The Logical Firmament

Most work in the epistemology of logic asks how inferential rules are known, and how individual steps in a proof are justified. But what happens when single steps are composed into a complex derivation? A new set of facts—“compositional facts”—come into play, which have been undertheorized despite being at the heart of such phenomena as logical non-omniscience. I will ask how recognition of these facts might alter our metaphysics and epistemology of logic. And I will make a tentative proposal for how compositional facts come to be known.