This book is about rules, and especially about human capability to create, maintain and follow rules, as a root of what makes us humans different from other animals. The leading idea is that scrutinizing this capability is able to tell us who we humans are and what kinds of lives we live. It elaborates Wilfrid Sellars' visionary observation that "to say that man is a rational animal, is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but of rules"; and it builds on the ideas of Sellars' and Brandom's inferentialism, in a novel naturalistic way. The main tenet of inferentialism is that our language games are essentially rule-governed and that meanings are inferential roles. Jaroslav Peregrin sees the task of reconciliation of inferentialism and naturalism as centered around the problem of naturalization of rules. He argues that the most primitive form of a rule is a cluster of normative attitudes. We humans are specific by our tendency assume peculiar attitudes to what we do, and to do so in a specific way, which turns the attitudes into "normative" ones. This self-reflective structure characterizes our ability to build systems of interconnected rules, which have come to constitute our natural niche. Furthermore, Peregrin shows how our most important system of rules—that constitutive of our language—helped to lead us to our current position of rule-following, ultra-social, rational, and discursive creatures. Normative Species will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, social ontology, cultural evolution, and cognitive science.

This book addresses the hasty development of modern logic, especially its introducing and embracing various kinds of artificial languages and moving from the study of natural languages to that of artificial ones. This shift seemed extremely helpful and managed to elevate logic to a new level of rigor and clarity. However, the change that logic underwent in this way was in no way insignificant, and it is also far from an insignificant matter to determine to what extent the "new logic" only engaged new and more powerful instruments to answer the questions posed by the "old" one, and to what extent it replaced these questions with new ones. Hence, this movement has generated brand new kinds of philosophical problems that have still not been dealt with systematically. Philosophy of Logical Systems addresses these new kinds of philosophical problems that are intertwined with the development of modern logic. Jaroslav Peregrin analyzes the rationale behind the introduction of the artificial languages of logic; classifies the various tools which were adopted to build such languages; gives an overview of the various kinds of languages introduced in the course of modern logic and the motifs of their employment; discusses what can actually be achieved by relocating the problems of logic from natural language into them; and reaches certain conclusions with respect to the possibilities and limitations of this "formal turn" of logic. This book is both an important scholarly contribution to the philosophy of logic and a systematic survey of the standard (and not so standard) logical systems that were established during the short history of modern logic.

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language.

This book addresses the hasty development of modern logic, especially its introducing and embracing various kinds of artificial languages and moving from the study of natural languages to that of artificial ones. This shift seemed extremely helpful and managed to elevate logic to a new level of rigor and clarity. However, the change that logic underwent in this way was in no way insignificant, and it is also far from an insignificant matter to determine to what extent the "new logic" only engaged new and more powerful instruments to answer the questions posed by the "old" one, and to what extent it replaced these questions with new ones. Hence, this movement has generated brand new kinds of philosophical problems that have still not been dealt with systematically. Philosophy of Logical Systems addresses these new kinds of philosophical problems that are intertwined with the development of modern logic. Jaroslav Peregrin analyzes the rationale behind the introduction of the artificial languages of logic; classifies the various tools which were adopted to build such languages; gives an overview of the various kinds of languages introduced in the course of modern logic and the motifs of their employment; discusses what can actually be achieved by relocating the problems of logic from natural language into them; and reaches certain conclusions with respect to the possibilities and limitations of this "formal turn" of logic. This book is both an important scholarly contribution to the philosophy of logic and a systematic survey of the standard (and not so standard) logical systems that were established during the short history of modern logic.

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language.

In Meaning and Structure, Peregrin argues that recent and contemporary (post)analytic philosophy, as developed by Quine, Davidson, Sellars and their followers, is largely structuralistic in the very sense in which structuralism was originally tabled by Ferdinand de Saussure. The author reconstructs de Saussure's view of language, linking it to modern formal logic and mathematics, and reveals close analogies between its constitutive principles and the principles informing the holistic and neopragmatistic view of language put forward by Quine and his followers. Peregrin also indicates how this view of language can be made compatible with what is usually called 'formal semantics'. Drawing on both the Saussurean tradition and recent developments in analytic philosophy of language, this book offers a unique study of the ways in which the concept of meaning can be seen as consisting in the concept of structure.

In Meaning and Structure, Peregrin argues that recent and contemporary (post)analytic philosophy, as developed by Quine, Davidson, Sellars and their followers, is largely structuralistic in the very sense in which structuralism was originally tabled by Ferdinand de Saussure. The author reconstructs de Saussure's view of language, linking it to modern formal logic and mathematics, and reveals close analogies between its constitutive principles and the principles informing the holistic and neopragmatistic view of language put forward by Quine and his followers. Peregrin also indicates how this view of language can be made compatible with what is usually called 'formal semantics'. Drawing on both the Saussurean tradition and recent developments in analytic philosophy of language, this book offers a unique study of the ways in which the concept of meaning can be seen as consisting in the concept of structure.