Martínez Ordaz on Cases in Logic

 In philosophy of logic, it has become common to find arguments based on one logic outperforming another in accounting for the data, i.e., capturing and systematizing our pre-theoretical intuitions and practices regarding what follows from what, what is consistent with what, etc. However, our intuitions are not well suited for this job. They are too messy and mushy. Our intuitions do not use logical or, in general, theoretical language. We may have a positive intuitive reaction towards a certain assertion, it is not innocuous to say that the assertion is intuitively true. So perhaps we should moderate our expectations when we deal with cases and intuitions.

“What counts as the relevant reasoning in as scientific case, which aspects of the case should be abstracted away, and how thew resulting reasoning should ve formally represented are tghemnselves matters of methodological and philosophical interpretation” (Martínez Ordaz 2026)

It does not follow, of course, from the fact that arguments are linguistic entities that our best theory of their logical validity must be a linguistic theory, or even sensitive to linguistic information. This is because of the nature of abstraction. To say that an entity is linguistic is to say something about it—perhaps even something essential about it—but it is not to say that it is only a linguistic entity. Linguistic entities have properties that are not purely linguistic. Some of these will be extrinsic, such as their social history. Some will derive from its content. For example, a word may be rarely used because the conditions of its application rarely obtain in its context of use. Validity may be one such property. For Platonists and at least some psychologists, it is.