Abstract

Propositionalism is the claim that all logical relations can be captured by propositional logic. It is usually regarded as obviously false, because propositional logic seems too weak to capture the rich logical structure of language. I show that there is a clear sense in which propositional logic can match first-order logic, by producing formalizations that are valid iff their first-order counterparts are, and also respect grammatical form as the propositionalist construes it. I explain the real reason propositionalism fails, which is more subtle and more interesting.