Question I presently working through Grayling's Introduction to Philosophical Logic (Blackwell), after studying philosophy at university in the late 1960s. Can anyone recommend a follow-on text (for when I feel I have assimilated this book)? (I have seen the interesting replies to the August post about further reading on symbolic logic.) Peter

Accepted:
September 23, 2010

Comments

There aren't a whole lot of textbooks on this sort of thing. A more current text is John Burgess's Philosophical Logic. And, depending upon your interests, you might have a look at something like Graham Priest's Introduction to Non-classical Logic. Working through a serious textbook on modal logic would also be worth doing. The two classics are by Chellas and by Hughes and Cresswell.

A quite different route would be to look into linguistic semantics. Many forms of philosophical logic—tense logic, modal logic, epistemic logic—originated as attempts to deal with some of the features of natural language that are omitted by quantification theory. But the relation between the logical treatments and natural language were always pretty obscure, and around 1960 people started to get much more serious about dealing with natural language in its own terms. Formally, much of linguistic semantics looks like philosophical logic (especially in certain traditions), but it is targeted at an empirical phenomenon (natural language) and so its adequacy is subject to empirical constraints. That makes it very different, in the end. Two good places to start with this are Larson and Segal's text Knowledge of Meaning and Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet's Meaning and Grammar. The latter is on Google books, so you can have a peek before buying.