International symposium
Cognition and Interpretation

Institute of philosophy,
Zagreb, October 10-11, 2003

Winfried Löffler (Innsbruck)
What does it mean to formalize an argument? Remarks on logic and hermeneutics

It is a commonplace among analytic philosophers that the formalization of arguments brings a gain in exactness and allows a more reliable scrutiny of the validity and soundness of arguments. On the other hand, anybody who ever tried to formalize “serious” arguments (going beyond the well-prepared, artificial examples in logic textbooks) knows the difficulties of finding an “adequate” formalization. One of them could be labelled the “paradox of benevolent formalization”: surely, it is a principle of interpretation to impute to a text a higher rather than a lower logical quality. As a consequence, the formalizer will often be inclined to supply lacking premises, to choose the applied formal language as adequate as possible, etc. However, the more benevolence in the course of formalization, the higher is the probability that the argument will appear as valid, and the lower is the gain for the scrutiny of the argument. Another special, but frequent problem is the application of logical tools which the author of the argument could definitely not know. In my paper, I will adress some of these problems. A useful starting point seem to be some reflections on the very argument of formalization, and a classification of different overall-types of formalization.