The Concept of Relevance and the Logic Diagram Tradition (Paperback) | Released: 31 Jul 2012

This book upends the almost universally received view that modern classical logic is anti-relevantist. PRAISE 1: "Dejnozka's erudition continues to astound me." - Nicholas Griffin. As Canada Research Chair and Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University, Professor Griffin directs the editing of the ongoing editions of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. He also edited The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell. PRAISE 2: "Dejnozka challenges the reader to open his mind for a new interpretation of Russell's work, in particular that relevance notions have a greater place in his philosophy of logic than has been stressed before. Dejnozka's work is full of material which stimulates one to rethink Russell's philosophy of logic, and it is greatly to the author's credit that he brings to light such a wealth of crucial issues in the history and philosophy of logic." - Shahid Rahman. Professor Rahman teaches at the Université de Lille (France). He is the author of several books and the editor of several anthologies on logic. FROM PUBLISHED REVIEW 1: "This book offers a new interpretation of relevance logic. It does so by reuniting two areas of logical research that have been historically unrelated: diagrammatic logic and relevance logic." Francesco Bellucci, Studia Logica (2019). FROM PUBLISHED REVIEW 2: "Dejnozka's defense of his view is well articulated and strongly supported by citing thinkers of the caliber of Quine, Russell and Wittgenstein, among others. Moreover, the defense is presented in a clear and explicit way, making evident the role played by relevance logic and diagrams.... Finally, a very positive aspect is the presence of many explanatory notes, placed at the end of the book, that shed light on the discussion in the text." Edgar L. B. Almeida, Logic and Logical Philosophy (2013). FROM PUBLISHED REVIEW 3: "The main argument of the book is interesting for suggesting that truth ground containment, i.e. the classical notion of consequence, embodies a meaningful notion of a connection between the assumptions and the conclusion of a valid argument.... I do think that the book's main claims hold.... Yes, classical validity can be seen as involving a...notion of containment - containment of truth grounds. Yes, this notion can be found in the writings of outstanding modern classical logicians such as Wittgenstein or Russell. Yes, the relevantist's notion of relevance...can be seen as a species of a broader genus. Perhaps the greatest merit of the present book is that it emphasizes these points explicitly." Igor Sedlár, Organon F (2014). BOOK DESCRIPTION: In the first volume of their monumental work, Entailment, Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D. Belnap say that the "modern classical tradition[, ] stemming from Frege and Whitehead-Russell, gave no consideration whatsoever to the classical notion of relevance." But just what is this classical notion? I argue that the relevance tradition is implicitly most deeply concerned with the containment of truth-grounds. Thus modern classical logicians such as Peirce, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine are implicit relevantists on the deepest level. In showing this, I reunite two fields of logic which have become basically separated from each other: relevance logic and diagram logic. I argue that there are two main concepts of relevance, intensional and extensional. The first is that of the relevantists. The second is the concept of truth-ground containment as following from in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I show that this second concept belongs to the diagram tradition of showing that the premisses contain the conclusion by the fact that the conclusion is diagrammed in the very act of diagramming the premisses. I argue that the extensional concept is primary, with at least five usable modern classical filters or constraints. In this way, I argue for a major reunion of purpose in logic between relevantists and modern classical logicians.
About the Author: Jan Dejnozka (pronounced Yon DAY-no-shka) was born on December 20, 1951 in Saratoga Springs, New York to Ladislav and Helen Garrett Dejnozka. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1979 from the University of Iowa and a J.D. in law in 1996 from the University of Michigan. He taught philosophy at the University of Iowa and the United States Naval Academy, was a Visiting Scholar in Law and Philosophy in the Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, and is a Research Fellow in Philosophy at Union College. His works include The Ontology of the Analytic Tradition and Its Origins (1996 original printing, 2003 corrected printing, Littlefield Adams), Bertrand Russell on Modality and Logical Relevance (1999 first edition, Ashgate, 2015 second edition, CreateSpace), and over twenty papers in philosophy and law. In 1992 he married Chung Hwa Choi, born in Seoul, South Korea. The Dejnozkas have two daughters, Julie and Marina.