Prawitz's Epistemic Grounding

This book presents an in-depth and critical reconstruction of Prawitz'sepistemic grounding, and discusses it within the broader field of proof-theoreticsemantics. The theory of grounds is also provided with a formalframework, through which several relevant results are proved. Investigating Prawitz's theory of grounds, this work answers one of the mostfundamental questions in logic: why and how do some inferences havethe epistemic power to compel us to accept their conclusion, if we haveaccepted their premises? Prawitz proposes an innovative description ofinferential acts, as applications of constructive operations on grounds forthe premises, yielding a ground for the conclusion. The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the author discusses the reasonsthat have led Prawitz to abandon his previous semantics of validarguments and proofs. The second part presents Prawitz'sgrounding as foundin his ground-theoretic papers. Finally, in the third part, a formal apparatus is developed, consisting of a class of languages whoseterms are equipped with denotation functions associating them tooperations and grounds, as well as of a class of systems where importantproperties of the terms can be proved.