What Logicians Do (and What They Ought to do)

Grammarians have come to think of their discipline as a descriptive science, not as a set of prescriptive rules. This paper explores the ways in which logic, sometimes called “the grammar of argumentation,” can also be considered a descriptive science. Logic is a natural science that describes a set of observable facts, namely facts about the nature of successful reasoning, but logicians have been remiss in failing to recognize abductive reasoning as an observable mode of successful reasoning. Logic also offers descriptive definitions of words that structure arguments in common speech. But here logicians have made a “prescriptivist error,” offering a definition of the ‘if…then…’ relation that has no basis in common usage. The paper prescribes (to logicians) that they should (a) accept abduction as a third mode of reasoning, and (b) adopt a definition of the consequence relation commensurate with the connexivist school of logic.