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ABSTRACT:
The paper addresses the question of whether Strawson’s claim that ordinary language has no exact logic entails a view according to which it is in ordinary language’s nature to be ‘illogical’. It is first explained where the traditional idea of an exact, language-independent logic comes from, i.e. the idea of a logic which underlies ordinary languages and governs their logical use and which lack – if Strawson’s assumption is right – would leave ordinary languages being ‘illogical’ insofar as there would be nothing to eliminate their logical imperfections. Secondly, it is shown that it is inherent to language – to human language in contrast to animal ones – to be ‘logical’, because language games are typically introduced, explained, learned, and played out in a practice of giving and asking for reasons , which means, so to speak, in a ‘logical space’. Thus the fact that ordinary language has no exact logic – in the sense that there is no one-to-one correspondence between its (grammatico-)syntactic and its (logico-)semantic sentence forms – does not exclude the possibilities for it to be used in a logical manner.
Key words: Strawson, ordinary language, logicality, logical space of reasons.