Change of logic, without change of meaning

Abstract

Change of logic is typically taken as requiring that the meanings of the connectives change too. As a result, it has been argued that legitimate rivalry between logics is under threat. This is, in a nutshell, the meaning-variance argument, traditionally attributed to Quine. In this paper, we present a semantic framework that allows us to resist the meaning-variance claim for an important class of systems: classical logic, the logic of paradox and strong Kleene logic. The major feature of the semantics is that the connectives have the same meanings in these systems, so that the meaning-variance argument is straightforwardly blocked. We discuss the effects of this semantics for two uses of the argument of meaning variance, and also consider its impact on related issues.