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This paper is divided into four sections. The first two identify different logicist theses, and show that their truth-values can be conclusively established on minimal assumptions. Section 3 sets forth a notion of ‘content-recarving ’ as a possible constraint on logicist theses. Section 4—which is largely independent from the rest of the paper—is a discussion of ‘Neo-Logicism’. 1 Logicism 1.1 What is Logicism? Briefly, logicism is the view that mathematics is a part of logic. But this formulation is imprecise because it fails to distinguish between the following three claims: 1. Language-Logicism The language of mathematics consists of purely logical expressions.

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Over the last few decades Michael Dummett developed a rich program for assessing logic and the meaning of the terms of a language. He is also a major exponent of Frege’s version of logicism in the philosophy of mathematics. Over the last decade, Neil Tennant developed an extensive version of logicism in Dummettian terms, and Dummett influenced other contemporary logicists such as Crispin Wright and Bob Hale. The purpose of this paper is to explore the prospects for Fregean logicism within a broadly Dummettian framework. The conclusions are mostly negative: Dummett’s views on analyticity and the logical/non-logical boundary leave little room for logicism. Dummett’s considerations concerning manifestation and separability lead to a conservative extension requirement: if a sentence S is logically true, then there is a proof of S which uses only the introduction and elimination rules of the logical terms that occur in S. If basic arithmetic propositions are logically true—as the logicist contends—then there is tension between this conservation requirement and the ontological commitments

In this article, we canvass a few of the interesting topics that philosophers can pursue as part of the simultaneous study of logic and metaphysics. To keep the discussion to a manageable length, we limit our survey to deductive, as opposed to inductive, logic. Though most of this article