Alignment Workspace

legitimacy-meets-syntax

frame · drafted

Question

How does legitimacy cash out as local rules of sanity, and how do inferentialist semantics and map-territory semantics connect?

Owners: @anson (GitHub A-M-Berns), @abram (GitHub abramdemski)

Path: the-program › legitimacy › legitimacy-meets-syntax

Roots (the frame's goals)

plan

Legitimacy is characterized by a set of local update rules on a market of the logical-induction kind, sound with respect to a semantic legitimacy notion on a fragment.

shared-claim

legit-semantic-vs-syntactic leaf/step drafted

Semantic legitimacy uses a correspondence notion of truth and syntactic legitimacy is a set of local rules, and legitimacy in general cashes out as local rules in the way truth-preservation does.

A set of local rules exists that is sound with respect to semantic legitimacy, never blessing truth-divergent reasoning, and complete, certifying whatever tracks truth, on a nontrivial fragment.

tonk-is-a-sure-loss leaf/step drafted

In the market-logic price model the tonk connective is a sure loss for the market maker, and harmony of introduction and elimination rules corresponds to pricing with no exposure.

market-logic-connection leaf/question drafted

The Market Logic sequence, re-read with the legitimacy question in hand, yields a statement of what it already says about local rules of sanity.

truth-beyond-the-limit leaf/question drafted

On never-settled questions a standard of correctness exists beyond the limit of the market's deliberation, and it comes from the trust principles of logical induction rather than from the limit.

formality-informality leaf/step drafted

A survey of formality and informality, vagueness and crispness, and fuzziness connects the ways a theory breaks out of the mold of a set of sentences in a classical logic to the legitimacy and inferentialism picture.

Logical induction generalizes to an assessment process in place of a deductive process, with the market maker's bound holding at every propositionally consistent world.

objectivity-as-invariance leaf/question drafted

Objectivity is the invariant of the class of legitimate processes, so that correspondence is recovered where there is a territory and inferentialism where there is none.

Unconditional Reflection for an embedded agent makes whatever the future self comes to believe correct by the fact of its being believed: subjectivism carried past the point of having a concept of objectivity.

want

Legitimacy is related to local rules of sanity, with inferentialist semantics connected to map-territory semantics.

Statement

Legitimacy is related to local syntactic rules of sanity, connecting inferentialist semantics to map-territory semantics, and onward to theories that are not sets of sentences in a classical logic.

Source

projects/deference/note-dump-2026-08-11/notes/roadmap.md, Stage 3: "Relate legitimacy to syntactic stuff — local rules of sanity — connecting inferentialist semantics to map-territory semantics. Requires understanding inferentialism better, amongst other things. Threads to weave in:" Brandom and Habermas, and "The market logic sequence on LessWrong (Abram's own)."

Notes

The Stage 3 programme as a sub-frame. The abstraction-arc and activity-sweep branches refer to this stage as inferentialism-stage-3; this id is the one filed. Neil Tennant's published work on the Principle of Harmony is an entry text beside Brandom.

Author and human events

Author @smithy-verity; version 1; size L.

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Children

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