Concha Martínez Vidal: Inferentialism Naturalized, Anti-Exceptionalism and The Ineliminability of Perspective. The Case of Logic

Tuesday April 14 2026 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
With the growing interest in naturalistic approaches to logic, it is worth examining to what extent inferentialist naturalism can support an anti-exceptionalist view of logic. This talk revisits the proposal developed by Peregrin and Svoboda, previously introduced in joint work with García-Arnaldos (Synthese, 2025), where their account was situated within a broader set of questions surrounding the nature of logical theory. In that discussion, it was argued that their framework both offers a solution to the Adoption Problem—famously raised by Kripke and later by Boghossian and Wright—and remains committed to the core motivations of anti-exceptionalism.

Yet their view appears anti-exceptionalist in all respects except one: the way it understands the justification of logic itself. The aim of this talk is to reconsider whether this feature of their account should be read as exceptionalist. Assessing this issue is not straightforward. I will begin by offering a preliminary analysis of the justificatory status of logic and then turn to the broader comparison between how we evaluate logical theories and how we evaluate scientific theories.

The analysis proceeds from a hypothesis that is, admittedly, not very “naturalistic”: that evaluative discourse possesses an intrinsic peculiarity—one that in philosophy of language is captured by the idea of assessment sensitivity. From this perspective, I examine the proposal of Peregrin and Svoboda, asking how far their inferentialist naturalism can be reconciled with the anti-exceptionalist commitments it aims to preserve.

Bio
Concha Martínez Vidal is Associate Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her research interests are related to the philosophy of logic and mathematics: the justification of logic, the role of intuition in mathematics, indispensability arguments, and the metaphysics of numbers as abstract objects.