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Inferentialism claims that the rules for the use of an expression express its meaning without any need to invoke meanings or denotations for them. Logical inferentialism endorses inferentialism specifically for the logical constants. Harmonic inferentialism, as the term is introduced here, usually but not necessarily a subbranch of logical inferentialism, follows Gentzen in proposing that it is the introduction-rules whch give expressions their meaning and the elimination-rules should accord harmoniously with the meaning so given. I claim that the logical expressions are those which can be given schematic rules that lie in a specific sort of harmony, general-elimination (ge) harmony, resulting from applying a certain procedure to produce ge-rules in accord with the meaning defined by the I-rules. Owen Griffiths claimed recently that identity cannot be given such rules, concluding that logical inferentialists are committed to ruling identity a non-logical expression. I show that the ge-rules for identity are indeed harmonious, so confirming that identity is a logical notion.

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This page is a summary of: HARMONIC INFERENTIALISM AND THE LOGIC OF IDENTITY, The Review of Symbolic Logic, February 2016, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s1755020316000010.
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