Grounding textual entailment in human intuition conflates the normative logical relation with descriptive cognitive performance, a category error Frege explicitly warned against as psychologism.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Logical entailment is a normative relation between propositions independent of any mind's cognitive capacities or limitations.
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2.Human intuitions about entailment vary by education, language, and cognitive bias, so they cannot constitute the normative standard itself.
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3.Frege distinguished sense from psychological representations precisely to avoid reducing logical truths to mental phenomena.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.We have no access to abstract logical relations except through human cognitive performance and linguistic judgment.
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2.The normativity of logic itself may emerge from or be grounded in optimal human reasoning capacities, not independent of them.
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3.Distinguishing normative logic from intuition doesn't require claiming intuition is entirely irrelevant to discovering logical truths.
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Key Terms

Category error(as used in logic and philosophy of language): A logical mistake where you apply a rule or concept to something it doesn't actually fit, like using a math formula on a poem.
Frege(as a major historical figure in philosophy): Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was a German logician and philosopher who founded modern logic and did groundbreaking work on how language relates to meaning and existence.
descriptive(describing the other type of vocabulary being compared): Language or claims about how things *actually are* in reality—just the facts without judgments about whether they're good or bad.
grounding(Drawn from contemporary metaphysics; proposed as potentially applicable to understanding the foundations of legality.): A metaphysical relation in which some entities or facts are more foundational than others, providing a hierarchical structure of the world.
normative(in ethics and philosophy): Relating to how things should be or what people ought to do, rather than just describing how things actually are.
psychologism(Philosophy of social science): The view that the social sciences are sciences of the mind or psyche of society, treating mental states as the building blocks of the social
textual entailment(Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) challenge framework): A relation between two linguistic strings where one entails the other in a sense that accords with human intuitions about what a person would naturally infer, relying on word meanings, general knowledge, and specific facts

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Consciousness & Mind1 linked Philosophy of Language1 linked

Distinguishing normative logic from intuition doesn't require claiming intuition...Frege distinguished sense from psychological representations precisely to avoid ...

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Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit