August 11, 2025Open Access

Overinterpreting Logics

Key Points

Overinterpretation poses risks of misunderstanding paraconsistent logics, leading to false conclusions about contradictions.
Basic criteria for interpreting logics are proposed, emphasizing the philosophical costs of deviating from them.
Philosophical analysis applies to the practice of interpreting paraconsistent logics, challenging common misinterpretations.
A modalist-empiricist perspective offers a neutral framework for understanding paraconsistent logics and their applications.

Abstract

Paraconsistent logics, minimally, are not explosive; that is, on these logics, not everything follows from a contradiction of the form ‘A and not-A’. Dialetheists, who argue that some contradictions are true (Priest 2006), have philosophically interpreted such logics as supporting the existence of true contradictions, since they allow for the possibility of true contradictions without triviality. In this paper, I provide basic criteria for philosophical interpretations of logics and consider the costs of violating such criteria, especially by engaging in logical overinterpretation. I argue that overinterpretation supports metaphysical or epistemological readings of logics that are not called for and that can be resisted on philosophically independent grounds. A more neutral, modalist-empiricist stance toward logics in general, and of paraconsistent logics in particular, is then advanced.

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