Meaningless Divisions

Abstract

In this article, we revisit a number of disputes regarding significance logics—that is, inferential frameworks capable of handling meaningless, although grammatical, sentences—that took place in a series of articles most of which appeared in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy between 1966 and 1978. These debates concern (i) the way in which logical consequence ought to be approached in the context of a significance logic, and (ii) the way in which the logical vocabulary has to be modified (either by restricting some notions, or by adding some vocabulary) to keep as much of classical logic as possible. Our aim is to show that the divisions arising from these disputes can be dissolved in the context of a novel and intuitive proposal that we put forward.