Redefining logical constants as inference markers

Abstract

There is currently no universally accepted general de nition of logical constanthood. With a view to addressing this issue, we follow a pragmatist ratio- nale, according to which, some notion can be identi ed as a logical constant by considering the way in which it is used in our everyday reasoning practices, and argue that a logical constant has to be seen as encoding some kind of dynamic meaning, which marks the presence of an inferential transition among proposi- tional contents. We then put forth a characterisation of logical constants that takes into account their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic roles. What follows from our proposal is that logical constanthood can be best understood as a func- tional property that is satis ed only by certain uses of the relevant notions.