Constructive Logic, Truth and Warranted Assertibility

October 2001

“Constructive Logic, Truth and Warranted Assertibility,” Philosophical Quarterly, 51 (2001) 474–483.

Shapiro and Taschek have argued that simply using intuitionistic logic and its Heyting semantics, one can show that there are no gaps in warranted assertibility. That is, given that a discourse is faithfully modelled using Heyting”s semantics for the logical constants, that if a statement S is not warrantedly assertible, then its negation ~S is. Tennant has argued for this conclusion on similar grounds. I show that these arguments fail, albeit in illuminating ways. I will show that an appeal to constructive logic does not commit one to this strong epistemological thesis, but that appeals to semantics of intuitionistic logic nonetheless do give us certain conclusions about the connections between warranted assertibility and truth.

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