Last year I read a paper by Gillian Russell with the self-explanatory title "Logic Isn't Normative" (Russell 2020). I already had some views about the normativity of logic, and found the paper a bit of a challenge for them, because the picture Russell presents of the relationship between logic and normativity is quite similar to how I see things, even though I think logic is normative and she thinks it isn’t. It seems to me that although our positions are in some ways quite close, there are things we disagr
Russell’s view, as I understand it, is roughly as follows. The subject matter of logic itself is descriptive. 1 Logic studies which arguments are and aren’t truth-preserving, and this isn’t in itself a normative matter. If we’re taking the constituents of arguments to be sentences, then whether arguments are truth-preserving or not will depend on what sentences mean, the conditions under which they would and wouldn’t be true given what they mean, and which conditions are and aren’t jointly possible. (We'll
Now, even though I think logic is normative, this view isn’t so different from mine. (Indeed I expect that to some extent her views expressed elsewhere have probably influenced mine on this issue.) I think that there are the non-normative laws that Russell identifies as logical laws, and normative bridge principles that combine with them to give general principles about the relationship between logical consequence relations and how we should think. The difference between my view and Russell’s is that I thin