idealisation and abstraction as means of attaining generality.
Rather, I am saying that, on the modelling half of the coin, they are parameters that must be considered
before generality.

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is there any value to this kind of purity? These (and similar) are important matters and
they may have a considerable impact on the assessment of the nihilistic threat. That,
however, is a matter for another occasion.
The second, related, observation is this. In the last paragraphs, we have strayed
rather far from the general background of nihilism discernible in, e.g., Russell (2018).
One may worry that the proposed solutions to the nihilistic challenge are not solutions
at all because they undercut the problem. In my view, that is a benefit, not a flaw. Be
that as it may, it still is the case that it is the nihilist’s job to defend the fundamental
assumptions on which they develop their arguments. Their opponents have no duty to
grant them.

7 Epilogue

In this paper, I have argued against logical nihilism, understood as the claim that the
consequence relation is empty. I have found reasons for dissatisfaction with both the
nihilists daggers (Sect. 3) and with their real effects (Sect. 4). I have also objected
to the nihilist’s characterisation of the laws of logic (Sect. 5). But the more serious
problem is rather deeper: the nihilist’s treatment of the generality of logic (Sect. 6).
Generality, I have argued, is to be assessed within an antecedently delimited space of
logically relevant properties. I have incriminated the nihilist reliance on a model of
generality that presupposes a kind of qualitative continuity between natural language
and logic. This model is flawed and a nihilist victory based on it is hollow.
Is this the end of logical ghost-busting? I doubt it. But for now the ball is firmly in
the nihilist camp.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to audiences at Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, the University of Buenos

Aires, and the University of Salzburg where I have presented versions of this paper. I owe special thanks to
the participants at the LanCog Group’s M(etaphysics), E(pistemology), L(language), and L(ogic) Work in
progress seminar at the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, and in particular to Diogo Santos,
Ricardo Santos, and Elia Zardini, who read a version of this paper and provided detailed comments and
observations. For comments and suggestions I am also grateful to Eduardo Barrio, Natalia Buacar, Bruno
Da Ré, Andreas Fjellstad, Roberto Giuntini, Bruno Jacinto, Adrian Luduşan, Francesco Paoli, Greg Restall,
Lucas Rosenblat, Mariela Rubin, Federico Pailos, Gigi Ştefanov, Diego Tajer, Kai Tanter, Iulian Toader,
Damian Szmuc, and Isis Urgell. I am grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal, whose constructive
comments went well beyond what I could acknowledge explicitly in the text. Finally I owe both thanks and
apologies to all those whom I forgot to acknowledge explicitly. This work was financially supported by the
FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, grant SFRH/BPD/116125/2016.

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