Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science

Volume 24, Issue 2, May 2009

Marcus Rossberg, Daniel Cohnitz
Pages 147-168

Logical Consequence for Nominalists

It has repeatedly been argued that nominalistic programmes in the philosophy of mathematics fail, since they will at some point or other involve the notion of logical consequence which is unavailable to the nominalist. In this paper we will argue that this is not the case. Using an idea of Nelson Goodman andW.V. Quine’s which they developed in Goodman and Quine (1947) and supplementing it with means that should be nominalistically acceptable, we present a way to explicate logical consequence in a nominalistically acceptable way.