Michael Dummett’s Theory of Meaning

Diogo Bispo Dias

The main goal of this presentation is to argue that Dummett’s defense of intuitionistic logic is compatible with a logical pluralism. For that, we’ll start with a general investigation on Dummett’s Theory of Meaning, since it lies at the core of his criticism towards classical logic, and we’ll expose its main features.

Then, we’ll present the notion of paraconsistentization of logics, which means the process of turning a non-paraconsistent logic into a paraconsistent one. It will be proven that this can be done both semantically and syntactically, and we’ll discuss some formal properties of these procedures.

Given this background, we’ll show how to develop a theory of meaning subjacent to the notion of paraconsistentization of logics that is compatible with Dummett’s requirement for a correct theory of meaning. Hence, a paraconsistent version of intuitionistic logic should still be considered as correct logic by Dummett’s constrains and, therefore, his position is compatible with a logical pluralism.

Finally, we’ll present some general philosophical consequences of paraconsistentization of logics, as well as possible future investigations.