This paper investigates the work of Frank Miller, particularly his Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, in light of Nietzschean aesthetics and social commentary. A graphic novelist, and thus nominally an entertainer of the masses, Miller uses the comic medium to challenge, aesthetically and intellectually. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns explores the struggles of an ageing Batman to redefine the relationship between the dictates of the government and his own will and capacity to control his environment. Through text and image, Miller (...) emphasises the personal impotence of those agents of order who are working to restrain Batman, and the essential similarities between Batman and the criminals he fights, both of whom exist outside of that social order. Quintessentially Nietzschean themes – sickness and health, self-created and imposed identities, and irresolvable conflict between the true individual and society – recur throughout the work. Miller's work is triply subversive. First, it subverts generic expectations that the superhero will uphold the social order; second, it both challenges and supports Nietzsche's contention that art was the province of the noble singular artist and a product of ‘high culture', rather than of the masses; thirdly, it repositions Nietzsche within popular culture, subverting his expectations of his reception. This phenomenon of at one appropriating and challenging Nietzsche makes Miller an instructive example of an alternative way in which we can confront Nietzschean ideas about art and life. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 (1) 2007: pp. 96-108. (shrink)

In this study two strands of inferentialism are brought together: the philosophical doctrine of Brandom, according to which meanings are generally inferential roles, and the logical doctrine prioritizing proof-theory over model theory and approaching meaning in logical, especially proof-theoretical terms.

The paper presents an argument against a "metaphysical'* conception of logic according to which logic spells out a specific kind of mathematical structure that is somehow inherently related to our factual reasoning. In contrast, it is argued that it is always an empirical question as to whether a given mathematical structure really does captures a principle of reasoning. lMore generally, it is argued that it is not meaningful to replace an empirical investigation of a thing by an investigation of its (...) a priori analyzable structure without paying due attention to the question of whether it really is the structure of the thing in question.) It is proposed to elucidate the situation by distinguishing two essentially different realms with which our reason must deal: "the realm of the natural'*, constituted by the things of our empirical world, and "the realm of the formal'*, constituted by the structures that we use as "prisms'* to view, to make sense of, and to reconstruct the world. It is suggested that this vantage point may throw light on many foundational problems of logic. (shrink)

A review of deVries' and O'Shea's books, both titled "Wilfrid Sellars". By Jaroslav Peregrin.

The problem of biological memory led Russell to propose the existence of mnemic causation, a mechanism by which past experience influences current thought directly, that is, without the need for a material intermediary in the form of a neural "memory trace." Russell appears to have been inspired by German biologist Richard Semon's concept of mnemic homophony, which conveys memory to consciousness on the basis of similarity between current and past circumstances. Semon, however, in no way denied a role for stable (...) neural structures or "engrams" in the memory process. In contrast to Russell, contemporary biologist Rupert Sheldrake provides a viable theory of memory by remaining true to Semon's original idea and expanding it beyond personal memory to the collective memory of species, encompassing not only mental but developmental memory. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of (...) thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Prerequisite to memory is a past distinct from present. Because wave evolution is both continuous and time-reversible, the undisturbed quantum system lacks a distinct past and therefore the possibility of memory. With the quantum transition, a reversibly evolving superposition of values yields to an irreversible emergence of definite values in a distinct and transient moment of time. The succession of such moments generates an irretrievable past and thus the possibility of memory. Bohm’s notion of implicate and explicate order provides a (...) conceptual basis for memory as a general feature of nature akin to gravity and electromagnetism. I propose that natural memory is an outcome of the continuity of implicate time in the context of discontinuous explicate time. Among the ramifications of natural memory are that laws of nature can propagate through time much like habits and that personal memory does not require neural information storage. (shrink)

Logic is usually presented as a tool of rational inquiry; however, many logicians in fact treat logic so that it does not serve us, but rather governs us – as rational beings we are subordinated to the logical laws we aspire to disclose. We denote the view that logic primarily serves us as logica serviens, while denoting the thesis that it primarily governs our reasoning as logica dominans. We argue that treating logic as logica dominans is misguided, for it leads (...) to the idea of a “genuine” logic within a “genuine” language. Instead of this, we offer a naturalistic picture, according to which the only languages that exist are the natural languages and the artificial languages logicians have built. There is, we argue, no language beyond these, especially none that would be a wholesome vehicle of reasoning like the natural languages and yet be transparently rigorous like the artificial ones. Logic is a matter of using the artificial languages as idealized models of the natural ones, whereby we pinpoint the laws of logic by means of zooming in on a reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

The paper presents an argument against a "metaphysical" conception of logic according to which logic spells out a specific kind of mathematical structure that is somehow inherently related to our factual reasoning. In contrast, it is argued that it is always an empirical question as to whether a given mathematical structure really does captures a principle of reasoning. (More generally, it is argued that it is not meaningful to replace an empirical investigation of a thing by an investigation of its (...) a priori analyzable structure without paying due attention to the question of whether it really is the structure of the thing in question.) It is proposed to elucidate the situation by distinguishing two essentially different realms with which our reason must deal: "the realm of the natural", constituted by the things of our empirical world, and "the realm of the formal", constituted by the structures that we use as "prisms" to view, to make sense of, and to reconstruct the world. It is suggested that this vantage point may throw light on many foundational problems of logic. (shrink)

Summary. I do not think there is one true answer to the question What is logic?. There are, clearly, good and less good answers, and there are answers which are plainly wrong; but the term 'logic' has been employed, throughout the history of the subject matter, in such diverse ways that no single one of the uses can be said to be the correct one. However, even among the answers which are acceptable on historico-semantical grounds there are still, without doubt, (...) good and less good ones, in the sense of more and less useful. In this paper, I will argue for a certain, rather narrow conception of logic; and I am going to argue that it is not only an acceptable answer, but also one which is more useful and fruitful than its alternatives. (shrink)

Ve své nové knížce Kauzalita činitele Petr Dvořák argumentuje, že svoboda vůle existuje, a tudíž musíme přijmout nějakou formu indeterminismu; a předkládá návrh odpovídajícího pojmového rámce. Já se naproti tomu domnívám, že ač svoboda vůle skutečně existuje, neměli bychom proto opouštět determinismus; hlásím se tedy k určité formě kompatibilismu. Podle mého druhu kompatibilismu tomu ovšem není tak, že by se svoboda vůle dala vtěsnat do deterministického rámce. Domnívám se, že řešení je v přijetí toho, že při výkladu skutečnosti nevystačíme s (...) jediným pojmovým rámcem – konkrétně že na člověka se můžeme dívat jako na organismus (skrze deterministický a fyzikalistický rámec), ale také jako na osobu (skrze rámec, který je „prodchnut normativitou“). (shrink)

It is a trivial fact that if we have a square table filled with numbers, we can always form a column which is not yet contained in the table. Despite its apparent triviality, this fact underlies the foundations of most of the path-breaking results of logic in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. We explain how this fact can be used to show that there are more sequences of natural numbers than there (...) are natural numbers, that there are more real numbers than natural numbers and that every set has more subsets than elements (all results due to Cantor); we indicate how this fact can be seen as underlying the celebrated Russell paradox; and we show how it can be employed to expose the most fundamental result of mathematical logic of the twentieth century, Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Finally, we show how this fact yields the unsolvability of the halting problem for Turing machines. (shrink)

Inferentialism is the conviction that to be meaningful in the distinctively human way, or to have a 'conceptual content', is to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules. The term was coined by Robert Brandom as a label for his theory of language; however, it is also naturally applicable (and is growing increasingly common) within the philosophy of logic.

By deriving the Lorentz transformation from the absolute speed of light, Einstein demonstrated the relativistic variability of space and time, enabling him to explain length contraction and time dilation without recourse to a "luminiferous ether" or preferred frame of reference. He also showed that clocks synchronized at a distance via light signals are not synchronized in a frame of reference differing from that of the clocks. However, by mislabeling the relativity of synchrony the "relativity of simultaneity," Einstein implied that this (...) effect concerns an actual difference in times from one frame to another rather than merely a failure of clock synchronization across frames. As a theory of length contraction and time dilation on the basis of relative motion in the context of the absolute speed of light, special relativity is the definitive interpretation of the Lorentz transformation and the correct explanation of relativistic phenomena. The relativity of simultaneity, as I demonstrate, plays no role in this explanation but instead provides apparent justification for a view of time in which the present moment is frame-dependent. In contrast to its legitimate application, special relativity fails as a theory of time on the basis of the relativity of simultaneity. (shrink)

I propose that logic may be seen as a science of patterns—however, not in the sense in which mathematics is a science of patterns, but rather in the sense in which physics is. The proposal is that logic identifies, explores, and fixes the inferential patterns which de facto govern our argumentative practices. It can be seen, I argue, as picking up the patterns and working from them toward the state of reflective equilibrium, where the laws it aims at are explicitly (...) articulated. Due to the normativity of logic, this process is not quite the same as that in which a natural science works its way from data to its laws; however, there is no reason why it should be seen as proceeding via a mysterious "a priori analysis.” Instead, it should proceed in the intersubjective space in which the sciences are practiced. (shrink)

Když jsem v roce 1992 začínal na filosofické fakultě UK přednášet teorii sémantiky, cítil jsem intenzivní potřebu poskytnout studentům nějaký učební text. O překotném vývoji tohoto interdisciplinárního oboru, který odstartovalo v sedmdesátých letech úspěšné “zkřížení logiky s lingvistikou” Richardem Montaguem a dalšími a který se nezpomalil dodnes, totiž v češtině neexistovaly prakticky žádné zprávy (s čestnou výjimkou přístupu tzv. transparentní intenzionální logiky, který byl dílem českého emigranta Pavla Tichého a o kterém u nás psal Pavel Materna). Přehledové publikace, jaké jsou (...) potřeba pro někoho, kdo se chce v dané problematice zorientovat, se ovšem v té době i po světě teprve začínaly objevovat: v roce 1990 vyšla kniha An Introduction to Semantics Gennara Chierchii a Sally McConell-Ginnetové a v roce 1991 vydala skupina holandských logiků pod kolektivním pseudonymem L.T.F. Gamut dvousvazkovou knihu Language and Meaning. Za této situace jsem se pokusil co nejrychleji sepsat učební text, který by moji studenti i jiní zájemci o sémantiku mohli použít; a protože o jeho vydání paradoxně projevila větší zájem filosofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity v Brně (kde jsem já osobně nikdy neučil; ale zájem o sémantiku tam neúnavně podněcoval a vydání mého textu tam zprostředkoval kolega Materna) než filosofická fakulta mojí domovské Karlovy univerzity, vyšel tento text v Brně, a to pod názvem Úvod do teoretické sémantiky. (shrink)

Can we base the whole of logic solely on the concept of incompatibility? My motivation for asking this is two-fold: firstly, a technical interest in what a minimal foundations of logic might be; and secondly, the existence of philosophers who have taken incompatibility as the ultimate key to human reason (viz., e.g., Hegel's concept of determinate negation). The main aim of this contribution is to tackle two related questions: Is it possible to reduce the foundations of logic to the mere (...) concept of incompatibility? and Does this reduction lead us to a specific logical system? We conclude that the answers, respectively, are YES and a qualified NO (qualified in the sense that basing semantics on incompatibility does make some logical systems more natural than others, but without ruling out the alternatives.) A search for the bare bones of logic generally leads one to the relation of inference (or consequence). This way is explored meticulously by Koslow (1992). He defines an implication structure as, in effect, an ordered pair , where S is a set and | f Pow(S)HS fulfilling certain (relatively simple) restrictions. And obviously if we reduce incompatibility to inference, which is achievable by the well known ex contradictione quodlibet principle, we reach a logic based on incompatibility. The kind of logic flowing most straightforwardly from this setting is the intuitionist one. However, there is also the approach taken by R. Brandom and A. Aker (2008), who have set up a logic based directly on incompatibility. They define an incompatibility structure as an ordered pair such that S is a set and z f Pow(S) (again fulfilling certain restrictions). The authors introduce logical operators in such a way that they reach classical logic. Does this mean that inference 'naturally' leads to intuitionist logic, whereas incompatibility leads to the classical one? Myself, I have argued that it is indeed intuitionist logic that is the logic of inference (see Peregrin, 2008).. (shrink)

The article addresses two closely related questions: What are the criteria of adequacy of logical formalization of natural language arguments, and what gives logic the authority to decide which arguments are good and which are bad? Our point of departure is the criticism of the conception of logical formalization put forth, in a recent paper, by M. Baumgartner and T. Lampert. We argue that their account of formalization as a kind of semantic analysis brings about more problems than it solves. (...) We also argue that the criteria of adequate formalization need not be based on truth conditions associated with logical formulas; in our view, they are better based on structural (inferential) grounds. We then put forward our own version of the criteria. The upshot of the discussion that follows is that the quest for an adequate formalization in a suitable logical language is best conceived of as the search for a Goodmanian reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

There are various approaches to truth and knowledge (in fact, cataloguing them has become something of a philosophical industry of its own); and in many cases, their explanations are taken to underlie the explanation of other crucial concepts, like language, reason etc. Especially in recent years, some of the approaches have come to be based on reducing semantics to pragmatics. An outstanding example of such a pragmatist approach is that of Bob Brandom, who bases the explication of both truth and (...) knowledge on his consideration of normative pragmatics. A less explicitly pragmatist approach to truth and knowledge was offered by Donald Davidson (who is surely not a pragmatist in the narrow sense of the word, but may be thought about as one in the wider sense proposed by Brandom, 2002, in which pragmatism means starting from the practical rather than the theoretical). In this paper I would like to point out that the discrepancy between these two approaches may be smaller than it would prima facie seem. To show this, I first turn my attention briefly to the general problem of theoretically accounting for human minds. (shrink)

The perennial question – What is meaning? – receives many answers. In this paper I present and discuss inferentialism – a recent approach to semantics based on the thesis that to have ( such and such ) a meaning is to be governed by ( such and such ) a cluster of inferential rules . I point out that this thesis presupposes that looking for meaning requires seeing language as a social institution (rather than, say, a psychological reality). I also (...) indicate that this approach may be seen as a new embodiment of the old ideas of structuralism. (shrink)

This book addresses the hasty development of modern logic, especially its introducing and embracing various kinds of artificial languages and moving from the study of natural languages to that of artificial ones. This shift seemed extremely helpful and managed to elevate logic to a new level of rigor and clarity. However, the change that logic underwent in this way was in no way insignificant, and it is also far from an insignificant matter to determine to what extent the "new logic" (...) only engaged new and more powerful instruments to answer the questions posed by the "old" one, and to what extent it replaced these questions with new ones. Hence, this movement has generated brand new kinds of philosophical problems that have still not been dealt with systematically. Philosophy of Logical Systems addresses these new kinds of philosophical problems that are intertwined with the development of modern logic. Jaroslav Peregrin analyzes the rationale behind the introduction of the artificial languages of logic; classifies the various tools which were adopted to build such languages; gives an overview of the various kinds of languages introduced in the course of modern logic and the motifs of their employment; discusses what can actually be achieved by relocating the problems of logic from natural language into them; and reaches certain conclusions with respect to the possibilities and limitations of this "formal turn" of logic. This book is both an important scholarly contribution to the philosophy of logic and a systematic survey of the standard logical systems that were established during the short history of modern logic. (shrink)

The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth into an explicit definition of the concept hence coalesced with the question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and ingenious move was to introduce a new concept, satisfaction, which could be, on the one hand, recursively defined, and which, on the other hand, straightforwardly yielded an explication of truth. A surprising 'by-product' of Tarski's effort to bring truth under control was (...) the breathtaking finding that truth is in a precisely defined sense ineffable, that no non trivial language can contain a truth-predicate which would be adequate for the very 4 language. This implied that truth proved itself to be strangely 'language-dependent': we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a concept of truth applicable to every language. In a sense, this means, as Quine put it, that truth belongs to "transcendental metaphysics", and Tarski's 'scientific' investigations seem to lead us back towards a surprising proximity of some more traditional philosophical views on truth. 3. TARSKI'S THEORY AS A PARADIGM So far Tarski himself. Subsequent philosophers then had to find out what his considerations of the concept of truth really mean and what are their consequences; and this now seems to be an almost interminable task. (shrink)

Formal semantics is an enterprise which accounts for meaning in formal, mathematical terms, in the expectation of providing a helpful explication1 of the concept of the meaning of specific word kinds (such as logical ones), or of words and expressions generally. Its roots go back to Frege, who proposed exempting concepts, meanings of predicative expressions, from the legislation of psychology and relocating them under that of mathematics. This started a spectacular enterprise, fostered at first within formal logic and later moving (...) into the realm of natural languages, and featuring a series of eminent scholars, from Tarski and Carnap to Montague and David Lewis. Partly independently of this, Frege set the agenda for a long-term discussion of the question of what a natural language is, his own contribution being that language should be seen not as a matter of subjective psychology, but rather as a reality objective in the sense in which mathematics is objective. His formal semantics, then, was just an expression of this conception of language. And many theoreticians now take it for granted that formal semantics is inseparably connected with a Platonist conception of language. Moreover, the more recent champions of formal semantics, Montague and David Lewis, took for granted that natural language is nothing else than a structure of the very kind envisaged by the theories of formal logicians. While Montague claims quite plainly that there is no substantial difference between formal and natural languages ("I reject the contention," he says, 1974, p. 188, "that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages"), Lewis states that it is fully correct to say that a linguistic community entertains a language in the form of a mathematical structure ("we can say", states Lewis, 1975, p.. (shrink)

One of the recent trends in the philosophy of language and theory of meaning is the inferentialist project launched by Robert Brandom (1994, 2000, 2008), elaborating on the approach of Wilfrid Sellars (1953, 1954, 1956, 1974). According to this project, language is to be seen as essentially a rule-governed activity, providing for meaningful utterances in a way analogous to the way in which the rules of chess provide for making one's pawns, bishops or rooks attack one's opponent, checking his king (...) or castling (see Peregrin, 2008). Inferentialism is also a theory of the nature of human reason and consequently of the nature of man, hence an ambitious project. Independently of how realistic these ambitions are, it is of a profound interest that many of the ideas of contemporary general semantic inferentialism were already tabled and discussed within the philosophy of law. Some of them were used to account for the semantics of legal discourse just like they are now used to account for discourse more generally and hence their current employment can be seen as mere generalization; others were submitted to illustrate the fact that legal discourse is specific rather than continuous with the ordinary one. In this paper we would like to survey two such discussions; before presenting the example of the former kind, we will mention one of the latter kind. We will try to show how the legal theorists anticipated current discussions in the field of the philosophy of language and that given the current constellation of the debate, philosophy of language may learn many things from the philosophy of law. (shrink)

There may be various reasons for claiming that meaning is normative, and additionally, very different senses attached to the claim. However, all such claims have faced fierce resistance from those philosophers who insist that meaning is not normative in any nontrivial sense of the word. In this paper I sketch one particular approach to meaning claiming its normativity and defend it against the anti-normativist critique: namely the approach of Brandomian inferentialism. However, my defense is not restricted to inferentialism in any (...) narrow sense for it encompasses a much broader spectrum of approaches to meaning, connected with the Wittgensteinian and especially Sellarsian view of language as an essentially rule-governed enterprise; and indeed I refrain from claiming that the version of inferentialism I present here is in every detail the version developed by Brandom. (shrink)

W.V.O. Quine: Ontologická relativita W. Sellars: VĂ˝znam jako funkÄŤnĂ klasifikace D. Davidson: O samotnĂ© myšlence pojmovĂ©ho schĂ©matu N. Goodman: Slova, dĂla svÄ›ty R. Rorty: ZkoumĂnĂ jako rekontextualizace: antidualistickĂ© pojetĂ interpretace H. Putnam: Otázka realismu..

[Donald Davidson: Fighting the “Myth of the Subjective”].

Ve své knížce Fenomenologie a kultura slepé skvrny předkládá Ivan Blecha tři eseje, jejichž společným jmenovatelem je konfrontace různých aspektů postmodernistické filosofie s filosofií fenomenologickou. Proti obratu k jazyku a z něj často vyvozovaného pluralismu nebo dokonce relativismu staví Blecha tezi, že svět, ve kterém člověk žije, je determinován způsobem, kterým v kadlubu své intencionální mysli konstituuje věci ze svého bezprostředního prožívání, a že tudíž tento svět není v žádném podstatném slova smyslu ani tvarován jazykem, ani otevřen žádným velkým pluralistickým (...) variacím. V prvním textu, ‘Znak, stopa, fenomén’ se Blecha zamýšlí především nad tím, co nazývá lingvistickou klauzurou (a co je podle něj přesvědčením společným francouzským poststrukturalistům kolem Derridy i americkým postanalytickým filosofům kolem Rortyho), totiž že člověk nemá bezprostřední přístup ke světu, ale jedině k jazyku, takže veškeré poznávání je jenom interpretace. Ve druhém, ‘Kant, pragmatický anti-realismus a Husserlova fenomenologie’ se zabývá tím, do jaké míry je opodstatněné relativistické domýšlení Kanta. V posledním, který je nazván tak jako celá knížka, pak polemizuje především s názory Wolfganga Welsche, které ústí do cílevědomého epistemického pluralismu. Myslím, že ty nejzákladnější otázky, které Blecha ve své knize klade, totiž otázka po nutnosti a mezích plurality a po tom, do jaké míry je nám chápání světa zprostředkováváno jazykem, jsou velice důležité a také velice zajímavé. Blecha se s nimi navíc snaží vypořádat, aniž by se obrnil hantýrkou, která by jeho obranu fenomenologie učinila srozumitelnou zase jenom pro fenomenology; a jeho kniha tím představuje výzvu k zajímavé diskusi. Do filosofů na druhé straně barikády se pouští s odkrytým hledím, a i když je, jak se budu snažit ukázat, sem tam v něčem dezinterpretuje, je jeho kniha ukázku toho, jak by se podle mne s konkurenčními filosofickými směry polemizovat mělo. Co se mi jeví jako dezinterpretace, se objevuje hned na počátku prvního eseje.. (shrink)

Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content have chosen to do precisely this: what they present is a dialogic confrontation of two different kinds of views of a certain aspect of language, resulting into a partial synthesis. I should say immediately that this unusual form was a happy choice; but to explain why we must return to the roots of formal semantics.

Doing Worlds with Words throws light on the problem of meaning as the meeting point of linguistics, logic and philosophy, and critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of elucidating the nature of meaning by means of formal logic, model theory and model-theoretical semantics. The main thrust of the book is to show that it is misguided to understand model theory metaphysically and so to try to base formal semantics on something like formal metaphysics; rather, the book states that model theory (...) and similar tools of the analysis of language should be understood as capturing the semantically relevant, especially inferential, structure of language. From this vantage point, the reader gains a new light on many of the traditional concepts and problems of logic and philosophy of language, such as meaning, reference, truth and the nature of formal logic. (shrink)

The heyday of discussions initiated by Searle's claim that computers have syntax, but no semantics has now past, yet philosophers and scientists still tend to frame their views on artificial intelligence in terms of syntax and semantics. In this paper I do not intend to take part in these discussions; my aim is more fundamental, viz. to ask what claims about syntax and semantics in this context can mean in the first place. And I argue that their sense is so (...) unclear that that their ability to act as markers within any disputes on artificial intelligence is severely compromised; and hence that their employment brings us nothing more than an illusion of explanation. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the question whether there is a logic which could be justly called the logic of inference. It may seem that at least since Prawitz, Dummett and others demonstrated the proof-theoretical prominency of intuitionistic logic, the forthcoming answer is that it is this logic that is the obvious choice for the accolade. Though there is little doubt that this choice is correct (provided that inference is construed as inherently single-conclusion and complying with the Gentzenian structural (...) rules), I do not think that the usual justification of it is satisfactory. Therefore, I will first try to clarify what exactly is meant by the question, and then sketch a conceptual framework in which it can be reasonably handled. I will introduce the concept of 'inferentially native' logical operators (those which explicate inferential properties) and I will show that the axiomatization of these operators leads to the axiomatic system of intuitionistic logic. Finally, I will discuss what modifications of this answer enter the picture when more general notions of inference are considered. (shrink)