1LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE: AN EPISTEMIC OUTLOOK

logical consequence,1 has been widely challenged in recent decades. My own challenge to this thesis in The Bounds of Logic (and related articles2) was motivated by what I perceived to be its inadequate philosophical grounding. The bounds of logic are, in an important sense, the bounds of logical constants, yet the bounds of the standard logical constants are specified by enumeration, i.e., dogmatically, without grounding or explanation. Of course, how a given collection of objects is specified may change in the course of time, but my analysis of the role logical constants play in producing logical consequences led me to arrive at a criterion of logical constanthood whose 1st-order extension far exceeds the standard selection. More specifically, I showed that if we characterize logical consequence as necessary, formal, topic neutral, indifferent to differences between individuals, etc., then this characterization, restricted to languages of the 1st-level, is not adequately systematized by the standard 1st-order system. A richer system (or family of systems), with new logical constants, is required to fully capture it. The Bounds of Logic had as its goal a critical, systematic and constructive understanding of logic. As such it aimed at maximum neutrality vis-a-vis epistemic, metaphysical and meta-mathematical controversies. But a conception of logic does not exist in a vacuum. Eventually ou