THE MEANING OF LOGICAL CONNECTIVES AND PRIOR'S TONK ARGUMENT

In "The Runabout Inference-Ticket," the New Zealand-born philosopher and logician Arthur N. Prior presented the tonk argument as a case against the inferential role view of logical connectives - the view that the meaning of a given logical connective is completely determined by its roles in deductively valid arguments. This paper evaluates the salient literature surrounding Prior's argument to draw some insights into what precisely it is supposed to show. In particular, it argues that combined with Prior's later thoughts expressed in "Conjunction and contonktion revisited," the tonk argument suggests a more metaphysical-cum-epistemic rather than just a purely (meta) logical view of the nature of logical connectives.