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Dag Prawitz
Many of the ideas presented here were worked out while I was a fellow at the Institute
of Advanced Studies at Universit` a di Bologna in the spring of 2007 and were presented
in lectures given at the Philosophy Department of Universit`a di Bologna.
184 Dag Prawitz
I shall restrict myself here to deductive inferences and conclusive grounds,
and when speaking of inference and ground, I shall always mean de-
ductive inference and conclusive ground.
1 The problem
The question under what condition an agent, call her P , gets a ground
for the conclusion of a valid inference can be formulated more explicitly as
follows, where, for brevity, I restrict myself to the case when there is only
one premiss:
Given that
and that
the agent P has a ground for A, (b)
what further condition has to be satised in order for it to be the case that
The problem is thus to state a further condition (c) such that (a)(c)
imply (d). Obviously, as already remarked, (a) and (b) alone do not imply
(d). Hence, we need to specify a condition (c), in other words a relation
between an agent P and an inference J, which describes how the agent
arrives at a ground for the conclusion of J.
Realizing that (ck ) is not the right condition, one may see the proposal of it
as an overreaction to the simple observation rst made, viz. that an agent
need to stand in some relation to the inference, if it is to provide her with a
ground for its conclusion. Of course, the mere existence of a valid inference
cannot automatically provide the agent with a ground for the conclusion,
one may say. She has to do something. But she does not need to establish
the validity of the inference. All that is needed is that she actually uses the
inference. Then the validity of the inference does provide the agent with a
ground for the conclusion, given that she already has one for the premiss.
One may thus suggest that the condition sought for should simply be
At this point it may be good to pause and consider in more detail the nature
of the problem that I have posed. I have used the term ground in connection
with judgements to have a name on what a person needs to be in possession
of in order that her judgement is to be justied or count as knowledge,
following the Platonic idea that true opinions do not count as knowledge
unless one has grounds for them. The general problem that I have posed is
how inferences may give us such grounds.
As I use the term ground, a persons judgement is justied or counts as
knowledge when she in possession of a ground for the judgement. Conse-
quently, one does not need to show that one is in possession of a ground for
a judgment in order to be justied in making the judgement, it is enough
that in fact one is in possession of such a ground. Justications must end
somewhere, as Wittgenstein puts it. And the point where they must end is
exactly when one has got in possession of what counts as a justications or
a ground; something would be wrongly called ground, if it was not enough
188 Dag Prawitz
that one to had got in possession of it, in other words, if there was yet
something to be shown, in order that ones judgement was to be considered
justied.
Hence, it is not the agent P who has to state an adequate condition
(c) and show that (d) holds, i.e., that she has a ground for B, when the
conditions (a)(c) are satised; as just said, she is justied when she is in
possession of a ground, regardless of what she can show about it. It is we as
philosophers who have to state an adequate condition (c) and then derive
(d) from (a)(c) to give an account of the epistemic signicance of valid
inferences. The point of making inferences is to acquire knowledge, and
philosophy of logic would not be up to its task, if it could not explain how
this comes about. To explain this is to say under what conditions a valid
inference can supply us with grounds.
Since the fact that we acquire knowledge by making inference is such a
basic feature of logic, one should expect the account of this fact to be quite
simple, once we have understood rightly the key concepts involved here, in
particular the notions valid inference, inferring or making an inference, and
ground. When these notions have been explicated appropriately, one should
expect it to be a simple conceptual truth that (a)(c) imply (d).
What is surprising is that there is no generally accepted account of the
epistemic signicance of inferences and that puzzling problems seem to arise
when such an account is attempted. This is a sign that our usual under-
standing of the key concepts involved is faulty.
6 Grounds
Finally we have to pay attention to the fact that the premisses of an in-
ference may be an open judgement A(x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ) (possibly under some
open assumptions), by which I mean that its kernel is not a proposition, but
a propositional function p(x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ) dened for a domain of individu-
als such that for any n-tuple of individuals a1 , a2 , . . . , am , A(a1 , a2 , . . . , am )
is the judgement that arms p(a1 , a2 , . . . , am ). We must therefore consider
unsaturated grounds that are unsaturated not only with respect to grounds
but also with respect to individuals that can appear as arguments in proposi-
tional functions. Let A(x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ) and Ai (x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ) be assertions
whose propositional kernels are propositional functions over x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ,
and let A(a1 , a2 , . . . , am ) and Ai (a1 , a2 , . . . , am ) be the assertions that arise
194 Dag Prawitz
when we apply the corresponding propositional functions to the individ-
uals a1 , a2 , . . . , am . Then I shall say that something is an unsaturated
ground for the open judgement A(x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ) under the assumptions
A1 (x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ), A2 (x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ), . . . , An (x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ) if and only if
it is an unsaturated ground (1 , 2 , . . . , n , x1 , x2 , . . . , xm ) with respect to n
closed grounds and m individuals such that when saturated by the individ-
uals a1 , a2 , . . . , am it becomes an unsaturated ground for A(a1 , a2 , . . . , am )
under the assumptions A1 (a1 , a2 , . . . , am ), A2 (a1 , a2 , . . . , am ), . . . , An (a1 , a2 ,
. . . , am ).
We can then specify that a closed ground for a generalized proposition
xp(x) is something that is formed by an operation that I shall call universal
grounding, G, applied to an unsaturated ground (x) for the propositional
function p(x). The result of applying this operation to the open ground
(x), which I shall write Gx((x)), again indicating that x becomes bound
by writing it behind the operator, is thus a closed ground for xp(x). We
have thus the equivalence
7 Inferences
1. a number of premisses A1 , A2 , . . . , An ,
2. grounds 1 , 2 , . . . , n ,
4. a conclusion B, and
In logic we are usually not interested in individual acts of this kind and
therefore abstract away from the agent, which leaves the four items 14
individuating what I shall refer to as an (individual) inference. To make
or carry out such an inference is to apply the operation to the grounds
1 , 2 , . . . , n .
I dene an individual inference individuated by 14 to be valid if 1 ,
2 , . . . , n are grounds for A1 , A2 , . . . , An , respectively, and the result of
Inference and Knowledge 197
applying the operation to the grounds 1 , 2 , . . . , n , that is (1 , 2 , . . . ,
n ), is a ground for B.
According to this denition an individual conjunction introduction, given
with two premisses arming the propositions p1 and p2 , grounds 1 and 2
for them, the operation conjunction grounding &G, and the conclusion af-
rming the proposition p1 &p2 , is trivially a valid inference since &G(1 , 2 )
is by denition a ground for arming p1 &p2 , given that i is a ground for
arming pi .
If we introduce two operations &R1 and &R2 dened for grounds for ar-
mations of propositions of conjunctive form by the equations
&Ri (&G(1 , 2 )) = i (i = 1 or 2), then an individual inference of the
type conjunction elimination, given by a premiss arming a conjunction
p1 &p2 , a ground for it, an operation &Ri , and a conclusion arming pi ,
is valid, since the ground for the premiss must be of the form &G(1 , 2 )
where i is a ground for pi , and since the ground i is by denition the
value of the operation &Ri applied to &G(1 , 2 ).
Often we also abstract away from the grounds and from any specic
premisses and conclusion of an inference, preserving only a certain formal
relation between them. We can then speak of an inference form determined
only by this formal relation and an operation . For instance, modus ponens
may now be seen as such an inference form, individuated by giving an
operation , namely the operation R dened below, and by saying that
one of the premisses is arming a proposition of the form of an implication
p q while the other premiss arms the proposition p and the conclusion
arms the proposition q. If we also abstract away from the operation ,
we get what we may call an inference schema.
I shall say that such an inference form is valid when it holds for any
instance of the form with premisses A1 , A2 , . . . , An , and conclusion B and
for all grounds 1 , 2 , . . . , n for A1 , A2 , . . . , An that the result (1 , 2 ,
. . . , n ) of applying the operation in question to 1 , 2 , . . . , n is a ground
for B. An inference schema is valid if it can be assigned an operation
such that the resulting inference form is valid.
For instance, modus ponens as usually understood without specifying an
operation is an inference schema, which is valid, because by assigning to it
the operation R dened by the equation
R( G p (( p ), ) = (),
8 Conclusion
J is a valid inference
from judgements A1 , A2 , . . . , An to a judgement B, (a)
and that
the problem was to state a third condition (c), describing what relation P
has to have to the inference J in order that it should follow from (8)(c)
that
P has or gets a ground for B. (d)
When an individual inference is individuated not only by its premisses
and conclusion but also by grounds for the premisses and an operation
applicable to them, and when making an inference is understood as applying
this operation to the grounds, in other words, as transforming the given
grounds for the premisses to a ground for the conclusion, it becomes possible
to state the third condition that we have sought for simply as
I started out from the conviction that the question why an agent gets a
ground for a judgement by inferring it from premisses for which she already
Inference and Knowledge 199
has a ground should be easy to answer, once the concepts involved are
understood in an appropriate way. This is now actually the case. What it
means for an inference J to be valid, as it has now been dened, is simply
that the operation that comes with the inference J yields a ground for the
conclusion B when applied to the grounds 1 , 2 , . . . , n for the premisses
A1 , A2 , . . . , An in short, that (1 , 2 , . . . , n ) is a ground B. Therefore,
by making the inference J, that is, by applying the operation to the given
grounds, the agent gets in possession of a ground for the conclusion.
It remains to say something about what it is for an agent to be in pos-
session of a ground for the conclusion. As already said above, it means
basically to have made a certain construction in the mind of which the
agent is aware, and which she can manifest by naming the construction.
Regardless of whether the construction is only made in the mind or is de-
scribed, it will be present to the agent under some description, which will
normally contain descriptions of a number of operations. It is presupposed
that the agent knows these operations, which means that she is able to carry
them out, which in turn means that she is able to convert the term that
describes the ground to canonical form. Furthermore the agent is presup-
posed to understand the assertion that she makes and hence to know what
kind of ground she is supposed to have for it. It follows that when an agent
has got in possession of a ground for an judgement by making an inference,
she is aware of the fact that she has made a construction that has the right
canonical form to be a ground for the assertion that she makes.
However, it does not mean that the agent has proved that the construc-
tion she has made is really a ground for her assertion. As we have already
discussed (Section 4), this cannot be a requirement for her judgement to
be justied. But if the inference she has made is valid, then she is in fact
in possession of a ground for her judgement, and this is exactly what is
needed to be justied in making the judgement, or to be said to know that
the armed proposition is true. Furthermore, although it is not required
in order for the judgment to be justied, by reecting on the inference she
has made, the agent can prove that the inference is valid, as has been seen
in examples above.
Dag Prawitz
Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University
106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
dag.prawitz@philosophy.su.se
References