I am currently reading Logic: A Very Short Introduction and can't help but think of that proverbial saying: "don't mistake the forest for the trees". The moral being: if you can't see the forest for the trees, your are getting so caught up in the small details that you fail to understand the bigger picture. I am not saying that the authors of this book is narrow minded - far from it, the book is as engaging and broad as such a book can be. Rather, it is a commentary on my own thinking regarding the rebarbative areas of philosophical inquiry. While I have an appreciation for logic and the role it plays in philosophy, I have a hard time getting into it as an activity in-itself. Enter: the proverbial forest. With regards to logic, I need an understanding of the forest before I can invest in the trees. I need to know why it matters in order for it to matter to me. Fortunately, such a forest is the task of the Philosophy of Logic, which is devoted to examining the scope and nature of logic. This includes the problems in the field and the relation of logic to mathematics and other disciplines. In slightly less technical wording: Philosophy of Logic tells a story of what Logic is and why it is. At first, I only knew of one such story: that of empistemic access (EA). Logic, the story goes, establishes the truth of certain claims by proving them. Logic is thus good and right by virtue of its ability to provide us with truth claims. But there is something fishy about this story. It's justification hinges providing epistemically access, but does not epistemic access function upon logical vocabulary? Such a story is reminiscent of Pax Romana. Yes, peace ....but at what cost? Yes, truth ....but at what cost? It is this very question that a story is supposed to answer but is conspicuously absent in EA. Recently, however, I have come across another story of what and why Logic is. Logic can also be thought of in terms of expressive explication (EE), as a distinctive set of tools for saying something that cannot otherwise be made explicit. Unlike the first story, in which Logic simply establishes itself by right, logic is nested in a broad inferentialist account of concept use - in which making a claim implicitly endorses a set of inferences which articulates its conceptual content. Understood as such, logic looks less like a Pax Romana and more like the rules of a game in which we find ourselves already playing. Instead of being a check point to Truth, logic is the tool by which we say things we already knew, we just didn't know that we knew. Since coming across this story I view logic much more like a craft or skill - the mastering of which will make me a better philosopher.
